Stephen Holden

Remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances.

Like all of Mr. von Trier's films, The Boss of It All is a cold, misanthropic work that places no faith in institutions and in humanity itself. But it's also very funny.

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.

The dialogue and the ensemble acting maintain a near-perfect pitch.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.

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.

Shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera, the movie often looks frayed around the edges. Yet it has a soulful heart and a clear grasp of its rarefied milieu (Manhattan upper-level moneyed academia).

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.

No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

Rudy shamelessly manipulates the heartstrings and pumps the adrenaline. There are many moments in which it seems like nothing more than a promotional film for Notre Dame...For all its patness, the movie also has a gritty realism that is not found in many higher-priced versions of the same thing, and its happy ending is not the typical Hollywood leap into fantasy...Most important, it has a tough, persuasive performance by Mr. Astin that keeps the role firmly in perspective.

Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.

Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.

These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.

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."

For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.

Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.

The screenplay evokes this psychosexual power struggle with perfect accuracy and finely tuned performances.

This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.

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

A small, mildly entertaining documentary.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

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

In painting an unabashedly romantic picture of a nation whose songs spring directly from the lives of the people, the movie exalts the Marxian dream of honest working folk, with little to show for their labor, living harmoniously, joined in song.

Presents itself as an anguished brief against capital punishment, especially the execution of people who are legally insane...But the timing of its release smacks of the very exploitation that Mr. Bloomfield condemns.