For le Carré fans, The Pigeon Tunnel is a must-see, but the film will also be useful to people wanting an introduction to his work.

An engrossing new drama from France.

It’s true that “Dune 2” is as depressing as watching the news, but that doesn’t make it relevant, because it isn’t the news. It’s more like unnecessary self-torture, like watching a depressing newscast from another planet.

By the end, it is clear just how much in control Sayles has been all along. The resolution, though typically restrained, forcefully puts over the movie's point, that we're all more connected than we think.

Blume’s insistence on first-person realness, on the page and in life, centers this thoroughly delightful documentary from directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, who met at Stanford University. But don’t expect the same degree of exploration Blume brought to her own protagonists.

The most important mainland Chinese film this decade.

Mainstream audiences will probably be confounded by Drive, while lovers of gritty filmmaking will defend every exaggerated shotgun wound as art. Know which camp you're in before you enter the theater.

Ultimately, The Fighter loses its courage and betrays the terms of its own story by fashioning an interpretation designed to please the people it portrays. It does a switch on us, by changing its focus from Micky's character to Micky's career and then pretending it was really about the career all along.

In The Five Obstructions, we meet the Danish filmmaker for an extended period, and he's exactly what a fan might hope and expect him to be like: impish, insightful, unpredictable, mildly sadistic and rigorously honest.

The world here is so ugly that only beautiful tracking shots, rich close-ups and adroit handheld work could make it bearable.

Where it really counts, though, it's the same good old comic action fantasy.

The strength of the Coens is that they are so witty, skilled and smart, so in command of their medium, so fluid and agile, so capable of surprising and delighting from every angle, that they can make the grimmest story bearable, even palatable.

A new restoration takes a flawed bit of monster camp and turns it back into a strong, serious-minded and occasionally moving science-fiction film.

I hope casting agents and other industry types see Fourteen, because I want them to see Norma Kuhling (of the NBC series “Chicago Med”), who plays Jo. She takes this strong role, by writer-director Dan Sallitt, and hits it exactly right.

Portrayals of transgender people in movies and television are a vast and complex subject, but Netflix’s new documentary Disclosure does an admirable job of covering many issues and contradictions a century of mostly insensitive screen depictions have raised.

The Visitor, is, if anything, more imaginative and touching than his first.

The story itself is arresting, and if that’s all “Bang” offered, that would be enough. But “Bang” does more.

The cinematography and direction are particularly compelling; the complicated sequences on the tight sets must have forced camera operators to play cinematic Twister in impossibly small corners.

An action sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza that provides cartoon thrills for thinking people. It's the best movie of its kind since the second "Spider-Man" movie four years ago.

A film filled with beauty and pain that moves at the pace of molasses and snails. That is to say, some of it is in real time. Audiences would be advised to stay caffeinated.

One of the year’s most significant films.

The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

With "Flynt," Love does what Madonna has been trying to do for 12 years -- create a performance filled with humor, intelligence and soul.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.