[A] fascinating documentary.

In a complicated role, the excellent Ms. Koler exudes a kind of flighty confidence: For all her nuptial-related anxieties, Michal is completely comfortable with who she is.

Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.

Mr. Perry is such a good filmmaker that he can make the embarrassing and the unbearable insistently, fascinatingly engrossing (and often funny).

Donald Cried is an acutely insightful, exquisitely written and acted triumph for Mr. Avedisian, who understands how the past permanently clings to us.

Call Me by Your Name is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity.

It’s a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force.

An actor before he was a screenwriter, Mr. Sheridan clearly spent a lot of his time learning about filmmaking on movie sets; his direction is assured throughout.

The back-and-forths of the character’s decisions feel real, and Mr. Dickinson’s laconic blankness (you would never guess the actor was British) helps to give the character’s existential crisis a charge. Ms. Hittman is also assured enough to know it can’t be easily resolved.

God’s Own Country weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful.

There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.

For sure, this funny and tender film prompts cheerful smiles, but sometimes they turn melancholy.

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

Mr. Mooney, currently cutting it up on “Saturday Night Live,” manages the twists and tonal fluctuations in Brigsby Bear beautifully.

The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.

The great virtue of The Young Karl Marx is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.

This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized

Mr. Gomis’s cinematic style is spectacularly multifaceted.

Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.

While scenes of the lake and land are magnificent, there are repulsive sights and stories, too. Whether inspiring or upsetting, all feel authentic.

Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.

Summer 1993 is movingly understated and beautifully acted.

The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.

It’s refreshing to see concrete solutions at work, many of them at the grass-roots level. And the optimism of those countering ineffective politicians and big business is infectious.

It’s a study of courageous innovation against an entrenched medical orthodoxy.

The Day After, one of three films this prolific director brought to festivals in 2017 (another one screened in Berlin in February), is an especially elegant presentation of some of his [Mr. Hong’s] characteristic concerns.

It has an uncommonly strong ensemble cast...but the movie belongs to Mr. Trintignant.

Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.

The picture makes an eye-filling package of rollicking fun and thoughtful common sense. The humor sparkles with real, knowing sophistication.

This is an angry, vivid, passionate film.

With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.

Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.

Mr. Selznick’s emphasis on wonder...can feel bullying, as if he were demanding delight instead of earning it. Yet even as he follows Mr. Selznick’s narrative lead, Mr. Haynes quietly and touchingly makes Wonderstruck his own because the wonder of the film isn’t in its story but in its telling.

Wildly ambitious, thoroughly entertaining and embellished with some snaky moves, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is a lot like its nominal subject, Elvis Presley.

In its alternating of Parvana’s day-to-day struggle with the tale she tells herself, the movie doesn’t promote bromides about stories and storytelling transcending reality. Rather, it demonstrates that the way imagination refracts reality can provide not only solace but also real-world strategy.

Ms. Huppert’s presence — steady, warm, thoughtful but with a casual air — keeps the entire enterprise classically comedic.

At a time when throwaway gags seem like a luxury in any film, Airplane! has jokes—hilarious jokes—to spare. It's also clever and confident and furiously energetic, and it has the two most sadly neglected selling points any movie could want right now: it's brief (only eighty-eight minutes), and it looks inexpensive (it cost about three million dollars) without looking cheap. Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise, in the midst of this dim movie season. As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered.

As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.

An intelligent, beautifully acted adaptation.

It’s a film of scenes rather than of one unified narrative, but each scene is a showcase for the magnificent talents of Ms. Balibar, a multifaceted performer of spectacular magnetism and intelligence.

More than a simple tribute or a fond remembrance, it is a remarkable and full-throated elegy, a work of art that is full of life.

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.

The existence of a debut as confident and allusive as Columbus is almost as improbable as the existence of Columbus, Ind., where the movie is set.

''The Color of Money'' isn't ''Mean Streets'' or ''Raging Bull.'' It is, however, a stunning vehicle - a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.

George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson are responsible for the story and screenplay, which was directed by John Glen, who does much better than he did with "For Your Eyes Only." However, the material is markedly better, and the budget seems noticeably larger. Peter Lamont's production design is both extravagant and funny.

This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.

Mr. Fancher’s movie love and way of spinning a yarn to its near-breaking point — one detour opens onto another — dovetail nicely with the cinephilia and playfulness that characterize Mr. Almereyda’s movies.

The Dark Half is an exceptionally entertaining film of its kind. Only Stanley Kubrick has ever adapted a King novel (The Shining) in such a way that the ending remains as satisfyingly spooky as the beginning.

Mr. Boorman, working in top form with a keenly acerbic overview, has written the film so sharply that the facts speak well for themselves.

“En el Séptimo Día” pulls off the tricky feat of feeling utterly natural as it ratchets with the mechanics of drama and suspense.

There's no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played.

Here’s a summer movie that is about — and offers — escape.

The look is rough, the emotions always hovering near the surface. Yet, buoyed by Mr. Sharif’s cheery personality, these can sometimes be defiantly upbeat.

My Cousin Vinny is easily the most inventive and enjoyable American film farce in a long time, even during those extended patches when it seems to be marking time or when it continues with a running gag that can't stay the distance. The film has a secure and sophisticated sense of what makes farce so delicious.

Despite the urgency of the situation the musicians face, when they’re not doing their work, the movie is quiet, observant, taking in the austere beauty of the land and the people.

The nice thing about I.Q. is that its intelligence doesn't stop at the title. In a romantic comedy that mingles brilliant physicists with auto mechanics, everybody manages to seem smart.

It’s Fang’s transformation, embodied by Ms. Zhou’s lean, cool authority, that carries the most weight, lending the proceedings an unforced feminist dimension, and reaffirming Ms. Hui’s status as one of China’s cinematic treasures.

There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.

Elegantly shot on film by Chris Teague, the movie feels unforced and at times shockingly authentic, allowing its emotions to percolate and rise of their own volition.

It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.

Mr. Crichton's previous films as a director — "Westworld" and "Coma" — are skillful and, each in its own way, entertaining, but they give no hint of the amplitude he displays in this visually dazzling period piece. With Sean Connery as the gang's elegant leader, the sort of mastermind who denies his body nothing, Lesley-Anne Down as his magnificent moll, and Donald Sutherland as his locksmith —"the best screwsman in England" — The Great Train Robbery is classy entertainment of the sort I associate exclusively with movies.

Arthur is a terrifically engaging, high-spirited screwball comedy about Arthur's more or less accidental salvation, largely through the love of a good, very poor but equally daffy young woman named Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli).

The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.

All the Money in the World revs up beautifully, first as a thriller. But while the kidnapping is the movie’s main event, it is only part of a story that is, by turns, a sordid, desperate and anguished tragedy about money.

A sly and thoroughly charming Trojan horse of a movie.

Besides being one of Woody's most consistently witty films, Love and Death marks a couple of other advances for Mr. Allen as a film maker and for Miss Keaton as a wickedly funny comedienne.

The Sure Thing is glowing proof of two things: Traditional romantic comedy can be adapted to suit the teen-age trade, and Mr. Reiner's contribution to ''This Is Spinal Tap'' was more than a matter of humor.

A witty, romantic, psychological horror film and it's almost as rewarding as a successful analysis...The fun is not in logic but watching how Mr. De Palma successfully tops himself as he goes along, and the fun lasts from the sexy, comic opening sequence right through to the film's several endings.

Like the teenage girls who monopolize its attention, Kill Me Please is moody, lovely, preening and libidinous.

Urban Cowboy is the most entertaining, most perceptive commercial American movie of the year to date. Here is a tough-talking, softhearted romantic melodrama that sees a world that is far more bleak than the movie, or the characters in it, ever have time to acknowledge.

Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.

In appreciating that world, its pathos, its narcissism, its tensions, and its sufficient moments of glory, Downhill Racer succeeds with sometimes chilling efficiency. Within the limits imposed by the tangential nature of its insights, it is a very good movie.

A terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well acted, written the way people talk.

For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.

On any level, earthly or otherwise, the ingenious new animated Hercules is pretty divine. With inspired intuition, Hercules brings together ancient lore, gospel singing, girl-group choreography and lots of free-floating mischief into a jubilant pastiche of classical references.

The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.

Bathed in a shadowy beauty and slippery psychological atmosphere, “Beast” soars on Ms. Buckley’s increasingly animalistic performance.

With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.

Mr. Legrand is skilled in the techniques of dread and suspense, and without sensationalizing or cheapening the story, he gives this closely observed drama the tension and urgency of a thriller.

The writer and director Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) has an exacting eye. The framing is meticulous; soon it’s also very purposefully working your nerves.

There’s almost a cosmic dimension to some of the most beautiful passages, as if the world (call it nature or God or sensitive direction) were holding Charley in its embrace.

The director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.

There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.

Western is as precise as a dropped pin on a GPS map, which makes its sense of mystery all the more powerful.

At first, Rosie’s simplicity is jarring. But as the character learns more about her personal and poetic origins, her minimalist frame absorbs the weight of a rich, complex history. That transformation is the great pleasure of watching this small film.

In this time of mass displacement across the globe, it is a stark reminder of how traumatic the refugee experience often is.

The Icelandic director Oskar Thor Axelsson is clearly fluent in horror conventions. But he has commendable restraint, and his latest film, I Remember You, transcends genre pyrotechnics even as it incorporates elements of Nordic noir.

In spite of its limited perspective on Vietnam, its churning, term-paperish exploration of Conrad and the near incoherence of its ending, (it) is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity.

Long Shot isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart.

Mr. Pollack's film runs into these obstacles so hard, in fact, that it runs right over them without difficulty. His "Sabrina" succeeds as a breezy, lighthearted throwback, made without benefit of the Hepburn magic but with much else in its favor.

Making a terrifying menace out of what is assumed to be one of nature's most innocent creatures and one of man's most melodious friends, Mr. Hitchcock and his associates have constructed a horror film that should raise the hackles on the most courageous and put goose-pimples on the toughest hide.

The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.

The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices...are gentle and persuasive, using the horrific details of the rape and its aftermath as ballast to stabilize a heart-wrenching history of systemic injustice.

I’ve rarely seen a movie about citizenship as quietly eloquent as Quest.

Though House of Games is not of the dramatic heft of the playwright's ''American Buffalo'' and ''Glengarry Glen Ross,'' the screenplay is the first true Mamet work to reach the screen, and the direction illuminates it at every turn. Both Miss Crouse and Mr. Mantegna and the supporting actors, including Mike Nussbaum, J. T. Walsh and Steve Goldstein, are splendidly in touch, not only with character but also with the sense of the film.

The excitement of Down by Law comes not from what it's about. Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.

As directed by George Miller, this film has an appealingly brisk, unsentimental style and a rare ability to compress and convey detailed medical data. It also displays tremendous compassion for all three Odones and what they have been through.

Mr. Sauvaire’s approach may not be for everyone, but his skill and audacity are invigorating — and, strangely, liberating.