Stephen Holden

What Slam possesses is real passion, and that is in short supply in movies these days.

A wholesome self-help fable about the unlocking of shame and its magical transformation into pleasure and personal liberation.

The film's sobriety and carefully balanced arguments make it an exemplary piece of reporting, although its emotional heat rarely rises to a boil.

Like a Bela Tarr film it leads you to consider the breadth of eternity, the limits of human consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation.

The remarkable if overlong Korean film Oasis strips away much of the sentimentality and goody-two-shoes attitudes that the movies traditionally display toward disabled people.

Mr. Di Gregorio wrote the screenplay with Valerio Attanasio, and this movie is a richer variation of his small, exquisite 2010 film, "Mid-August Lunch."

As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.

One of the thrills of the movie is watching the improvisatory trial-and-error process as the dancers explore psychological themes, contorting their graceful, amazingly limber bodies into visual representations of relationships and emotional states.

Frantz takes pains to show both sides’ lingering hostility after a devastating and (the movie implies) senseless war.

At times The Hedgehog suggests a Gallic "Harold and Maude," with an intellectual gloss as it celebrates the life force passed from an older generation to a younger. But its concept of vitality isn't the popular cliché of kicking up your heels, breathing deeply and gorging on ice cream. It is an aesthete's ideal of pursuing moments of ecstatic perfection in art and companionship.

The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.

Explores interlocking themes of sexuality, immigration and power dynamics with a cleareyed sensitivity and refuses to demonize even its shadiest characters.

Mr. Bana's Chopper is so scarily convincing that he makes you feel the eruptive force of each mood swing and the way his character's paranoia, egomania and conscience- stricken apologies are part of a volatile emotional cycle.

Visually Megamind is immaculately sleek and gracefully enhanced by 3-D. The score by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe is refreshingly subtle for an action comedy.

In its quiet, literate way, the film is almost as subversive as its central character.

Seduced and Abandoned may be the year’s most entertaining put-on.

Transfixing in the way that well-told life-and-death adventure tales inevitably are. It is the film’s more mundane elements -- an awkward, under-nourished love story and half-baked politics -- that are problematic.

A soulful cinematic tone poem.

[A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.

With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.

Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.

The movie's unhurried rhythm eventually works a quiet spell, and after a while you find yourself settling back, adjusting to the film's bucolic metabolism and appreciating its eye and ear for detail.

Dark Days illustrates even the worst nightmare can have descending levels of horror.

Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.

A gripping and important documentary.

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.

Ms. Khoury, often filmed in close-up, gives a deeply sensitive, unsentimental performance, and the feelings that crowd on her face (sometimes more than one at a time) run the gamut from despair to ambivalence to hysterical frustration to tenderness and joy.

If the situation has all the ingredients of a shrill, tearful melodrama, the filmmaker, working from a taut screenplay by Avner Bernheimer that doesn't waste a word or a gesture, keeps the emotional lid firmly in place.