Stephen Holden

The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.

If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.

This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.

May be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation.

The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.

Definitive and engrossing documentary.

This warm, robust movie ultimately transcends the formulas with which it flirts to become a far more subtle and honest result than a machine-tooled tear-jerker like “The Theory of Everything.” When the film doesn’t try to build up the usual suspense found in movies about competition, you sigh with relief.

If there were more experimental films as entertaining as The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.

A skillful assemblage of newsreel clips, cartoons ridiculing the American interlopers, television commercials and interviews with power officials and ordinary Georgians. It gives new and darker meaning to that comfy adage "We're all connected."

Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.

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.

The movie maintains a refreshingly light touch in spinning a fable about individualism and conformity.

Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.

Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.

This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.

A singularly depressing film. In the face of such unrelieved, grinding poverty, hope fades.

The voice casting and the visual representations of the characters the boy encounters on his journeys are superb.

Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.

Skarsgard and Headey deliver perfectly meshed lead performances in a small, beautifully acted film that will make you squirm.

That it succeeds in being both stimulating and funny is a testament to the talent and open-heartedness of Ms. Dunye, who wrote and directed the movie and is its star.

It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.

The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.

Tom DiCillo’s angry comedy Delirious subjects modern celebrity culture to a microscopic examination that shows the toxic virus of fame squirming and multiplying under its lens.

In their intensity, the actors’ incisive, impeccably coordinated performances are pitched slightly above normal conversation but not so much that “What’s in a Name?” shatters credibility.

An unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years.

Natalia Almada's eloquent documentary portrait of a sprawling graveyard in Culiacán, Mexico, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The rapidly expanding cemetery has become the burial ground of choice for the country's slain drug lords.

The movie rides on Ms. Abbass's serenely confident performance. As Lilia metamorphoses from a shy housebound widow into a woman calmly rejoicing in her body and her sexuality, Ms. Abbass marks her character's every blush and hesitation in the process of letting go with a winning delicacy and sweetness.

The players in this mouth-watering Gallic soufflé are so attractive, well mannered and comfortably grounded in the bourgeois world that you needn’t fear for their well-being, minor heartaches notwithstanding.