The limits of Dallas Buyers Club are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

Well, there’s one way for a biopic about a self-loathing, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying and self-involved music star seem different: Make him an ape.

Lumpy.

A sweet-natured reconsideration of one of San Francisco's most vital, if least widely recognized, creative fountainheads.

Centuries ago, the heath lands of Denmark were rough-hewn, expansive and notoriously unforgiving. In the new Danish film “The Promised Land,” those words could also describe the face of its star, Mads Mikkelsen. One of the great visages in movies, it has a landscape all its own.

It's hard to sell people on a movie about grief, but A Single Man deserves recognition for being about something real that usually goes unexplored: The grief from which there really can be no return.

A privileged glimpse into people's private pain, a drama shot with the simplicity and immediacy of a documentary.

Seems more appropriate for a science museum than the Metreon, but that's not the film's problem. The problem is that oceanic movies in actual science museums are far more interesting and nuanced than this documentary.

Suffers from Resnais' inability to open it up and give it the look and pulse of a film.

A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. This musician may not be a genius along the lines of Brain Wilson, as Feuerzeig claims, but Johnston has a knack for revealing innermost thoughts in an offhand way that is eerie and uncanny.

There are some brief minutes when the tension drops and the story starts to sag, but Fukunaga almost always fills the frame with something worth seeing, and the story has a built-in suspense.

Haunting in its charm, Children of Heaven opens a window on both contemporary Tehran and the hopeful heart of childhood. This lovely, amusing film deserves a big audience -- especially families. It touches on the innocence of children with tremendous affection.

Early scenes are unnecessarily horrific, and the final scenes falter from a disconcerting shift in tone. But this still leaves a significant stretch of beautiful acting, thoroughly engaging action and vital history lessons about the brutality on which some supposedly civil societies were built.

Other than raising awareness for endangered wildlife, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili doesn't have anything profound to say, but it has a lot to show.

Lily Tomlin has been one of our best comedic actresses for the past 50 years, and she’s at the height of her powers in the beautifully observed dramedy Grandma. Her performance is funny, acerbic, touching — and ultimately, exhilarating.

The film is notable as the first English-language role of Peter Lorre, who is creepily appealing as the leader of the conspiracy. [03 Feb 2013, p.Q19]

It’s buoyant. It’s bright. It has lots of pop music on the sound track, none of it from 1991 or 1994, and almost all of it from the late 1970s, mostly 1977 and 1978. The movie’s mix of music and era doesn’t quite make sense, strictly speaking, but like everything in this loose, inspired and yet tonally precise film, it feels right.

Watching this film will leave you with some dispiriting questions about America and its values.

This is a different kind of girls' movie, and certainly not a pretty one, especially its horrific head-scratcher of an ending.

Worthy but dull.

Humanite isn't like any other film: It's uncompromising, eerily affecting and wildly unresolved.

The Rodriguez segment is terrific; the Tarantino one long-winded and juvenile.

Except for Patekar, the main actors are nonprofessionals, which works nicely here.

Delivers on the promise of its title. It shows us the world's most famous living painter, who turned 80 in February, at work with greater intimacy than any other film portrait of a contemporary artist provides.

There's a lot to process when watching The War Tapes, and that's probably why the documentary gets even better a few days later.

Maestro exposes a truth about marriage that I always knew but could never quite articulate: To be truly known and understood can actually be scary.

Zellweger has the most interesting new face in film, and she knows how to use silences to say what the heart wants to get across.

It’s a masterpiece of a family popcorn movie, with eye-popping hand-crafted production design and outstanding creature design and puppetry work. This is the kind of movie that could have been made in the era of moon landings and space shuttles, when the general public found science trustworthy and wondrous.