Stephen Holden

In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life.

Black Souls is an ominous, well-acted portrait of an ingrown feudal society of violence, retaliation and deadly machismo.

Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.

At first Apprentice seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex.

As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.

The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.

Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.

Dense, exhilarating.

Yes, the documentary is undeniably uplifting. But …

Even through improbable moments and abrupt changes of pace and tone, Ms. Dench and Mr. Coogan hold the movie together.

The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.

[Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.

Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.

Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.

Definitive and engrossing documentary.

Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece Before the Rains may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy.

The movie's triumph -- if that's what it is -- is in the force of its assault. It takes one man's unbearable truth and bashes us in the skull with it.

Dragon 2 is considerably darker and more self-aware than its forerunner. Both films are speedier than the average animated blockbuster. In places, Dragon 2 is almost too fast to keep up with, and, in other places, it’s a little too dark, at least in 3-D.

Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.

Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.

The clammy chill that pervades The Hunter, the fourth feature film by the Iranian director Rafi Pitts, seeps under your skin as you wait for its grim, taciturn protagonist to detonate.

The film sustains an air of overarching mystery in which the viewer, like the title character, is in the position of a sheltered child plunked into an alien environment and required to fend for herself without a map or compass.

Was it all for naught? Only weeks after the 23 partisans were arrested (and all but two promptly executed), Paris was liberated. Army of Crime is a passionate act of remembrance.

Despite its moments of pathos and its expressions of homesickness, A Room and a Half, is an uplifting comedy. Like Fellini’s screen reminiscences, it is suffused with a hearty appreciation of the world’s absurdity, along with a hungry appreciation of its beauty.

[A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.

An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny.

Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.

Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.