Zachary Barnes

Mr. Tirola has fashioned a portrait of the man that is engaging if not exactly revelatory, and occasionally a little broad in its attempt to fill out the social context, with footage of Hitler, Vietnam and the KKK coming in sweeping succession early on.

It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.

The movie has an elegant, almost symmetrical narrative economy. It’s at once orderly and disorienting, as though following a plan drawn by M.C. Escher.

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

The two lead actors, both superb, strike a delicate imbalance.

The Testament of Ann Lee is primarily a film about the pull and power of belief. Delivered in a style that evokes its historical moment while also cutting across time to the present, it lands with the enthralling, incantatory force of urgent prayer.

Father Mother Sister Brother is no doubt true enough to many a family gathering this Christmas—awkward, amusing, a bit dissatisfying, but not a disaster. Sometimes that’s reason enough to call for a toast.

Formally and dramatically, the movie has poise, which only strengthens its depiction of girls thrown off balance by growing up.

Running only 76 minutes, the movie is a veristic and voluble delight, an exercise in eavesdropping on a pair of smart, funny people who wear posterity—there’s a tape recorder running, after all—with wry lightness.

Ms. Mumenthaler has constructed her character study with subtly expressionistic imagination, deploying an enveloping, finely tuned sound design and finding a transporting musical motif in Holst’s “The Planets.” One daring sequence toward the end offers a vivid panorama beyond this woman’s world.

As the title suggests, this isn’t a film focused simply on the ruins of a relationship so much as one with an eye on what’s worth keeping.

The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.

The portrait that emerges is that of a fanatical protector of her public image, a movie star turned director for whom the camera was a miraculous and endlessly manipulable tool, no matter which side of it she was on.

Its title notwithstanding, the fascinating, frustrating Highest 2 Lowest ends up somewhere in the middle.

It’s a graceful, unassuming portrait of relationships old and new as a handful of characters consider their pasts and look wonderingly toward their futures, soju flowing freely all the while.

The film is more illuminating in its depiction of a distinctly contemporary war, in which men are augmented at every step by advanced machines.

The final act of the film turns into an extended shootout, made gripping through Mr. Kurosawa’s expert construction of the scene, which is methodically paced and adept at keeping us oriented within the labyrinthine warehouse in which it unfolds. But beneath the action-movie surface lies a more despairing subject.

If Sorry, Baby isn’t exactly an assured debut, it nonetheless has a sincere purpose, thoughtfully expressed.

Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.

Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past.

With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.

Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves.

By its end, “Misericordia” emerges as a drama by turns chilling and absurd, with some of its twists daring us toward incredulity. Yet Mr. Guiraudie’s mix of mischief-making and straight-faced conviction keeps us continuously unsettled, and continuously curious.

With “Seven Veils” Mr. Egoyan has done something more interesting, weaving a new narrative into and around the opera until the two become a dense, dark thicket of their own.

The performances are admirably committed, the scenario likably loony, and the jokes come in swift succession.

The heart of the film is the emotional triangle of Petey, Li’l Petey and Dog Man, as the two erstwhile enemies both find something like love for the kitten (voiced by Lucas Hopkins Calderon and full of disarming innocence) and something like forgiveness for each other.

Mr. Henry’s performance, by turns firm and funny, is the highlight of the movie.

Ms. Jean-Baptiste portrays a character on an extreme end of human temperament, and she brings to it an intensity of focus and feeling that abolishes the easy contours of caricature.