Stephen Holden

If it feels uncomfortably real, it's because its vision of decadence (if you'll pardon the word) is almost unwatchably creepy. Crazy Eyes awakens the same queasiness. Yes, it feels true. But why bother?

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.

Time and again, Microbe and Gasoline risks cuteness without going overboard. Too easily taken for granted, its accomplishment is its ability to gaze steadily with warmth but minimal sentimentality at the world through unjaded 14-year-old eyes.

Gathers riveting, rarely seen news clips from the era into a chronology that plays like a suspenseful police drama.

I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.

Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.

Frozen, for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners.

Galiana's quietly monumental performance is one for the ages.

The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.

Not a horror movie but a witty, expertly constructed psychological thriller.

Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.

The Iranian director Majid Majidi’s sad, soulful film The Willow Tree is his second movie to explore blindness and sight on multiple levels.

Family dynamics examined through the prism of art: The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis's compelling documentary study of an artistic clan whose comfortable life was shattered by the suicide of its youngest member, asks profound questions to which there really are no answers.

This movie, directed and produced by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards, digs deeply enough into Mr. Giordano’s world to convey the drudgery and headaches of being a bandleader.

The movie's biggest disappointment is the vague, unfocused performance of Ms. Ricci, an actress known for taking risky, unsympathetic roles. Here she seems somewhat intimidated by her character.

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.

Although Ms. Berg’s enthralling film tells a story somewhat similar to “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s recent documentary portrait of Amy Winehouse (who also died at 27), the demons that devoured Winehouse came from outside as much from within. Not so with Joplin.

In its unassuming way, this tiny, low-budget film is a universal reflection on issues of personal identity and choice for which there are no easy answers.

Tries to do too much in too little time. It would be a stronger film if it devoted more detailed attention to the plight of the returning veteran. As it stands, it is a scattershot antiwar polemic that doesn't bolster its arguments with any historical perspective or statistical evidence. No one from the government or the military is trotted out to give an opposing view. This is not to say that The Ground Truth, on its own terms, isn't devastating.

Looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.

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.

The movie’s unblinking observation of a friendship put to the test is amused, queasy making, kindhearted and unfailingly truthful.

Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.

As Harry and Julie, Mr. Edwards and Ms. Winningham make an unusually refreshing pair.

The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."

It places Basquiat's art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive.

If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.