This universal story could easily serve as a dramatically gripping primer on topical immigration issues to schoolchildren across the globe, from Arizona to Afghanistan. 　

For all the impressive ease with which the filmmaker handles her tyke star, Nana never quite manages to achieve the thematic resonance to which it aspires.

An all-access pass to an artist embarking on a new path, this is entertaining stuff – funny, disarming, even poignant. It's also jammed with terrific music.

This is a looser, grittier film than their work of late, and while it’s more successful in the sequences of bold theatricality than in the faux-cinéma vérité of the surrounding scenes, the mix is nonetheless an interesting one.

The film falls into an interesting intersection between documentary and feature, between reality and fiction.

You'll never play the titular parlor game again after watching Would You Rather, director David Guy Levy’s clever exercise in torture porn that manages to display as much restraint as genuine sickness.

A visually lavish epic fantasy that happily marries the latest advances in CGI and action techniques with ancient Chinese fable and a Buddhist atmosphere.

This material would never have attracted a major studio, so Christy Walton — heir to the Wal-Mart fortune — financed the picture herself, not because of any desire to become a movie mogul but simply because of her passion for the novel. She allowed the filmmakers to work without major stars or obvious commercial hooks added to the story. Although the film doesn’t always sustain dramatic impact, its fidelity to the spirit of the novel is impressive.

The Lords of Salem is more creepily atmospheric than truly scary and eventually lapses into silliness. But it does provide some evocatively spooky moments along the way.

While the exact secret to the film’s high-grossing recipe remains a bit of a mystery, it probably has to do with the good-humored chemistry between the unlikely partners, pushing the limits of censorship in the sexual-innuendo department, and a well-written off-the-wall script that makes audiences laugh out loud.

It's not surprising that the remake of the 1986 film About Last Night... is broader, cruder and raunchier than the original. What is surprising it that's also much, much funnier.

Managing to be neither sentimental nor sensationalistic, the film tells its story from the heart, and from the simple, straightforward viewpoint of young heroine Komona, warmly played by the talented Rachel Mwanza in her screen debut.

Filled with devastating statistics documenting the devastating effects of climate change on the planet, the film takes particular aim at CEOs, or “greedy lying bastards,” of the oil and gas corporations which are contributing to the crisis.

Beyond the Hills is less fun than any film about lesbian nuns and their psychotic ex-lovers ought to be. But it is an engrossingly serious work, and confirms Mungiu as a maturing talent with more universal stories to tell than those defined by Romania’s recent political past.

When rehearsals finally give way to full, unconventional production numbers, it's hard to imagine any way Hunky Dory could get much better.

Despite the familiarity of this setup, Way Back is a charmer, putting refreshingly little emphasis on Duncan's romantic needs and allowing family melodrama to erupt and simmer down without pat resolution.

Although the overlong film skirts with hagiography, at times feeling more like a promotional DVD extra than an objective account, it nonetheless has an undeniable emotional pull thanks to its fairy tale-like narrative.

There's more than enough going on here to compensate for the script's occasional tendency towards on-the-nose exposition of feelings, and evasive contrivances.

Even if the movie ultimately proves less adventurous than its main characters, it has a charm that keeps resurfacing every time you think it’s wandering too far into cutesville.

Wells directs the actors smoothly enough in individual scenes, but his work lacks the cohesiveness to really pull all the characters together and convey their shared past.

A few clumsy touches do not seriously diminish the charm of a film that is ultimately a heart-warming celebration of kindness, friendship and forgiveness. Like a fine whisky, the angry old man of British social realism seems to be mellowing with age. It suits him.

Michel Gondry takes an idiosyncratic, funny, unexpectedly poignant snapshot of American youth in The We and the I. Rambling and unpolished, the film has a scrappy charm that springs organically from the characters and their stories rather than being artificially coaxed.

Haute Cuisine is light on plot, long on flavor and deliciously French.

For all its derivative poetics -- as many exteriors as possible were shot during or just after magic hour, a la Malick -- the film is a lovely thing to experience and possesses a measure of real power.

A broken-family melodrama with a minimum of histrionics, Scott McGehee's and David Siegel's What Maisie Knew begins from scenes that will be familiar to most viewers who've witnessed a custody battle. Things get pretty orchestrated from that familiar scenario onward, but never to the point of unbelievability.

Trippy in the best sense, Vanishing Waves adds a healthy dose of eroticism to its familiar sci-fi genre.

This would all be moving enough, but the film also benefits greatly from Conde’s endlessly charismatic personality.

Its highly informative recounting of this little-known tragic tale provides a vivid reminder of the ephemerality of civilizations.