The subject is crucially important, but the movie dilutes its impact with by-the-numbers filmmaking, and Cheadle's one-note performance displays few of his acting gifts.

Understated acting and brilliant use of wide-screen black-and-white cinematography.

Photographic Memory is about the permanence and impermanence of what we choose to preserve: on film and in our heads (which is often the same thing). I would like to think that one day Adrian might look at this documentary and see it as a supreme act of paternal love.

The film's biggest unexplored question: Why is someone with a reputation for laying bare the truth so addicted to plastic surgery?

This astoundingly beautiful Korean production is poignant, original, and engrossing.

Expressively filmed story of rivalry, romance, and cultural conflict.

The meandering story and channel-surfing style prevent it from gathering the emotional momentum it would need to get below the hero's skin and let us know what really makes him tick.

There's not enough substance to support the sentiment of this longish comedy-drama.

The greatest performance, though, is Vanessa Redgrave's as Martius's blood-lusting mother, Volumnia. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of acting, all controlled rage. When, in the end, that rage erupts, her vehemence splits the screen.

[An] affectionate documentary.

It’s a gangster movie that tries to be more than that, not always successfully. In his own small-scale way, Chandor wants to expand the reach of his vision to “Godfather” status, with Abel as his shining (tainted) knight.

Understandably wanting to leave audiences with a measure of hope, Garrone in some ways falsifies what is most powerful about his movie. But there is power, too, in dramatizing the endurance of people such as Seydou. Epic stories require epic bravery.

A few of the supporting players, including Kim Dickens, as a suspicious local cop, and Carrie Coon, as Nick’s twin sister, move beyond the formulaic, which is more than can be said for the movie.

What we do see, among much else that is damning, are archival NYPD videotapes of the boys being interrogated by detectives who press them to implicate one another in exchange for a leniency that never materialized.

It does leave you with something, though – a deeply wistful mood, if not a full experience. It bears out the sadness in a line from Tao earlier in the film: “Nobody can be with you all through life.”

The movie's style is fairly staid, but it's hard to imagine how Neeson could be better, and the subject is handled with taste and tact.

Indelible images and brilliant use of unconventional music make this a nonfiction film that must be seen – and heard – to be believed.

Wordy, wearying drama.

The aura of shock-and-awe surrounding this game is laid on a bit thick, and sometimes you feel like you're just watching an ESPN special. Still, it's fun. The interviewees include Harvard's stone-cold-serious Tommy Lee Jones and Brian Dowling, Yale's wonder-boy quarterback who became the model for B.D. in classmate Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury."

Loving is a decent and heartfelt movie that, rarity of rarity these days, suffers from being too decent and heartfelt. It is so careful not to give offense that, in some ways, it’s more admirable for what it doesn’t do than for what it does.

Silence, though conceived on a grand scale, is an almost obsessively personal, at times even private, film.

It would be easy to overrate I've Loved You So Long, which often dampens its best effects with undue tastefulness, but the image of Scott Thomas, with her despairing resilience, stays with one.

It’s impossible not to be charmed by these students, by their aspirations and idealism, not to mention the fact that one of them, or someone like them, may well end up winning a Nobel Prize. It’s also impossible not to recognize, although the movie does not make a political point of it, that a goodly percentage of these participants are first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States.

In Moving Midway, Cheshire chronicles not only the history of the move but also of the family members, past and present, who occupied the place, and, most pointedly, the slaves who worked its fields, some of whom turn out to be related.

Eastwood has made an honorable movie about honor, but the naivete of the conception - which some will call purity - keeps "Flags" at arm's length from greatness.

Deeply personal, morally alert, and highly entertaining.

Clear away the annoying avant-gardism and you have a powerful movie about a writer, Phillip, who undergoes a mental breakdown and is pulled halfway back to health by his girlfriend.

This is the kind of movie that literate viewers pine for, laced with gracefulness and wit.