Walter Addiego

Questions of politics and policy, even urgent ones, seem pretty dry after watching Henry and the other elderly patients come to life. Those scenes are a revelation.

The new film pokes heavyhanded fun at extreme conservatives and has a "power to the people" sub-theme, but it's full of ultra-violence and is dragged down by standard scare tactics, thin characters and the absurdities of the premise.

It's fascinating stuff, but secondary to Ebert's genuine passion for the movies, which, if anything, grew toward the end of his life. He saw film as a great civilizing force, "a machine that generates empathy," as he says in the film. If that idea appeals to you, see Life Itself.

An intense and affecting report on the experiences of U.S. troops in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

For a while, you can feel like a part of the golden circle.

Despite the increase in seriousness, the film's mood is buoyant, as it's impossible not to root for these appealing if flawed youngsters.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.

It's hard to argue with the movie's basic point. Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF sums it up in three words: "Sugar is poison."

For those willing to overlook its few slips into heavy-handedness, Corpo Celeste tells a compelling story of a 12-year-old girl thrust into a strange new world.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

Offers some memorable stories, but it simply tries too hard.

The filmmaker works with economy and has a knack for creating a sense of foreboding, which is good because the plot is simply a working out of the old saw that violence begets violence.

The resulting film is a rich mix of movements and cultural phenomena that occurred not only in the United States, but several European countries.

The documentary Watermark is close to the cinematic equivalent of a coffee-table book. It relies heavily on visuals and offers minimal context. The project has a pro-environment feeling, which comes across implicitly, not through browbeating or preaching.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

This film doesn't feel obliged to pick a winner or lob easy answers; it aims to observe, with humor and humanity, with penetration and without oversimplifying.

A gripping documentary about the most exacting and expensive scientific experiment ever conducted, and one that may be among the most significant.

You may experience Visitors as more of a sedative than a punch in the guts.

Director Patrick Creadon, who in 2006 made the entertaining "Wordplay," about crossword fanatics, probably errs on the side of advocacy here. But give him credit for acknowledging that idealistic endeavors don't always pay off.

The movie has lots of ironic humor, especially in the earlier segments, and laughter doesn't disappear entirely when the thriller element kicks in.

Tonal inconsistency is the iceberg that sinks The Pretty One. The film is a mashup of wacky comedy, romance and sorrowful elements that would tax a more seasoned filmmaker than first-time writer-director Jenée LaMarque.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

The director takes an unpromising premise - the switched-at-birth plot - and gives us something that's touching and unexpected.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

Jia is passionate about his characters, but that never compromises his considerable artistic control.

Despite its worthy subject, this feature by veteran Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has a bluntness that's at odds with Bishop's personality and work.

The veteran filmmakers, siblings Lisa and Rob Fruchtman, accentuate the positive, while acknowledging the obstacles. They also realize Rwanda's trauma can't be denied - a handful of women recount harrowing stories of their experiences during the genocide and its aftermath. Some have parents or husbands still in prison for war crimes.