When the goal is simply to be as faithful as possible to the material - as if a movie were a marriage, and a rights contract the vow - the best result is a skillful abridgment, one that hits all the important marks without losing anything egregious. And as abridgments go, they don't get much more skillful than this one.

Berri's work never really rises above the gradual or the mild, and it eventually settles gently into one of those elliptical conclusions that mark mainstream French cinema at its most tasteful and staid, but the film's fully realized performances and sharply observed moments make it a pleasure, albeit a minor one.

Makes heavy demands of even jaded viewers, who are unlikely to stomach de Van's anatomical noodling from the same curious distance. But for the brave, the film's literal journey to find the "I" inside the body moves forward with a riveting single-mindedness.

The Yes Men's brilliant lies unlock explosive satirical truths, but the film runs out of steam a bit toward the end.

By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.

Poised on the edge of camp, Horror Express nimbly cycles through genres, with drawing-room mystery and procedural elements bleeding into Universal-style monster effects and science-fiction hokum.

Dark Passage is usually ranked as the least of the four Bogart-Bacall collaborations, but it's a practically perfect little noir exercise, with Bogart as a prison escapee tracking his wife's killer.

I Used To Go Here would rather be painfully relatable than cutting.

Step Up To The Plate is as much about the passing along of a legacy as it is about cooking.

From Valentino Garavani's imperious carriage and diva fits to his coterie of tiny dogs, the subject of Tyrnauer's doc comes off like a fictional character, scripted by a writer with a weakness for cliché.

Skarsgård brings some redemptive soul to the role of a man who gradually begins to understand the aptness of his favorite Pretenders album: "Learning To Crawl."

Gibney has enough material for a dozen movies here, but his attempt at an overview, however unwieldy, paints one hell of a nauseating picture.

Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there.

Afterglow gets off to a weak start—and it's occasionally hampered by stilted dialogue and cutesy conceits; Nolte's character is named Lucky Mann—but it is nevertheless a strong, frequently touching film that benefits from a pair of brilliant performances by Nolte and Christie.

A landmark production that can be watched with equal satisfaction as a metaphorical psychodrama or as a sheer visual spectacular.

For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.

Zandvliet's direction lacks Steen's gradations. The handheld, rubbed-raw style wears thin after a while, growing monotonous and wearying.

The unforced ease of the performances make August Evening an intermittent pleasure, but its images aren't strong enough to sustain its undisciplined length.

So what happens when people forget about all those people he stalked and snapped? Will his collection still be seen as an invaluable store of late 20th-century art, or the work of a celeb-obsessed hoarder?

Maybe it could have worked had the movie found a story worth telling, but it simply drifts from depressing incident to depressing incident, resembling the nightmare of an adorable but deeply emotionally scarred pig. Anyone with fond memories of Babe ought to avoid this mirthless, dispiriting sequel.

The heart of Addiction Incorporated is what happened after DeNoble was canned and later emerged as a key witness in news reports, courtrooms, and Congressional subcommittees. Bound by a non-disclosure agreement, DeNoble operated like a character in a real-life John Grisham thriller.

Pierrepoint is handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.

Gosling and Stone, too, have wonderful chemistry; their all-night "seduction" sequence is the film's highlight, witty and effortlessly sexy.

As entertainment, it works in the most rote way: the star power of Wahlberg, Russell, and Kate Hudson, who plays Mike’s worried wife; Malkovich’s predictable sliminess; the minor pleasure of seeing the good guys get out; the slight kick of watching something big crumble and burn while knowing that it’s only a special effect, real-world basis be damned.

The weaknesses in Sayles' story and his occasional bouts with didacticism are far outweighed by the film's exceptional intimacy and humanity.

This intimate, four-character film has its own quiet rhythms, compatible with yet distinct from any perceived A24 house style. It’s a hybrid of unnerving, dread-based horror and genuine domestic drama. Are they naturally so different, anyway?

Fighting With My Family is a shamelessly formulaic sponsored post of a crowd-pleaser that’s also, in its best moments, a genuinely stirring celebration of chase-your-dreams moxie.

Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.

With every overblown character introduction and goofy twist, it announces itself as intentionally cheesy guilty pleasure. With Woo, one expects a higher, more transcendent grade of cheese.

The whole film is too reliant on action-movie cuts and zooms, plus James Horner's insistent score, but it's beautifully rendered and convincingly exciting.

Funny, twisty, and sometimes bittersweet, Potiche is a fluffy good time, but not entirely insubstantial.

"Adolesence can kill you," Birot has said in an interview. In a film that leaves the "you" intentionally vague, moment after moment she shows how.

It’s obvious that Finn draws heavily from his own favorites, but Smile suggests that their skill and effectiveness have successfully been passed along to him.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is frequently funny and occasionally pointed, more than enough to recommend it as a comedy. It’s also another instance where doing things as they’ve always been done no longer feels like quite enough. The prejudices Baron Cohen exposes have become too fond of exposing themselves.

While it's essentially just another slick Spielberg action machine, it's operating effectively on all cylinders throughout.

As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective.

Here Scafaria makes nice use of her widescreen frame, and cuts the movie together crisply—a lot of the jokes actually come from the cuts, and the way they punctuate the often pitch-perfect dialogue.

Hopkins delivers such a warm, winning performance that it's hard not to be won over by his loopy charm and monomaniacal passion. The film is about a man whose need for speed takes on an existential and spiritual dimension, but it's precisely its rambling, meandering, unhurried affability that makes it such a low-key pleasure.

As a documentary, Ask Dr. Ruth has it kind of easy: It’s got an enchanting subject eager to tell a fascinating story.

What primarily comes across is a film about squandered creativity that itself ignores and trivializes the creative process, pretending that child prodigies produce masterworks unconsciously, like a chicken laying eggs. That’s a poor lesson to impart.

It makes a persuasive argument — which it makes easier by not allowing any counterargument — but it’s unpersuasive as a piece of filmmaking. In laying out its case, it’s manipulative and dull by turns.

Where it feels uninspired gore-wise, it similarly feels muddled in its message.

At times, Innocence feels like a clip show of Oshii projects past. But the effect proves more dulling than warmly familiar.

Perkins commits even harder to his singularly strange approach to the genre, turning a simple ghost story into an exercise in extremely prolonged unease. It could give Norman Bates the willies.

Keret’s alternately sweet and bitter sense of humor comes through clearly in $9.99, via warm voicework by vets like Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia.

There's a weary soul to HERE, embodied by Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal as two loners who meet in a café and impulsively decide to travel the country together, prompted more by mutual intuition than any meaningful exchange of words.

Minervini is not at his most provocative in What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire? That’s a good thing.

Perhaps it's a tribute to the breadth of Goodman's life that even after 90 minutes, it feels as if we've just scratched the surface.

Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman. Tommy Lee Jones’ off-beat minor-key Western has plenty of virtues, but straightness isn’t one of them.

The dancing is mostly depicted in practice and rehearsal in a featureless room, captured in raggedly cut handheld sequences that betray the movie’s modest means. If Akin knows how to direct better than this, he rarely shows it. But if he never displays a knack for visualizing the physicality of dance (more impressive rehearsal footage can be found in about five seconds on YouTube), he does a decent job of conveying the frustration and passion it inspires in Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani, a professional dancer).

Savagely funny...taken as a rancid, festering slice of Americana, it seems more potent than ever.

In its best sequences, Ramsay puts her duress in dazzlingly visual terms, collapsing the past and present in an associative rush of red-streaked images and piercingly vivid moments out of time.

In fitful moments, Omni Loop touches upon this truth in beguiling fashion. Mainly, though, it is a softly mumbled affirmation of immutable truths: that not all mysteries can be solved, and not all problems fixed.

Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.

Director Lian Lunson keeps the tone reverent, making I'm Your Man the cinematic equivalent of a testimonial dinner. But there's a place for that kind of film, particularly for subjects who've earned it.

Unfortunately, while the documentary’s points are clear, its desire to articulate them primarily through contrasts neuters some of its persuasiveness.

Early Man can’t overcome the limitations of its premise—one of Park’s less fruitful genre mashups.

It’s best, perhaps, to just accept the movie on its dramatic terms, as a reasonably gripping thriller about the dangers of deep cover, anchored by a terrific actress on the brink of stardom.

With In A Violent Nature, Nash crafts something entirely new; composed, near and real. But the film’s sense of tone and timing prove that he also intimately understands why audiences were always invested in these marathons of blood, gore, and guts.

Director Gil Kenan has a feel for dizzying "camera" work, and the screenplay combines witty gags with a sweet, albeit familiar, suggestion that kids shouldn't be in any great hurry to be anything but kids.

Without an emotional core, a stronger sociological angle, or many visceral thrills, Black Mass more or less limits itself to procedural status. Within those aims, it’s a pretty good one, absorbing and well-made.

The movie isn’t afraid to go to some dark places.

The film's daring, honest ending helps redeem the uneven drama, but the road there may occasionally try the patience of even the most sympathetic armchair revolutionaries.

Comes uncomfortably close to mocking these unlikely filmmakers, raising questions about its director's intentions and his respect for the subjects' humanity.

A mud bath of sentiment, strained speechifying, and gloppy music.

Beneath the sitcom-like surface of Slums lies a realistic coming-of-age story, perfectly cast and effectively acted with just a hint of tragedy.

The ridiculously entertaining Shaolin Soccer pulls out all the stops to make sure viewers stay happy.

During his clumsiest moments, Davis' fondness for provocation rises to the surface, which is unfortunate, since it weakens the impact of his many salient points about how American men are socialized to be warriors.

Only in the final minutes, when Kári overreaches for ironic effect, does the film plumb too far into the darkness.

Surprisingly successful blend of goofy political farce and sober family drama.

Not everything Perry's voices say seems relevant to his central thesis, but they speak fervently and colorfully, and their intensity is compelling even when their message is lacking.

The definitive spaghetti Western parody.

This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.

For the most part, writer-director Sophie Fillières’ If You Don’t, I Will strikes an engaging tone of melancholic humor through its portrait of a French marriage slowly falling to pieces.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.

Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.

Downfall is effectively enraging—especially in its middle section, where the picture really packs the most punch.

Harvest is a film about capitalism, at first quietly and then like a blunt object to the skull. Simmering beneath that ultimate disruption, though, is a sense of communal collapse that is already creeping under everything.

The results are reasonably clever and impeccably executed, but one of these days, Burger is going to have to pull more from his hat than just the rabbit.

Storytelling clarity has never been a Kurosawa strong suit, yet Pulse baffles even under those standards, so it's best to just get on his abstract wavelength and ride the thing out.

While Homeroom is far more contained in length and scope than a Frederick Wiseman opus, the way editors Rebecca Adorno and Kristina Motwani construct a narrative from a seemingly free-flowing assembly produces a similarly immersive viewing experience, as if one was wandering the school shrouded in an invisibility cloak.

Throughout, Una Noche’s details — an old man singing as he staggers down the street, young boys wasting away their days playfully leaping into the water — feel authentic.

In creating material so close to her lived experience, Lindon is able to avoid the common clichés of teenage stories.

As a sequel, Queen & Country doesn’t work at all, primarily because Boorman waited far too long.

This take on Charlotte's Web has its tacky side, but when dealing with a book this simply sweet and this revered--and given what was done with White's similarly gentle "Stuart Little" only a few years ago--"It could have been worse" practically counts as high praise.

The story is absolutely fascinating, even if the filmmaking isn’t.

The movie is more interested in him as a lovable loser, a working-class palooka who stumbled briefly into the spotlight, and Schreiber — bulked up, mustachioed, having a grand time — leans enjoyably into his hangdog mediocrity.

Hollywood features can be hellish, but in Guest's view, they're no different from "Waiting For Guffman's" community-theater productions, and that's just an impossible message to swallow.

If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”

The vibrant rap drama Hustle & Flow wraps the authentic around the inauthentic, telling an underdog story that sticks to formula, yet resonates with an undeniably real energy and texture.

Little besides an endless stream of ditties—only a few of them memorable—carries the film from one scene to the next. For anyone not just coasting along with the visuals, it can start to feel like a movie to be gotten through more than enjoyed.

Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.

Like so many of the works of Eastwood’s long late period, Jewell offers a story without much of an endpoint, with an uplifting coda that feels almost as jarring as the ending of "American Sniper." But somewhere within its surprisingly pacey two-plus hours is a compelling group portrait of ordinary oddballs in cruel circumstances; it relays Eastwood’s appreciation for individuals over masses better than any speech ever could.