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 film loses its edge as it proceeds, turning into something more generic, less credible, and overly explicit in its statement of themes.

The movie isn’t above using its star like a pin-up model. It isn’t above much, in fact, and it’s certainly below the level of the breezy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out with ease.

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.

The legacy of the Emerson String Quartet includes dozens of recordings, and it’s probably in those that the deepest lessons lie. For anyone curious to meet the musicians who made them, Four Rational People is a decent introduction.

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.

A cast this good would have a hard time delivering something less than watchable, and Goodbye June is watchable, even if little of it works.

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

Visually epic, sonically relentless and otherwise fatuous, the film has a dramatic inertia occasionally punctuated by eruptions of utter catastrophe—a series of shocks that leaves you singed, shaken and not much better for it.

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.

Inserting glitzy musical numbers amid such drama could have come off as a subversive twist, but because everything is presented with the same gentle glow of sentimentality it ends up feeling merely tasteless. For “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” this is the kitschy kiss of death.

The documentary becomes a reasonably engaging if unpolished account of a legendary filmmaker’s most quixotic pursuit.

With his trilogy, Mr. Haugerud has shown himself to be intelligent, compassionate and possessed of writerly flair. But filmmaking is, among other things, a demanding balancing act, dependent on a director’s taste and discernment in answering a wide array of questions—about sound, image and character, big themes and minor details. Dreams suggests he’s still trying to find his cinematic equilibrium.

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.

A feature debut from writer-director Nicholas Colia, it sees its premise stretched thin and undermined by an amateurish construction. But the commitment of the cast and a handful of good comic ideas keep the proceedings watchable and amusing.

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.

Once Mr. Cregger starts to let loose his revelations, though, disappointment creeps in, and the scale and soul of the film shrink before our eyes. It’s impossible to say how without getting into spoilers. But the movie’s potential richness, kept in play by its ever-circling narrative style, is finally brought crashing to the ground by its denouement.

Together is less a fully conceived horror movie than a plodding relationship drama with some impressively disgusting effects superimposed on it. The two elements, alas, don’t quite complete each other.

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.