Stephen Holden

Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.

I Am Divine doesn’t dwell on Milstead’s growing pains. It is an aggressively upbeat show-business success story that focuses on his self-reinvention.

The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned. But in the director’s farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound.

The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.

This deliciously nasty French deconstruction of male pecking orders, directed by Bernard Rapp, should send a pleasant shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever obsessed about wanting to please a devious and manipulative boss.

In its dry and forceful way, it delivers the same message as Jiri Menzel's "Closely Watched Trains" and Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land." While acknowledging that war is hell, it goes further to suggest it is ludicrous.

A film that delights by confounding expectations.

It is surprisingly timely.

Although seeds of hope are woven into this tapestry of rage, sorrow and disbelief, the inability of government at almost every level to act quickly and decisively leaves you aghast at what amounts to a collective failure of will.

True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").

Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

An intrepid sleuth, Ms. Snyder seems to have left no stone unturned in her search for answers.

Deeply whimsical beneath its poker face, The Princess and the Warrior has the structure of an elaborate mind-teasing puzzle.

As much as Mr. Levitch's voice grates, you can't help but admire the zest for life of this heroically independent but impossibly self-centered crank.

Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.

The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but the writer, editor and director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from "Robinson Crusoe" to "The Old Man and the Sea."

The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.

As the film's images accumulate, the movie becomes a sustained and ultimately refreshing meditation on surrender to the idea of temporality.

The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.

This entertaining movie is content to be something a bit more modest: a pungent period folk tale that teases you until the very end.

For all its quirks and tangents, Declaration of War feels entirely alive. This story of two people who transform fear into action is inspiring.

Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.

Yes, we've seen it all before. But The Relic proves that the hoariest cliches, when stirred together with enough money, shaken vigorously and artfully lighted, can still make the adrenaline surge.

What makes this Cherry Orchard different from almost every other interpretation (and makes it essential viewing for lovers of Chekhov) is Ms. Rampling's extraordinarily rich portrait of Ranevskaya.

Like a giant balloon painted with Day-Glo colors, however, the whole gaudy mess wouldn't inflate without the force of Mr. Myers's comic genius. It's his baby, baby. And after three editions, it's still flying high.

Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.

For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.