Wolf relies on the videos far too much. That over-reliance makes Recorder feel padded, as does his frequent use of reenactments.

A chick flick of a particularly intelligent, ruthless, and loving sort.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

MC5 is everything a rockumentary should be and usually isn't. Then again, MC5 was everything a rock band should be and usually isn't.

It's a snazzy, smartly made, and even hip little scarefest. As a jump-start to Halloween, it's all you could hope for.

For someone wanting to get noticed as a filmmaker, George Lucas couldn't have done much better than THX 1138, his 1971 feature debut that starts a limited run today in a new director's cut.

A documentary lovingly and somewhat shambolically directed by James D. Cooper, gives the duo their due and in so doing opens up a singular view on an era, its energy, and its excesses. For fans, it’s a must-see; for others, a slightly overlong tour of a seminal pop explosion and the men who made it.

An unexpected portrait of the legendary comedy duo on a mostly forgotten stage tour at the twilight of their careers.

Petzold is a gifted filmmaker pulled in opposite directions by politics and melodrama, and when they’re in perfect tension, as in Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014), a masterpiece can result. Undine, by contrast, is the slightest bit waterlogged.

Risky Business is the sleeper of the summer. It's a refreshing change from the usual dumb teenage ripoffs, the slickest American film since "Trading Places" and "War Games," and a strong directorial debut for Paul Brickman, who knows his way around teen fantasies. [05 Aug 1983]

This walkabout ends less dramatically and not as tragically as the one in Roeg’s film, but perhaps with a greater poignancy. And Gulpilil, four decades of hard living later, is as magnificent as ever.

The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.

Listening to Taylor is so compelling the screen could be blank and “Lost Tapes” would still be interesting. But director Nanette Burstein keeps things visually abundant with home movies, snapshots, film stills, film clips, newsreels, publicity photos.

One of the funniest yet most depressing movies in Martin Scorsese’s long career — a celebration and evisceration of male savagery, financial division. It’s like “GoodFellas,” only (slightly) more legal, which is very much the point.

A well-crafted, bravely revealing little film that could be considered essential education for baseball fans. It's just a bonus that the documentary is so entertaining.

Outrageous controversialist meets brilliant attorney, and fact intertwines with fiction.

But when Dark Horse leaves the feel-good realm to show news footage of a failed miners’ strike, or to have the camera linger on the impoverished surroundings where Dream Alliance’s owners still dwell, it suggests that it will take more than a few fairy tale finishes for their reality to change.

A lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

Two scenes in Misery are shockingly brutal. But many more are wickedly amusing - especially the ones stemming from the fact that no small part of the writer's torture is the way his deranged muse uses language. There's something simultaneously comical and scary about the way Bates employs euphemisms to keep the lid on. [30 Nov 1990, p.29p]

Through luck or Huber’s eye for the odd detail, it adds up to an unexpectedly moving portrait of a maverick at twilight.

Confident enough to simply go with the exotica of average middle-class Americans who are well-intentioned, flawed, and dog-paddling like crazy to keep their heads above water. There's nothing at all unusual about them, and that's unusual.

Clean has the same mixture of human tenderness and borderline-silly Eurochic that marks Wenders films like "Until the End of the World."

Fred Schepisi's "A Cry in the Dark" is a powerful film with a terrific performance by Meryl Streep, her best since "Sophie's Choice." [11 Nov 1988, p.57]

All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity. Many of the actors are from the streets themselves, and such locations as a crash pad rented out by a dotty lady could never be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.

As savage and as epic as film gets.

It's filled with vivid characters and action. Beneath its modesty of gesture, it's one of the year's richest, most humane films.

You'll care what happens in this film with more than enough freshness and originality to avoid succumbing to girls-on-the-run cliches.

It's brilliantly precise in its detailing, stylishly jagged and sensual by turns, and utterly unpredictable.

I'd take a chance on it anyway, even if it stumbles and loses its way.

When all is said and done, Goodbye to Language may simply be about Jean-Luc Godard exploring 3-D filmmaking, in the same way “The Shining” is really just about Stanley Kubrick wanting to fart around with a Steadicam. Which, honestly, is fine. Great artists use new tools to discover new vehicles for seeing, understanding, living. Be thankful we get to come along for the ride.

Efficient, cogently argued, and visually compelling documentary.

It’s easily the most mannered movie Anderson has made, which is really saying something. It’s so mannered at times as to be almost unmoored — speaking of ships — but the many marvels it contains make that an acceptable price to pay.

It is an honest, dumbstruck, not particularly deep demonstration of how insanely difficult it is to make a movie, any movie, no matter how blithe the end result may appear on screen.

Black gets to play an actual character instead of a loudmouthed cartoon. The movie's bright and endearing and surprisingly lacking in a point. I wish I liked it better.

Orlowski does share Balog's smoldering rage at a society that refuses to face the consequences of its actions, and that rage forms the necessary spine of Chasing Ice. This is an agit-doc with no apologies and a lot of sorrow.

Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.

Less a documentary than a cry of outrage -- a series of exotic images that slowly turn horrifying.

Beneath the period décor and lamp-lit elegance, this is a story of a profound emotional crime prompted by profound love.

Theron is so good that when Tully climaxes by revealing whole new depths to her character, an audience can’t help but feel cheated. Maybe the rosy, complacent final scenes can fool the filmmakers, but not us, and certainly, one senses, not Theron. The movie’s over, but it feels like the star’s just getting started.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

This is no exercise in miserabilism. Instead Moverman and Gere take a problem and elevate it into a universal experience, turning social issues into existential insights.

A decent biopic, rousing and well-made and unruffled by depth, with an expertly judged performance at its center.

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

In an eco-horror show that politely masquerades as a documentary, the former vice president effectively warns of man-made cataclysm.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

For most of Lady Vengeance, Park is playing with us. But the jokey atmosphere dissipates and the fun turns inside out in the movie's last act.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.

A story about the ravages of one war on a single man's soul and psyche becomes an eloquent plea for peace.

Unfolds with the serenity of a fable but underneath it draws intelligent, deeply troubled connections between the personal, political, and spiritual.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

What works best in Shrek 2 are the smaller roles, the pile-driving pop-culture jokes, and the moments of weird, early-Mad-magazine comic invention.

"Angélica" feels most like the film that argues Oliveira is this close to the beyond without ever bothering to knock first at death's door.

It's slambang in pacing, bald in exposition, and offers cast-of-hundreds spectacle.

A work of quiet, crystalline empathy, I’ll See You in My Dreams is notable for reasons that nearly overshadow its modest yet indisputable charms. It’s a drama about the kind of people invisible to the movies and much of our culture — senior citizens in the early evening of their lives — and it grants its characters individuality in ways that are almost wholly free of cliché.

Unlike the Makioka sisters, this quartet lack ambiguity and mystery.

It’s Dyrholm’s film, though, and Nicchiarelli’s, and between them the two women do honor to their subject in all her contradictions.

The character is sweetly sympathetic — less “Tammy” than “Mike & Molly” — and the laughs and chaos are all the more infectious for it.

A quirky, welcome addition to Disney's cavalcade of animated stars.

The ‘"unreasonable man" himself is interviewed, too, and he comes across as patient, articulate, and maddeningly uncompromising.

If this is an unusually sentimental outing for Jia, it’s also characteristically tinged with woe. He’s just added a touch of sweetness to these otherwise sugarless lives.

Though at times it threatens to become too generic to be original, or too original to be generic, it retains enough indirection to frustrate those looking for thrills and to engage those willing to be challenged. And by the time the bottom drops out in a characteristically enigmatic ending, Night Moves distinguishes itself as a genuine Reichardt movie.

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

He’s the dreamer in the machine, and if he truly is retiring, the world stands to look a lot more ordinary.

So, yes, something needs to be done, and if it takes Sting reuniting the Police in-concert to sing “sending out an SOS’’ on behalf of the plaintiffs (among other worthy causes), so be it.

For audiences with an extremely high tolerance for brutally fetishized shootouts and bloodletting, this continuation of Reeves’s potential-filled reluctant hit man saga is electrifying, both visually and in its cracked narrative ambitions.

The rage expressed onscreen is understandable, and even cathartic. We can live vicariously through the vengeance of others.

Lyrical and episodic, Belfast is often affecting, if far too sentimental.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

Finds DreamWorks Animation looking to Viking territory for its next Shrek-sturdy comedy tentpole. By Odin, they make it work.

Civil War can, and frequently does, put its characters through an emotional wringer. It puts viewers through one, too. But those characters seem less like people with actual feelings to be wrung than means to Garland’s filmmaking ends.

A sleekly clever murder mystery, the film plays as many games with the audience as it does with its characters, and for the majority of the running time — the challenge comes from matching wits with what you’re seeing.

Titanic is a big-budget spectacle and director Cameron brings it off with high-tech bravura, placing us aboard the ship in real time.

Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.

The best parts are the breezes of real, observed life that breathe through many of the scenes — the street corners, the storefronts, the rough camaraderie of guys hanging out, the wary warmth of women.

Rules and regulations, which the military is very good at, are about behavior. Law is about justice. The Invisible War makes all too clear that the military isn't very good at justice.

Poetic, surreal, and curiously powerful.

For a movie, this feels inadequate, despite its splendors and, later, its social dismay. It does, however, have the makings of a grand postcard.

A reporter is never the story — the story is the story. But if looking at the reporter helps you see the story, and the human beings the story is about, then the effort may be worth it. A Private War is worth it.

The movie only looks like a coming-of-age freak show from the outside; in reality, it’s unexpected proof that flowers can grow even in a prison.

Even if the number of ideas he has to improve the sport don’t quite live up to the title of Infinite Football, Corneliu Porumboiu’s documentary about Ginghina, there certainly are a lot. The fact that they’re all either unworkable, ridiculous, or both simply adds to the charm of this extremely low-key film.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

While Morris From America trundles along familiar tracks, Hartigan’s eye for detail and individuality yields enough dividends to keep the film moving tartly and congenially along.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

By the Grace of God shows how one man’s evil acts spread into the cracks of not just his victims’ lives but the lives of their loved ones as well. But the film’s gathering crowd also testifies to the sustenance people take when their pain is shared and they pool approaches and resources.

Rich Hill might fairly be called “Boyhood: The Documentary,” and, not surprisingly, it offers a reality harsher than — if just as compassionate as — Richard Linklater’s dreamy time-lapse drama.

Engrossing and eye-opening in several respects and even, when you least expect it, humorous.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

They’ve built up a vast ensemble of character types, all of them played by better-than-average actors, and that they can mix and match the drama, comedy, or action as they see fit.

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser doesn't make the mistake of trying to oversell Monk as a colorful personality. It doesn't have to. It simply stands back and allows his genuine originality and unorthodoxy to make their own impressions. [13 Oct 1989, p.37p]

In The Desert of Forbidden Art, documentarians Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev offer some background on the late Savitsky, a painter who initially collected ethnic folk art quashed by the Stalin regime.

The chief problem is the documentary’s misapprehension of the artistic personality.

Implicitly acknowledges and celebrates the glorious chicanery and self-delusion of this most American of businesses, and for that reason it may be the most oddly honest Hollywood document of all.

A sleek little poison pill of a movie.

Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.