What's exciting about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is that, in Jason Scott Lee, the movies have created a new star out of an old star. The film is a tribute to Bruce Lee but it's also a tribute to the transforming powers of performance. Lee does justice to Bruce Lee while, at the same time, creating a character out of his own fierce resources. He is, quite literally, smashing.

This is a moving and provocative film that initially unsettles, then disturbs and finally haunts you well into the night.

Nicholson's Joker will be the pivotal point for many. It's his energy, spurting like an artery, that keeps the picture alive; it's certainly not the special effects, the editing, which has no discernible rhythm, or the flaccid screenplay.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is too cartoonish and glib to have much to say about Russia or about genre films in general. But it is stylish and snazzy — a confident throwback to the knowing exploitation pictures of yesteryear.

In the fleet, pacey manner of the editing, toggling between private and public moments with highlight-reel efficiency, the film is a stirring glimpse of top-down kindness as a winning leadership style.

The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise.

Like any good purveyor of noir, Boyle, who wrote the film with Joel Clark and Michael Lerman, understands that identifying someone is only one endgame while the mystery of identity is naggingly, tragically endless.

It's tempting to forget that Cage is not Terence. That would be unfair though, and diminish the sheer ferocity of his performance.

A runaway train drama that never slows down, it fashions familiarity into a virtue and shows why old-school professionalism never goes out of style.

Brave simply doesn't feel as much like the Pixar movies we've come to expect.

Something about Eklavya: The Royal Guard suggests a lost film by David Lean. With some muted echoes of "Hamlet." And a whiff of "Rigoletto."

Nothing happens you won't see coming, but it's all so deftly done you're more than happy to wait for the inevitable to arrive.

"In His Own Words" is a deeply involving look at the man's entire life, using archival footage, home movies, private letters but most of all filmed interviews Rabin gave, to let us hear him tell his own story just about from cradle to grave.

Love & Taxes is an amusing, endearing trifle.

Inventive and imaginative, Napping Princess confirms [Kamiyama] as one of the most interesting writer-directors working in Japanese animation.

As directed by Thomas Piper, a filmmaker who specializes in arts-related docs, "Five Seasons" does two things with grace and skill, starting with immersing us in what Oudolf's work looks like.

Reminiscent of the naturalistic social dramas made by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Scaffolding combines the nervous tension of a thriller about a bomb waiting to go off — Lax’s volatility is as nail-biting as his bursts of compassion are relief-inducing — and the mournful clarity of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about troubled students.

Ponciroli shows natural flair for holstered and unholstered suspense (if not always story logic), plus he’s got a worthy partner in the muted exteriors and sparsely lit interiors of John Matysiak’s cinematography, and a cast that dutifully plays along with every stare-down and line of colorfully poetic cowboy dialogue.

The solution, the filmmaker argues, is a spiritual communion with the unknown, because there’s healing in surrendering to one’s perfect insignificance as part of something bigger.

Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

The impulse to end on an "up" note, to turn complex and contradictory lives into palatable narratives, is one of the least-examined pitfalls in nonfiction filmmaking. But in her attempt to give their lives a shape that the girls themselves seem to resist, this talented filmmaker has done both herself and them a disservice.

A funkadelic fun ride that shrewdly reinvigorates the eye-popping styles and pulpy veneer of '70s blaxploitation flicks.

Redoubt is slow going but not uninvolving. Barney’s filmmaking is less about the manipulation of image, or the roiling power of editing to create emotional states, than it is about dutifully documenting what he’s created, what he’s seeing, what’s on his mind.

"Ashes" is glorious and ultimately wrenching, but it's a tough journey.

Suffice to say, unrelenting material like this isn't for everybody. That it is a gloriously filmic gesture - by turns jaw-dropping, elusive, silly, obnoxious, painful and beautiful - is celebration enough.

The filmmaker deftly moves backward and forward in time to chronicle Ngoy’s remarkable journey from war-torn Cambodia to the strip malls of Orange County while becoming a multimillionaire.

If it sounds critical to say that the resolution of the murder at the center of the narrative is the least interesting aspect of the movie’s intrigue, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The message is clear, and memorably rendered: Care about where your meat comes from, because then you might eat less of it, feel better when you do eat it, and cause a little less suffering in the world.

Encouraged by Mendes' artful direction, his gift for eliciting naturalness, the core of this film finally cries out to us today, makes us see that the notion of characters struggling with life, with the despair of betraying their best selves because of what society will or won't allow, is as gripping and relevant now as it ever was. Or ever will be.

A slick and efficient piece of action entertainment, fast moving with energetic stunt work and nice thriller moves.

A winning combination of humor and crafty filmmaking.

When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, We Are Guardians, like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.

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

A brilliantly written black comedy in the tradition of "To Die For" and "Flirting With Disaster," The Opposite of Sex was worth the wait.

Entertaining, nostalgic and well-organized documentary.

De Clercq’s clear directorial talent gives the film the illusion of respectability, but it can’t remove the sweaty sheen of smarm.

An absolute delight. [29 Dec 1996, p.78]

Once Lion's can't-miss conclusion hovers into view, the film's periodic over-dramatization matters less. A story like this is finally impossible to mess up, and pretending otherwise is beside the point.

A slight, if often riveting, behind-the-scenes documentary.

The movie is as entertaining as it is educational.

Beeswax has a rhythmic quality, and it eschews conventional plotting for sharp observation of human strengths and foibles.

That writer-director Jessica Hausner moves things along at such a glacial pace and fills her velvety frames with the equivalent of museum-quality oil paintings instead of with living, breathing humanity, only adds to the film's turgid quality.

Cinderella Man's key emotional moments feel as if they've been predigested for an audience that can't be trusted to feel things for itself but needs to be firmly albeit lovingly pointed in the appropriate direction.

Mightily impressive to look at. What it's like to listen to is somewhat different.

The way I Went Down, with its lovely score, plays out under Breathnach's gentle, compassionate touch becomes wryly amusing, ironic and entirely satisfying. Its cast is a glory, adept at setting off a sly humor with a touch of pathos, and it brings to the fore Brendan Gleeson, so good in so many supporting parts, as a seriocomic powerhouse in the central role. [1 July 1998, p.F4]

Maybe they don’t all deserve to escape punishment. But these otherwise overlooked lives deserve a spotlight.

In its own modest way, it’s one of the year’s bravest films.

As with its beloved subject and his enormous catalog of multiplatinum earworms, the movie’s familiarity turns out to be crucial to its charm.

Director Wayne Kramer and co-writer Frank Hannah pull off a sleight-of-hand trick here, playing a gritty surface reality against dark Vegas mythology and getting away with it through a combination of shrewd, witty characterization and sure-footed storytelling skills.

Alternately satirical and romantic, full of pain and humor, Buffalo '66 is a winner.

Brown's engrossing and poignant documentary on Van Zandt, is filled with appearances by celebrated performers who are simply fans of this legendarily troubled figure with the aching voice and haunted Lincoln-esque look.

An intelligent adult drama that's especially relevant in these harsh economic times.

Makes for a thoroughly captivating film.

It's a complex, determined look at one of the most pernicious problems facing organized sports on all levels.

Barbara Sukowa's performance in the title role is the kind that reverberates long after the screen goes black.

A small-scale gem of a movie, both dramatically aware and psychologically astute.

Faucon, whose own grandparents came to France without speaking the language, has a gift for artfully removing the melodrama from potentially overheated situations, leaving behind a scenario that is honest, direct and dramatic without any sense of special pleading or situations pushed too hard.

The Little Hours gets freaky, but it never feels truly subversive, or even that titillating.

When “Chasing Trane” serves up mesmerizing footage of Coltrane lost in the middle of a long solo, the film communicates something beyond words.

What emerges won’t be revelatory for anyone who has spent time studying the Kubrick filmography. But it’s still such a rare treat to hear the man himself say anything at all — let alone to hear him talk about why the ideas in his work and the challenges of bringing them to the screen excited him as much as they did his fans.

Laden with bittersweet sentiment, the film packs a muted but lasting emotional wallop.

Cleverly written by William and Tania Rose, it's become a cold-war curio. [28 May 1989, p.2]

With her feature debut, Alberto keenly understands that any story of self-discovery is as much a constellation as it is a journey, and that’s how her adaptation plays, as a mature accumulation of the tender, the uneasy and the clarifying.

A throwback to the days of old-school caper movies like "To Catch a Thief," Duplicity is just the kind of sophisticated amusement you would expect from filmmaker Tony Gilroy.

The Painted Veil has all the elements in place to be a great epic, but it fails to connect, to paraphrase Maugham's contemporary E.M. Forster, the prose with the passion. It's impeccable, but leaves you cold.

A fresh pivot that starts out strong before caving to fan service, this femme-centered installment at least doesn’t skimp on visceral horrors and black humor, finding inventive ways to make its audience cringe, cower and cackle as it puts its heroines through hell.

Mama maestro Andy Muschietti directs this visually splendid but thematically toned-down interpretation with finesse, crafting a world rich in detail where menace lurks in every shadow.

The ambitious Peepli Live manages to mine substantial dark humor from this tragic situation while offering pointed - and sometimes poignant - social commentary in the process.

Black Gold moves at an inexorable pace, painstakingly building a case until suddenly it looms very large and casts an even longer shadow.

Somewhere between the rabbit-hole absurdist comedy of Charlie Kaufman and a navel-gazing Woody Allen film is the somberly humorous indie Cold Souls.

Unabashedly theatrical in presentation but broken up with interludes of nature, this Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

What’s remarkable is that you come away from the movie laughing at Graham’s murderous indiscretions and yet you’re frightened by them too. Caine makes you taste the ashes in this black comedy.

With Tuesday, Pusić shows great promise as a visual storyteller and director of performers. Yet it is in her work as a screenwriter where the film falters. Without the power and nuance that Louis-Dreyfus brings to the role, the drama would not have nearly as much spine or impact as it does.

A beautiful, harrowing film of understated power and perception that affords Fernando Fernán Gómez, the Spanish cinema's great, weathered veteran, yet another of his unforgettable performances.

Demolition is a state of mind in White Building, Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang’s sad, beautiful feature debut, an urban elegy about what’s thick in the air when the home one has always known is not long for the world.

One could argue that, in varying degrees, all of the iconoclastic French director's films have dismantled femme-centric fairy tales. But in this, the second of a planned trilogy, she's confronting burnished old folk tales head-on. Sly and playful, it's a beauty.

It’s an overwhelming, and sometimes disorganized firehose of information.... Ultimately, however, I Am Jane Doe is a powerful call to action to protect children over profit.

What Solondz does so well is create unthinkable moments in a "Leave It to Beaver" world, where unmentionables are aired in the most innocuous ways to startling effect. In Life During Wartime, he's done just that, creating a relationship agitprop that pops and sizzles; just be careful not to get burned.

The result is a kind of quiet Scandinavian cousin (OK, twice removed) to "Home Alone," in which patient viewers will find sporadic rewards.

The step-by-step examination of how so many smart people with such a good idea failed so badly results in a film which offers up not only a crackling story but also enough lessons that it could be a Harvard Business School case study all by itself.

Far more than simply “The Longest Yard” with hoops, the remarkable Q Ball serves as a potent illustration of the redemptive powers of team camaraderie.

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.

Even more than describing her cause, the affecting I Am Greta introduces us to the person herself, digging deep into why she’s pushing herself so hard, to do what our planet’s adults apparently won’t.

This graceful and wise film moves to its denouement with subtlety and, at its end, strikes a note that seems just right for all that has gone before.

Handsome as all Allen films are, and it proceeds with the brisk, sophisticated air of throwaway confidence and lack of pretense that we expect from the contemporary master of grown-up comedy.

A serious film with a lot on its mind, is probably the most intelligent treatment of this period we've had.

Hank is but the latest of Thornton's strikingly taciturn characters in a whole string of movies, but for Berry, Leticia represents a big-screen breakthrough.

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]

By concentrating on the early projects, we get a richer sense of the development of Nichols the artist in his own words and illustrated with photos and extended clips of performances.

Kill Me Please acknowledges the dark and riotous physical energy of teen girls in this tribute to slasher films and coming-of-age comedies that proves to be a new classic from first frame to last.

The film gets laughs from a script emphasizing Steve’s awkwardness and the soundtrack’s use of ’80s power ballads. Of course, nothing in it is as endearing as the birds themselves. The mere sight of their fat bodies waddling across the ice gets the warmest response of all.

While the movie balances a spirited celebration of America’s space race ingenuity with a satire about the cleverness of mass deceit, it’s hard to ignore the one thing Operation Avalanche understands implicitly: whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, a well-crafted image can sell anything.

Remarkably, much of that sizzling sensibility was caught on film and has been stylishly stitched together with her personal history in the scrumptious new documentary, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.

As breezy primers go in a life that’s as full as it gets, this collection of the archival and the anecdotal, with the occasional preparing of dishes as mouth-watering interludes, is decidedly more feast than fast food.

Laudatory but never simplistic, Bill W. is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Wilson, his times and the visionary fellowship that is his legacy.

Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.

Bana is, as always, a very watchable screen presence; the film is not bad. But there’s a spark missing that could make the story burn, and the film’s abrupt ending will leave viewers high and “Dry.”

Sands' scripted narration sounds detached and dissociated from the grief, frustration and anger he sporadically displays.