While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

A rare, hilarious and ultimately touching look at the kind of American iconoclast that barely exists anymore.

Key to the strength of Big Sonia is its refusal to give in to easy bromides. Its use of animation to illustrate Sonia’s memories spins off her own artful drawings in a way that amps the sense of unspeakable horror rather than sugarcoating it.

The mix of commentators is unusual and lively, hardly the usual crowd that often pops up in documentaries like this, the clips are illustrative and on point in addition to often being eye-popping, and the film looks certain to please Keaton aficionados. Most importantly, it's likely to induce newcomers to investigate the great stone face for themselves.

This playfully made exposé should be required viewing for anyone wondering what they could do to pitch in and save the planet.

As painstakingly crafted as this mystery-thriller is, it remains something to be admired from a distance rather than felt viscerally.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.

The docu is not visually innovative, but the content more than makes up for what it lacks in style.

Proves so determinedly ebullient you begin to think they're pumping laughing gas into the auditorium. The most kid-friendly DC movie so far, the film is thoroughly entertaining.

Although it reunites the comic talents of director Ivan Reitman, writer Harold Ramis and star Bill Murray, the team responsible for the Meatballs phenomenon, their style here is far more laid-back and relaxed. There are still plenty of laughs, but not of the frantic sledgehammer variety.

Our Brand Is Crisis well demonstrates the international efficacy of the methods used to twice elect Bill Clinton. Unlike in "The War Room," the charismatic Carville makes but fleeting appearances in this docu, and it suffers as a result.

It is a provocative and potentially rich premise, to be sure, but the execution here is somewhat lacking.

Visually stunning if dramatically logy and willfully enigmatic.

If it were possible to send a camera crew back into the past to capture such an event, the result would be something close to what Minervini delivers in this quietly intoxicating and existentially real war movie.

An absolute delight from start to finish.

With Banel & Adama, Ramata-Toulaye Sy has conjured a stunning world in need of a sharper story.

Swinton and Moore imbue the movie with heart that at first seems elusive, along with the dignity, humanity and empathy that are as much Almodóvar’s subjects here as mortality.

It feels like every script-reader in the Italian-Swiss-German-Albanian-Kosovo coproduction cut out a line of dialogue in each scene, leaving behind an irritating silence and an enigmatic puzzle for the audience to second-guess.

On paper, neither character may seem terribly appealing, but on the screen they steal your heart away, but completely...Not only did that last reel include some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen, but it also provided an emotionally gratifying capstone to a picture that is truly an ode to the human spirit.

What makes "Ecstasy" essential viewing for any pop-music fan and any student of celebrity pathology is the interview itself. Spector, despite his immodest comparisons of himself to Bach, da Vinci and Galileo, is surprisingly entertaining company, not simply the mad recluse with crazy hair that was his shocking image during the trials.

Like so many Bildungsroman, it’s a tapestry crammed with incidental details, just as busy as the fantastic vintage-style prints on the women’s dresses and the flammable upholstery in the interiors. But then Crialese, who’s always been good with performers, will serve up a moment of achingly sad stillness.

A first-rate music film capturing a restless desire to communicate beyond the boundaries of any single idiom.

Fort Tilden, the debut feature co-written and directed by Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, showcases a satirical voice so dyspeptic it’s almost endearing, never letting the abrasive lead characters – or anyone else for that matter – off the hook for their self-absorbed entitlement.

Very entertainingly takes us into the world of stuntwomen.

Indie coming-of-age dramas are not exactly an endangered species, but Michael Kang's debut drama is an admirably intelligent and modest example of the genre.

The film ambles along at a relaxed pace, well depicting the uneasy relationships among the soldiers and the mixture of boredom and danger that marks their daily existence.

Prisoners can at times be a hard film to watch, but thanks to all the talent involved, it’s even harder to shake off.

Overall, Year of the Dog evinces an appealing sentimentality without being maudlin or only puppy-dog cute.

For Christopher Nolan to turn Batman Begins into such a smart, gritty, brooding, visceral experience is astonishing. Truly, Batman does begin again.

A neatly observed take on Manila street life. Pegged to a gay theme, it works best as a character-driven slice of social realism.

Documentaries are a hard sell these days, and despite the timely, pertinent subject, the film simply doesn't have enough entertainment value to draw an audience to the multiplex.

Fascinatingly ambiguous tale and bizarre cast of characters make it one of the more entertaining documentaries in recent memory.

Areces is inventive and scary in main role, though it's impossible to sympathize with his madness. Other performances are gaudy but perfunctory.

The raging stamina, unrelenting violence, rapid-fire editing and truncated narrative all give one no pause for thought or even breath. By the time the central mystery is revealed in a nice twist, it gets swallowed in the messy, anti-climactic end.

[A] claustrophobically discomfiting but quizzically comic study of social unease and embarrassment.

Capturing the spirit of an artist and the quickly-fading moment in media history when his work could have real nationwide impact, Michael Stevens' Herblock: The Black & The White pays homage to the great editorial cartoonist with testimonials from a who's-who of D.C. journalists and opinion-makers.

Fatal Assistance is a chilling indictment of how billions of dollars in aid were squandered or lost, and how aid and politics are inextricably linked.

It’s a tricky proposition that will surely ruffle the feathers of many viewers, but one that also makes a curious, if lasting, impression, thanks in part to strong turns from actors Anais Demoustier and Josh Charles.

[A] likeably modest study of veteran, well-traveled American musicologist Louis Sarno.

German Kral's Our Last Tango balances between a studious fascination with the dance form's history and an embrace of the passions it stokes. Far more engrossing than the usual doc of this sort.

The film handles its admittedly familiar themes in uncommonly sensitive fashion.

Fairrie doesn’t attempt to rewrite history and make a case for Collins as an underappreciated literary genius. But she paints a stirring picture of a gifted storyteller and a brilliant female entrepreneur, who shrugged off the cultural snobbery and the misogynistic backlash sparked by her “scandalous” work and laughed all the way to the bank.

Hathaway draws splendid performances from his cast and maintains a taut, spicy tempo that grips the attention consistently. Miss Monroe turns in her finest acting performance yet, adding to her acting laurels by playing a sexy tart with a provocative abandon that has a powerful impact.

The superbly acted drama yields rewards, making astute observations about mental health, inherited trauma, self-determination and absent or unfixable fathers.

This is the first feature for Gordon and Lieberman and there’s little evidence of a visual sense, even if the rough edges are part of the appeal. But perhaps due to the elements of improvisation, the comic timing is uneven and the material tends to be more often cute than uproarious.

Too narrowly focused.

It's a rare comedy that actually grows funnier on reflection. It benefits enormously from the talents of the two stars.

So consistently odious, diabolical and simply anti-humane is Cohn’s lifetime portfolio that you really feel the need of a cold shower afterwards. But this kind of dark brilliance is always fascinating, and the doc is able to trade on this all the way through.

Saving some of the best for last, director Philippe makes outstanding use of footage of what in the trade is called the money shot, the startling payoff that everything has been building toward — in this case, of course, the scene featuring the “chestburster.”

In the charming comedy-parable Ushpizin, religious orthodoxy inspires not unbending dogma but humble, sometimes baffled spiritual striving by its embraceable, flawed characters.

Harnessing the wizardry of 3-D IMAX to magnify the sheer transporting wonder, the you-are-there thrill of the experience, the film's payoff more than compensates for a lumbering setup, laden with cloying voiceover narration and strained whimsy.

Dior and I is a fashion doc with both a sense of history and a feel for the energy of a work in progress.

As a character study of a man with good reason to wean himself off the very basic human instinct of hope and teach himself, even at some personal cost, to care for no one and nothing, Sundown gains texture from its stark setting in a seaside playground stained with blood. But of all the director’s films to date, this might be the most airless.

The tyro director steps up to the plate beautifully, delivering an ingenious, fast-paced horror-thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat while also featuring generous doses of mordant humor.

While it’s occasionally stuck in very rote biographical details and frequently limited by a race to theaters and TV that doesn’t necessarily align with any real ending to the documentary’s story, Fauci has an actual structural focus that’s smartly considered and interesting, even if it left me with myriad questions.

Whatever script flaws there are in terms of structure, plot momentum and an opaque central character, A Complete Unknown offers rewards in its lived-in performances and in the exhilarating music sequences that propel it forward. For many audiences with an affection for Dylan’s music and the era in general, that will be enough.

Although the story line is somewhat stretched and overly neat, "The Paper" is a tight and entertaining read, uh, view. [14 March 1994]

You don’t have to be an animation buff to appreciate the chances this stirring saga takes.

Jillian Schlesinger’s first feature, made in collaboration with Dekker and composed largely of footage that the hardy adventurer shot herself, is both low-key and lyrical as it focuses on the mundane and the magnificent.

The film lets you get caught up in the excitement of this religion and the addictive nature of those stadium lights. Berg and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler get up close to the action, catching the hits and miscues in all their violent urgency.

Though this anecdote-stuffed doc leaves us wanting more of her songs-and-gags routine, it has just enough clips for us to wish she could return to the stage as well.

As quiet and thoughtfully composed as a Dutch master's painting, Ordinary Love uses clean lines and well observed tiny details to build up a deeply moving, nuanced portrait of a marriage under strain after a cancer diagnosis.

What resonates beyond the brawls and blood is a profound affection for the people onscreen — those grace notes provided by a fine cast, with Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy stirring undercurrents that are particularly affecting precisely because they’re never explicitly examined or explained.

Ultimately, Swimming Pool belongs to Ozon, and while incorporating a carefully measured, quietly menacing style that summons up vintage Hitchcock and Chabrol, he has made it unmistakably -- and entertainingly -- his very own.

The non-linear structure works extremely well, making the drama a bracing emotional roller coaster of feel-good/feel-bad turns.

Memorable images. Immemorable film.

Becker is now completely paralyzed, unable even to speak. But Vile keeps him almost entirely offscreen until the last thirty minutes, preferring to introduce him as he once was: Uncommonly positive and single-minded in his obsession with the electric guitar.

Portrait of Wally may be too narrowly focused for some viewers, but offers an engaging narrative and high-profile subject that should attract audiences at fests and in specialized theatrical bookings.

Anderson, who previously made several Beach Boys/Brian Wilson video docs, is attentive to chronology and to Butterfield's legacy, but isn't making the kind of film that might win the artist new fans or magically transport older ones back to the moment when he was at the top of his field.

Although for much of the way it tinkles along with the innocent merriment of a carousel, it dips into reality for its climax, and makes a valid and indelible impression.

As a film, Victor Kanefsky's documentary about the iconoclastic painter Robert Cenedella makes a great art exhibit.

Hooper has all the action that fans of this genre could ask for, plus a whole lot more.

Even if the immediacy of the director's approach gives the material an electric charge, 100 minutes of it becomes monotonous.

Despite a slightly grating tendency to resist any kind of subtlety, the honest and convincingly played central romance does finally linger.

As viewers, we have no idea whether the doc's last act is building toward a triumphant reunion or a big dead end. Suffice to say that the final scenes, never manipulative, achieve an emotional impact appropriate to the scale of this journey.

Ultimately, the film’s divided attention between its snapshot of a place stuck in time and its examination of the unsolved case that came to redefine it stops Last Stop Larrimah from being a first-rate true-crime doc. But there’s nonetheless a lot of flavorful material here.

The two most hilarious characters, played by Spain's two most famous actors, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, are nothing if not cliches about tempestuous Latin lovers. But, boy, does Allen have fun with those cliches.

The film lacks the juice promised by the teaming of such extraordinary filmmakers with a cast as large as a Hooverville encampment.

Writer and director Andrew Semans puts Hall in every scene of this modest but effective thriller, and she comes through with a stunning, charismatic performance.

Brutal but believable, the film in some ways harks back to early Hollywood, when Jimmy Cagney or Richard Widmark played callow villains out of their depth in everyday life.

The film takes a whimsical view of this insular and sometimes daft environment where everyone's eccentricities are given an opportunity to shine.

Convincingly argued and extremely polished, it has theatrical potential for auds whose reservoir of worry about humanity's future hasn't already run dry.

Amusing but slight, the small-scale film is elevated by a spirited characterization from Geoffrey Rush as mercurial artist — is there any other kind in movies? — Alberto Giacometti.

In what does have to be perversely honored as some kind of special accomplishment for Moss as a performer, Becky sustains such an abusive, mad, pathetic and immature display for well over an hour that you just want to bolt. What edification can possibly be gotten from such a grotesque form of exhibitionism?

Coon and Skousen supply just enough information about the boys' post-Raiders lives to satisfy our curiosity.

That the film mostly falls flat has far more to do with the largely unconvincing material rather than with the co-stars, who are more than game for often clownish shenanigans Black and his co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi have concocted for them; in fit and starts, the actors display a buoyant comic rapport.

At heart, the film's biggest flaw is that it doesn't seem to have any faith in its audience's emotional intelligence. It effectively neuters all the original story's elusive, poetic, melancholy qualities by spelling things out in capital letters.

Overall, Pio's accelerated passage from adolescence to adulthood is depicted with moving honesty and sensitivity.

Despite fine performances by Stephen Fry and Jude Law, Wilde is a disappointingly predictable and uninvolving film portrait of Victorian wit and writer Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for being homosexual. [01 May 1998]

Given no one is a novelist or a poet or a filmmaker here, this represents a bit of an adventure for Hong beyond his usual milieu. That said, this is still profoundly slight stuff, thin and ineffable as mist.

Superbly made and winningly acted by Brad Pitt in his most impressive outing to date.

Ultimately, the film, for all its evident verisimilitude, never really demonstrates a compelling reason for being.

A film whose fascination with bees and their mammoth impact on the global food chain extends far beyond the subject of colony collapse disorder. Arthouse audiences will eat it up.

Hedda is a delightful, sexy ride made that reminds us that Thompson is a star and DaCosta has many more tricks up her sleeve. It’s good to hear her unique narrative voice again.

Though the script's handling of the decision itself is uncomfortably abrupt, everything leading up to it benefits from a convincing, lived-in vibe.

Sensitive performances from the young cast ensure that the story ultimately acquires poignancy, and the arresting physical setting helps disguise the familiarity of some of its coming-of-age signposts.

The main virtue of the film lies in the thoughtful interviews given by the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, both the accompanying voiceover commentaries and their later on-camera appearances.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.