Highly entertaining and encouraging documentary.

Jackie Chan's best American picture to date, breathes fresh life into the virtually dormant comedy-western.

This splendid film is no mere polemic, for Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, often called the first lady of Iranian cinema, is above all an accomplished storyteller and dramatist who understands the evocative power of sound and image.

Though Mission Blue gets its title from Earle's nonprofit organization, the film rarely comes across as propaganda.

With a unique narrative conceit and a highly root-worthy underdog at its center, the movie stands apart as a kind of feel-good, audio-visual experiment.

To consider the long-standing Bourj al Barajneh is to consider the true humanity of refugees, who have hopes, dreams, lives to live and work to do. “Soufra” efficiently and effectively illustrates those ideas.

It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.

La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.

An eerie, atmospheric horror film. [08 Aug 2004, p.E14]

With its blend of the archival, the interviewed, and modern-day footage, the first miracle of the film is that it never feels overstuffed with talking heads, or perfunctorily assembled, or rushed in covering its many glories across nearly a century. It’s a real beating-heart tribute, always streaked with feeling, whether joyous or poignant.

Just as Baird is sustained by his self-mockery, this tender and witty film is saved from sentimentality by its satirical edge. [19 Apr 1998, p.3]

Chang Can Dunk gets that the pursuit of fun, seemingly frivolous goals can be meaningful in itself, especially when undertaken with the loving encouragement of friends and family.

A subtle artist and a sharp observer, Martel manages a large cast with an ease that matches her skill at storytelling, within which psychological insight and social comment flow easily and implicitly.

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

Dench is not the only reason to see this unapologetic crowd-pleaser, but she is the best one.

To watch it is to feel Miike’s industriousness and partake of his pleasure: The cinema is his first love and likely also his last.

In lesser hands this Southern saga might have collapsed into whimsical corn, but cinematographer-turned-director Aaron Schneider has fashioned a measured fable, witty and deeply felt, if at times tipping into melodrama.

Jauja makes one cryptic leap too many at the end, but until then it evocatively confounds.

Though the film is sometimes as fraught as the immigrant experience, in the end the ideas are so rich, the look so lovely, Ewa's journey so heartbreakingly real, even the flaws seem to suit it.

Don’t Call Me Son, although built on conflicts that have fractured many a family, thankfully never veers into melodrama.

Incisive yet supple, wrenching yet deeply pleasurable, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada easily ranks among the year's best pictures.

The Danish director, whose film Pelle the Conqueror won the best foreign-language film Oscar, has turned out a thoughtful and accomplished piece of filmmaking, skillfully acted and beautifully put together with a kind of discreet elegance that the biggest budget (roughly $10 million) in Swedish film history made possible.

What makes Detroit vital is not that its images are new or revelatory, but rather that Bigelow and Boal have succeeded, with enviable coherence and tremendous urgency, in clarifying those images into art.

Written and directed by the gifted first-timer Kelly Fremon Craig, and graced by a superb star turn from Hailee Steinfeld, The Edge of Seventeen is the rare coming-of-age picture that feels less like a retread than a renewal. It’s a disarmingly smart, funny and thoughtful piece of work, from end to beginning to end.

It's a wonderful documentary look at an astonishingly successful public-school chess program that manages to be more moving and heartening than you expect. Which is saying a lot.

While this carnage is defensible in theory, and while the filmmakers have taken pains not to linger on the horrific brutality Logan and his terrible claws inflict, the gruesome situations presented, including more than one beheading, work at cross purposes with the film's more serious intent and reminds us that a scot-free escape from the strictures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not in the cards.

A marvel of a documentary, a clear-eyed and affectionate film that tells a remarkable story with both visual and personal sensitivity. More impressive still, it's largely the work of one man.

Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.