Stephen Holden

[Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.

Although the movie follows the standard Hollywood formula of pictures dealing with athletic competition, it is snappily paced and unusually well acted.

If Invincible is soft at the center, its visual grandeur and mostly full-blooded performances make it gripping, for this eminent German director has pulled off the tricky feat of elevating a true story into a larger-than-life allegory.

In simple, blunt language he exalts "quality," "warmth," "feeling," "truth" and "beauty," without trying to define or elaborate on those concepts.

What distinguishes Raja from every other movie to contemplate the treacherous intersection of passion, avarice and power is its unsettling emotional honesty. The two central performances are so spontaneous and mercurial that the reckless flirtation seems to be unfolding before your eyes.

Michael Kang's small, perfectly observed portrait of Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a Chinese-American boy who lives and works in a dingy downscale motel operated by his mother, captures the glum desperation of inhabiting the biological limbo of early adolescence.

Because “Merrily” was a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals, the documentary tells parallel stories — one fictional, the other real — of disappointment and disillusion. They give the film a double shot of poignancy.

The movie's disparate voices coalesce here as an emotionally charged microcosm of the conflict.

Filmed in less than three weeks, Man Push Cart is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring. Mr. Razvi’s convincing performance is a muted portrait of desolation bordering on despair.

Not a pleasant film, but it is deeply, scarily rewarding.

A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.

The movie's dramatic climax is a father-son confrontation of stunning cruelty. Although the movie stops short of outright tragedy, it is suffused with a grief born of rifts that may never be mended.

Because Chutney Popcorn knows its characters deeply enough to let them determine events, it rises above formula. It is also unusually well acted.

It would be foolish for a middle-class do-gooder confronting homeless children on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to expect conventional morality to have any meaning to them at all. That's one of the blunt, no-nonsense observations of Yvonne Bezarra de Mello, the Brazilian human rights activist profiled in Monika Treut's hard-headed documentary.

The current of intellectual energy snapping through the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play feels like electrical brain stimulation.

Mr. Cage gives his most committed performance in years as this divided soul, but it still looks like acting when compared with Mr. Poulter’s embodiment of pure evil.

In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.

As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.

Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.

In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.

It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative. But if you enjoy the challenge of solving difficult mysteries, Hukkle presents a tantalizing case waiting to be cracked.

Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil."

It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.

With its free-floating imagery, Elena unfolds like a cinematic dream whose central image is water, which symbolizes the washing away of grief. But more than that, it represents the stream of life, with beautiful images of women floating through time.

Awesome also describes this 16-hour, four-opera masterwork about the creation and destruction of the world, a work that Wagner considered unstageable in his time.

Veber's giddy social comedy The Closet finds more delicious, chortling fun in the spectacle of obsequious hypocrisy than any movie I've seen in ages.

Somersault, which the Australian Film Institute garlanded with 13 awards, including best film, director, actor and actress (for Ms. Cornish's astonishing performance), is a movie about the looks on people's faces and the disparity between the surface and the roiling chaos beneath.

This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.