Stephen Holden

The best way to enjoy The Intruder is to surrender to its poetry without demanding cut-and-dried explanations.

A clever if muddled collection of riffs on the "Blair Witch" juggernaut, dressed up with intellectual pretensions by Joe Berlinger, who directed this film with a chortling zest.

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.

A deeply personal film, and at times a touching one, it is a collection of fragments and memories artfully pieced into a quirky, captivating book of dreams.

Each person's story is so compelling it is worthy of a feature-length documentary itself. If The Last Days has a flaw, it is that the stories have been so abbreviated to keep the film moving quickly that they feel incomplete.

Sustains a perfect balance of pathos, humor and a clear-headed realism. One tiny misstep, and it could have tumbled into an abyss of tears.

Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.

In the Shadow of the Moon is such a morale booster. The power of its archival images hasn’t diminished with familiarity.

Visual knockout of a film.

An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.

One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.

As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.

Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.

The movie equivalent of a box of Froot Loops followed by a half-gallon Pepsi chaser.

The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.

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

What appears on the screen has a starkness that is almost indelible.

Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness.

Eloquent, meticulously structured documentary -- Sober political and legal analysis alternates with grim first-hand accounts of torture and murder in a film that has the structure of a choral symphony that swells to a bittersweet finale.

Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.

Scrupulously apolitical, The Waiting Room is the opposite of a polemic like Michael Moore's "Sicko." But by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate.

Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.

The Fool is a hard movie to shake.

Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.

Bomb the System, which rides on a subtle hip-hop soundtrack, might be described as soulful pulp; cult recognition awaits it.