Stephen Holden

While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.

Powerfully gritty.

As much as the film is shadowed by a keen awareness of mortality, One Cut, One Life often pulses with an almost ecstatic vitality. In its vision of human existence, life is as messy and unpredictable as it is precious.

If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.

Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.

Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man.

As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.

A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.

What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.

The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.

The movie's rejection of even a tinge of melodrama lends it a special integrity.

The Sessions is a pleasant shock: a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.

There are many moments when what is on the screen stops looking like acting and becomes life itself, and you're watching real people change and grow before your eyes.

For a film devoted to celebrating intimacy and the breaking down of emotional barriers, Pop and Me is oddly withholding of information about the travelers.

Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.

A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.

Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.

Very funny, extremely obscene movie spinoff from the popular animated Comedy Central series.

Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.

Julie Gavras’s wonderful film, Blame It on Fidel, views its ideological conflicts through the eyes of a smart, willful child.

A political movie that, partly through the powerful lead performance of its star, the relatively young Yves Montand, transcends its own politics.

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.

Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.

Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.