Stronger is an actor’s movie. Gordon Green’s touch is subtle.

Horses of God is one of the most forceful entries in a growing body of cinema that interrogates the causes and effects of terrorism, nationalism and fundamentalism in the Arab world.

Often scabrously funny in a post-Lena Dunham, post-Woody Allen New York comedy vein, and finds a star performance in the thoroughly unlikely personage of Jenny Slate.

Suffers from PBS syndrome, but Dame Judi Dench cures with a moving portrayal of life with Alzheimer's.

It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration.

While Reality is a mixed bag of satire, allegory and melodrama, it’s a rich mixture that an American remake would likely never pull off. This is a movie that will reward multiple viewings, from a filmmaker of tremendous technical ability, humor and heart.

This film is a portrait, and it's a mesmerizing, unforgettable one. The story of how a boy like Gary Oldman comes out of this world and becomes something different -- that's a drama, but perhaps its end has yet to be written.

Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.

For a loose-limbed spoof with no real plot, “What We Do in the Shadows” is startlingly effective at creating characters we care about, which testifies to the fact that Clement and Waititi have created a world with clear governing laws (albeit ridiculous ones) and never violate those parameters.

For my money, The Usual Suspects was the pulp fiction of the '90s.

It's a handsome and stimulating film, noteworthy more for its terrific acting and provocative ideas than for any kind of dark Cronenbergundian genius.

There's something kind of sweet about Stillman's enthusiasm for the long-despised era's thumping backbeat, even if the rhythm of his own work is a lot closer to chamber music.

The Last of the Mohicans is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it’s vintage Hollywood. It’s also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying adventure.

Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.

Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story.

Nightcrawler executes its ideas with tremendous craft and cool, and the courageous and counterintuitive pairing of its leads — Russo is 60, and Gyllenhaal 33 – produces two electrical, interlocking performances and undeniable erotic chemistry.

It’s a middle chapter, for sure, but a vigorous and fast-paced one that leaves you hungry for more.

At its best when it feels specific to its setting; Erik Wilson's often lovely cinematography captures the distinctive, watery light and raw weather of the Welsh seacoast in winter, and Hawkins, as always, captures a character who is completely specific in terms of class, place and period.

Its pleasures and charms lie in its very crudeness, in the way the characters' thoughts begin in their d---s and spill out of their mouths, completely bypassing their brains.

It's a crisply made, absorbing human drama that frames its moral confrontation between good and evil in universal terms.

It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.

Toothless, gutless, one-note political movies like Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, a picture that purports to have a galvanizing, liberal-minded theme (big business is taking over our country and our lives) but is really just ploddingly pedestrian.

An unsettling but ultimately joyous little picture, a movie that's as self-conscious as anything Baumbach has ever made, and yet far more open: It reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight.

However you respond to it, the fraught sexual and investigative chemistry between Mikael and Lisbeth is the most powerful ingredient of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The movie's second half is a capably executed but mostly by-the-numbers procedural.

It's a terrific little movie, gritty, real, ironic, ruthless and deeply humane.

Operation Homecoming at first seems like a modest enterprise, a document of a few guys' paths to personal catharsis. But the sense of damaged intensity found in all these men's writing -- and found in war lit since the classical age -- builds to a powerful crescendo, and the haunting poem that ends the film, in which the ghosts of American and Iraqi dead confront each other on the banks of the Tigris, is a showstopper.

There's nothing too clean or too overbright about it. It's magic, but not the loud, shiny kind: It has the texture of worn velvet, or a painstakingly hand-knit sweater stored away for years in tissue paper.

At its best, State and Main is fast and sharp, but when a movie like this goes off the rails, it's more disappointing than when a bad movie does.