Where most movies lie, Lorenzo's Oil tells the truth and pays the price. In a genre rife with romantic sentimentality, this film won't trifle with its integrity and ends up not artificially uplifting but heart-rending and exhausting. Based on a true story, it shows how dreadfully hard you have to fight to make a difference, and how grueling it can be to save even a single human life.

It’s a haunting and masterful effort, but be warned: This is tough stuff.

As a decades-long, ground-level portrait of the country, [Alpert's] vibrant film is unprecedented.

With a lovely, evocative score composed by Satyajit Ray, Shakespeare Wallah is a tribute to the gallantry, talent and courage of the Kendals. Its gentle humor, however, has a Chekhovian cast.

Even decades after it was written Beirut is as relevant as it is entertaining, and it is very entertaining indeed.

Unlike most rock docs, “Life in 12 Bars” isn’t a look back from a distance. It’s like living through one man’s pain.

It's a jewel-like, minimalist film about a group of crisscrossing wanderers and outlaws on one lyrically strange day and night in Memphis--where haphazard-seeming events slowly merge into entrancingly complex figures and patterns.

Adapted by Sadayuki Murai from Yoshikazu Takeuchi's novel, "Perfect Blue" creates an increasingly terrifying world and pulls you into it with the effectiveness of a Hitchcock suspense classic. [07 Oct 1999, p.F16]

The Dancer is such a bold and assured film, wildly creative and sensual, that it feels far more sophisticated than a debut, and signals Di Giusto as one to watch.

Permission asks difficult questions and doesn't offer easy answers. But while it deals with heavy relationship issues including the validity of monogamy, it manages an easy, seemingly effortless humor that seduces the audience while simultaneously breaking filmgoers' hearts.

The final act of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is funny, scary, troubling and exhilarating by turns; the meandering structure clicks into place as it becomes clear where Tarantino has been taking this story and, given his track record, perhaps could only have taken this story.

In a brash, beautiful, deeply American film, Kaufman has combined the resources and ingenuity of movie making with the freewheeling, damn-the-conventions style of of the New Journalism and come up with a generous, high-spirited look at the bravery and lunacy that was that era.

The radiant Danner, one of the greats, is perfection here, while Forster gives a stunning, Oscar-worthy turn as a man struggling to hold onto a blissful past to ward off a frightening future.

Though I Am Evidence processes a tremendous amount of data and information, it’s a deeply personal and intimate film. However distressing it may be, it leaves room for hope.

While time inevitably marches on, director Roger Mainwood has a splendid constant at his disposal in the pitch-perfect voice performances of Blethyn and Broadbent, who inhabit their hand-drawn characters with a vivid, fully-dimensional authenticity.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? demands not our love for this supremely difficult person but rather our respect for her defiance of an unsympathetic world. With such an impeccable presentation of such an intransigent personality, it is hard to deny her that.

By acknowledging what isn't known about drinking water, but what should be illuminated about the mechanism behind it, What Lies Upstream proves an exemplary piece of advocacy filmmaking. Outrage is a given, but more urgently, you're left wanting to learn more.

Working with longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown, the director casually but fearlessly stirs things up, balancing brutal satiric comedy, unapologetic social commentary, convincing jeopardy, even appealing romance.

What makes Non-Fiction stand out is the adroit way it keeps everything in balance. The writing and the acting, the questions about contemporary society as well as personal relationships, they all exist in enviable harmony to create an incisive snapshot of the present moment.

By the time the phantasmagorical finale arrives, you are flooded with blood and viscera, yes, but also something even more unsettling — a sudden onrush of feeling, a deep, overpowering melancholy.

Moselle’s movie is an empowering portrait of young women on wheels, but it proves no less surefooted when the wheels come off.

Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question.

It's a very fine film, powerful yet nuanced and not in any sense sensational or exploitative.

A charming film of an engaging, adult nature about two very different people trying to press reset in their lives, it is comic, heartfelt and smart as they come — a rare combination these days.

One of the most entertaining escape movies ever made, a rousing 1963 big-scale production directed by John Sturges and written by James Clavell. [12 May 1991, p.4]

Not every joke here lands, and not every experiment proves successful, but it scarcely matters. The genius of the picture is that even its wildest, most boundary-pushing formulations are tied to a thoughtful, rigorous thesis about how disparities of race, class and money conspire to keep ruthless systems of human oppression in place.

Mulligan's performance is too specific and too wrenching to be reduced to a mere generational statement. This is her most fully formed role since her performance in another early '60s piece, the British coming-of-age drama "An Education," and in some ways it feels like a rejoinder, perhaps even a corrective.