[A] compelling and energetic documentary.

It is Weigert's performance that gives the film its mystery and charge. Playing seriously with identity, she draws the viewer ever closer. The way she never reveals everything is electrifying.

The Summit tells a multifaceted story that deals with more than the expected peril and exhilaration of adventure tales. Here you'll find love, fear and forgiveness, personality conflicts and cultural differences, even mysteries that have stubbornly resisted solving.

Sarcastic, sanctimonious, salacious, sly, slight and surprisingly sweet, the black comedy of Bad Words, starring and directed by Jason Bateman, is high-minded, foul-mouthed good nonsense.

Because the stories are so specific, and because they play out over such a long period of time, it is hard not to be fascinated by this intimate look at how particular families deal with the great parental challenge of shepherding their children through the all-important educational experience.

With Palo Alto Coppola transforms weakness into strength, vulnerability into armor.

The whole truth about the complicated, charismatic man may never come out, but The Armstrong Lie is closer than we ever thought we'd get.

It's hard to believe a story this serious can be told in such an involving way, but that is one of this expert documentarian's greatest gifts.

Lean, muscular and on the money, The Last Days on Mars takes a familiar story and tells it so tautly that we are pleased to be on board.

The film is as heartbreaking as it is heart-stopping.

The Paw Project is robustly persuasive, with Conrad compellingly framing her crusade as a battle between a right-thinking vet and a deep-pocketed industry group that purportedly represents her.

It's a story of contained chaos, quietly observed — one that catches fire more in retrospect than in the viewing.

Mam's camera work is exquisite in its immediacy and agility. One of the most striking aspects of her film is the intimacy it achieves without feeling intrusive or turning her subjects into fodder for a message.

[An] incisive and absorbing documentary.

In Binoche's masterfully contained performance, Camille's clouded eyes sometimes brighten. If we didn't know how her story will unfold, that spark might have been comforting.

Written with a poet's ear and directed with an artist's eye, Forgetting the Girl plumbs the psyche of an unassuming studio photographer.

What this film does is reveal two very different societies — both exhibiting, each in its own way, unmistakable signs of collapse.

Measured and beautifully modulated, the 82-year-old director has the kind of sureness and fluidity that is easy to underestimate. But it's difficult not to be impressed by the results.

[A] highly watchable portrait.

Jaffe deftly captures his subject's creative process, helpfully illuminating the method to Wilson's comic madness.

This is the straightforward story of a family facing adversity head-on and making inroads against a rare disease.

The ground-level view of New York — high-energy, semi-farcical — avoids clichés while finding its own romantic pulse with Duris' charmer the compelling center of the buoyant and bittersweet storm.

The Ghosts in Our Machine, a heartfelt meditation on animal rights, comes at you as a whisper. It depends on the persuasive powers of creatures great and small — in their natural habitat or in cages — to argue that we stop using them for food, clothing, research and entertainment.

A vibrant example of hybrid nonfiction filmmaking, using hand-drawn animation, live action, home movies and newsreels in a rich synthesis of personal and historical memory.

The most hopeful — and the best — of this solid and unsettling series.

Spy may not be a great movie, but it is great fun. And at times it will have you wondering if there's that much of a difference.

Peck celebrates Abargil as an impassioned and inspiring advocate while making clear the emotional complexities of her single-mindedness.

McQuarrie is adept at keeping things moving and has overseen two areas where "Rogue Nation" stands out from the crowd.

Don't let the cheesy title deter you. Cuban Fury is a thoroughly engaging crowd-pleaser — sweet, quite amusing and even a tad inspiring.

The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.

The Last of the Unjust, like Lanzmann himself at his advanced age, is ungainly but powerful.

Fake Case assumes a certain familiarity with Ai and his work — explored more thoroughly in Alison Klayman's "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." But as a follow-up and a companion piece to that 2012 documentary, Johnsen's new work is remarkably intimate and astute.

A magically understated mash-up, Ernest & Celestine has a comforting storybook effect and proves a refreshing departure in an age of high-tech, hyperkinetic animation set to soaring pop ballads, as entertaining as they can be.

Director Yuya Ishii, working off a gentle, finely textured script by Kensaku Watanabe (adapted from the novel by Shiwon Miura) takes his time telling this warm story of the 15-year creation of a definitive print dictionary, but it's a worthy journey.

Afternoon of a Faun offers privileged glimpses of Le Clercq's life.

Volume II builds on emotional foundations from Volume I, even recasting the first film's ironic humor with a darker pall.

The spectacular combination of slapstick, love story and superhero antics doesn't entirely avoid awkwardness, but mostly it defies gravity, like many of the stunts.

Raze is a sweaty, queasy, bruising experience — and a superbly crafted film.

You can feel how personal a film In Bloom is and how promising a first feature this is for one of the country's new wave artists.

Brimming with sharp asides and clever throwaways...plus astute observations on literary pretension and misguided youth, Adult World is a winner.

No one comes out and says that music is the language of the soul, but no one has to. We see it happening right before our eyes.

Apatow, working in his signature tone of sweet raunch, directs another writer's script for the first time, and the comedic marriage is a fruitful one.

Marsh makes the most of McCarten's effective script. There's a real energy to his filmmaking, the ability to be intelligently dramatic without overdoing things that is ideally suited to material that would be so easy to get wrong.

Amini has a powerful acting triumvirate in Mortensen, Dunst and Isaac to help him deal with the capricious nature of this particular tangled web.

Life Itself may sound like it's a film that would only be of interest to those who knew Ebert personally or to fellow film critics, but the opposite is true.

Whether Aaron Swartz is a personal hero or someone you've never heard of until now, his story cannot help but touch you.

What happens when Omar is outside the prison walls, and how his world and his relationships are reshaped by the realities of broken trust and betrayal, make for gripping and heartbreaking watching.

The complicated narratives don't distract from what this film does best: make you laugh about the things that make you furious.

Odd, offbeat, somehow endearing, the bleakly comic Frank has its own kind of charm as well as some pointed, poignant things to say about the mysterious nature of creativity, where it comes from and where it might all go.

All in all, Happy Christmas is a good deal like cartoon Charlie Brown's classic tree — scraggly, plenty of heart and much to enjoy, especially if you prefer your presents homemade.

The director is increasingly adept at getting her actors to bask in emotions without any pretensions. It makes for easy watching. Seigel's breezy script makes the dialogue easy listening.

Tense and violent, it grabs you from the first moments and rarely loosens its hold until the last body drops.

Though it might not sound it, watching Kumiko brood is mesmerizing. Kikuchi uses her mournful eyes to take us to dark places, though she's equally adept at surprise and confusion, even joy when it comes along.

Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.

What we find out about Maier, revealed in self-portraits as a striking woman with a singular sense of self, is fascinating.

The film is quite serious about pushing its players and its audiences through the mental, as well as emotional, meat grinder. Many times along the way, you fear you know where things are going. But Kent is clever in choosing unexpected spots to pull the rug out from under you.

Land Ho! is full of surprises, rich in the way it noses around the rocky terrain of aging in an indifferent world through the engaging performances of its two stars.

As Obvious Child stumbles its way to the final punch line, it echoes Donna's onstage musings — funny but rough around the edges. A work in progress that somehow hooks you anyway.

This examination of the whys and wherefores of indie rock star Nick Cave is an unusual and nonformulaic cinematic enterprise and an adventurous film by any standard.

The comedy choir wars are more intense, more absurd and more lowbrow fun than ever in Pitch Perfect 2. It is almost impossible not to be amused by the cutthroat world of competitive a cappella.

Whatever this woman is saying or doing, you want to be there to hear it and see it, and there's no better formula for an entertaining documentary than that.

A documentary that's insightful, sweet and often hilarious.

Rife with familiar elements given something of a different spin, Run All Night manages to leave you out of breath but hungry for more.

Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan.

The movie has plenty of the expected fun with its parade of B-movie, VFX-created creatures — a werewolf, giant praying mantis and an army of angry garden gnomes, among them — but it also possesses a sly self-awareness.

There's a palpable excitement around the search for knowledge, and this film captures that beautifully.

The Retrieval comes at you like a haunting slip of a memory, one that writer-director Chris Eska retrieves from a mostly forgotten era in unforgettable ways.

Fort Tilden is cringe-worthy but true. Maybe that's why it's so uncomfortable to watch.

The rightfully disturbing Buzzard emerges as a true original.

The film is a bracingly romantic drama that's alive with a mature sense of passion and mystery.

Observational with a vengeance, more an art piece than a conventional motion picture, Manakamana is simple in conception, but the reactions it evokes in viewers will be complex and multifaceted.

Directors Goldfine and Geller tell their story with such engaged confidence that we are swept along to its wild end.

Whatever Proxy lacks in narrative cohesion and psychological realism, it makes up for in its compelling fever-dream quality and its probing questions about the darker side of parenting.

Soechtig puts mainstream clout to work to deliver a hard-hitting message. Her mix of archival material, punchy graphics and concise talking-head commentary traces a troubling modern history.

"Monster" is almost too ambitious to be completely realized. But when it works, which is most of the time, its story has a power which lingers in the mind.

Since many of the themes from Illmatic have become mere clichés in contemporary rap, this film serves as a reminder of the potential and the promise that hip-hop truly holds.

"Molière" is a polished, character-driven entertainment enlivened by flashes of droll humor.

This handsomely made suspense yarn proves an engrossing, pulse-quickening journey.

Part of the unpredictable pleasure of Bible Quiz is its unanswered questions.

Though the indie falls short of its grandest ambitions, it is inventive in constructing its conceits. As to Moss and Duplass? It's hard not to love them — for better or worse.

It's that rare film that captures and conveys the romance of the theatrical experience.

Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.

The Afghanistan war documentary The Hornet's Nest is a kinetic, immersive experience, particularly in its deeply felt human moments.

This frank, unruly look at sex, privilege and power unfolds so much like real life that it proves an intriguing and strangely immersive experience.

Though there are occasional stumbles along the 1,100-mile hike, the peaks in Wild make the journey more than worth it.

Letting questions remain unanswered and silences go unfilled, Rohrwacher offers lovingly crafted glimpses of an enterprise we all engage in, regardless of whether we've ever been near a beehive: extracting sweetness from the materials at hand.

When the film stays simple, and concentrates on the actors--as in Juano Hernandez's withering bit as the old man who wants to talk--it's almost great. [28 July 1996, p.74]

Korengal is a bracing reminder of the inexplicable will to endure hell and come out the other side alive.

The result is a type of cinematic performance art, with all the self-consciousness that suggests — a sibling love story that's no less heartfelt for being in the form of a first-person poem.

Shyer and Meyers... are endlessly inventive. They're not afraid to be sophisticated and screwballish in the best '30s tradition, and they know just how far to exaggerate for laughs without leaving touch with reality entirely or destroying sentiment. The humor in Baby Boom is sharp without being heartless.

The proportions of the narrative strands sometimes feel off, but the movie pulses with the unpredictability of full-blooded characters.

The key reason "Jimi" doesn't need the signature music is the extraordinary performance of actor-musician André Benjamin.

Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.

Eventually the film's suspense underpinnings take over its personal story, yet that tension Quaid and Barkin generate still holds.

A love of the world of movies permeates the first-class, crackling excitement of F/X, giving a rare dimension to this thriller.

The craftsmanship that went into the making of this film has to have been formidable, yet a key part of its enjoyment is its throwaway, unpretentious charm.

Nimbly avoiding the excesses of melodrama and the recessiveness of mumblecore, Chan and his likably low-key cast navigate hairpin turns from drama to comedy to outright farce with an impressive sense of proportion.

Despite the compromises that typically attend a studio-made family entertainment — especially one that has been adapted, however lovingly, from a sharper, edgier piece of source material — The BFG also possesses a rich and unmistakably Spielbergian understanding of the loneliness of childhood, and of the enduring consolations that friendship and imagination can offer. Not unlike its title character, the movie can be cloddish and clumsy, but it is also a thing of wily cleverness and lithe, surprising grace.