The light provides wordless, and conveniently apolitical, explanation for why a person might endure nearly three decades (or in cinematic terms, nearly three hours) without action.

James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955.

Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.

Not to be speechless about it, David O. Selznick has a rare film in Spellbound.

What makes the pain of this film bearable is Daniel’s unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance.

The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.

Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization's often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list.

A fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work.

Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.

Believable and preposterous, effective as a closing chapter and somewhat of a letdown if only because Mr. Nolan, who continues to refine his cinematic technique, hasn't surmounted "The Dark Knight" or coaxed forth another performance as mesmerizingly vital as Heath Ledger's Joker in that film.

There’s much to love in this film, but what lingers are those lapidary details that often go missing in stories about great men, as if they had built the world alone and no child had ever raced down a road waving goodbye as a father disappeared into history.

In the process of drawing audiences into the twists and turns of a knotty detective tale, Mr. Franklin and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, open up an enticing and languorous lost world.

Haapasalo blesses her trio with a pop soundtrack that crescendos at the peak of a kiss, and climactic crises that are a mite too readily resolved, adamantly gracing this awkward stage of girlhood with forgiveness — not hectoring lessons.

These cinematic allusions are catnip to film lovers, and while they’re pleasurable to consider they’re so delicately woven into the story that they never distract from the characters or the emotion, or edge into directorial cleverness.

Settling scores, wrapping up loose ends and taking a victory lap — the main objects of the game this ostensibly last time around — generate some comic sparks as well as a few honest tears.

Because of its relentlessness, its crawling pace (the 77 minutes pass like 2 1/2 hours) and its sometimes confusing story, A Time for Drunken Horses may not be for every taste, but it's still an affecting, and in its way beautiful, movie.

Deftly swings to a spartan, engrossing climax, and the final twists spell out what the murderers are made of and the setting responsible for creating them. It is a true piece of film magic.

Southern Comfort sent shock waves through this year's Sundance Film Festival, even though it is as much about generosity and courage and tolerance as it is about a potentially discomforting subject.

A slight yet profound exploration of generational choices and our fear of living our parents’ lives.

Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.

There's a story, in case you're looking for one, though it's almost an afterthought, just the thin glue holding everything together, including the fine cast, the sense of broody place and the fatalism that seems to come with it. Mostly there's Mr. McDonagh's playful, sometimes overly cute language, which serves the actors and also threatens to upstage them.

Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.

Stingy with details and dialogue, but more than generous with atmosphere, this seductively photographed thriller (written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who also wielded the camera) sells its empty calories with great skill.

It's a brutal and disagreeable story, probably a little far-fetched, and without Mr. Schulberg's warmest character—the wistful widow who bestowed her favors on busted pugs. But with all the arcana of the fight game that Mr. Yordan and Mr. Robson have put into it—along with their bruising, brutish fight scenes—it makes for a lively, stinging film.

The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.

The War of the Worlds is, for all of its improbabilities, an imaginatively conceived, professionally turned adventure, which makes excellent use of Technicolor, special effects by a crew of experts and impressively drawn backgrounds.

It’s aggressively self-indulgent, cinematically topsy-turvy and exhausting. It’s also singular, daring and an uncompromising cannonball into the queer cinema pool.

Unguided by obvious story signposts, you slip from image to image, pulled along by their beauty (the digital cinematography is by Chris Dapkins) and by the dreamy, leisurely rhythms of the editing (by Seth Bomse).

Oftentimes, animal pictures make the unhappy mistake of attributing almost human rationalization to simple four-footed beasts. An outstanding virtue of this picture is that it does nothing of the sort. It treats the dog as an animal whose loyalty is all the more wondrous and appealing because it is simple and free of human wile.

An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of We.

While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.

Hooligan Sparrow, which Ms. Wang also shot and skillfully edited, has the pulse of a mainstream thriller but without the pacifying polish and tidiness.

For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.

[Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.

Entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem.

Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, Saloum has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce.

The Tribe deploys an elaborate, rigorously executed conceit in support of a weary, dreary hypothesis: People are awful. That might well be true, but there’s no need to shout.

This minimalist film is slightly hobbled by its minimal plot; it's the crucial difference between a movie with moments of greatness and a great movie.

Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.

As La Ciénaga perspires from the screen, it creates a vision of social malaise that feels paradoxically familiar and new.

Mr. De Felitta's moody, well-rounded film is a kind of excavation and investigation of Mr. Wright's actions as a piece of civil rights history.

Love poem, restless dream, troubled history, alchemist’s scrapbook — Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is pure cinema as it dances through its dense 42 minutes.

The trouble is that despite how earnest and committed Mr. Zahs appears to be, the story of what’s in the collection might be more be more fascinating than the man who’s collected it.

Offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes -- and, more important, what it gives back.

The way to enjoy Blue Moon — and I think it’s terrifically enjoyable, despite the bright thread of melancholy running down the middle — is to settle into the theatricality, especially Hawke’s performance.

Much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, the film has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience.

Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.

A rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare.

Getting an audience so caught up is no small feat; it is a tribute to the directors' storytelling.

This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny little bits.

Unashamedly rousing, invigorating but very clear-eyed evocat ion of values of the oldfashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated...It's an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.

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.

Edging now and then into the surreal, this unusual and tender little movie gingerly interrogates the gulf between digital and biological wiring.

The movie operates on two basic levels. One is philosophical, as the camera watches two men who are themselves looking through viewfinders experience the sensations of a place where humans rarely disrupt the natural order.

Part exploration of the ravages of guilt, part homage to the stylish Hong Kong gangster flicks of the 1990s, “Lonesome” (written by Wen with Noé Dodson, Wang Yinuo and Zhao Binghao) wears its influences on its sleeve but is a cool and sophisticated debut feature.

The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one.

Slow, sweet and subdued, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman’s lovely first feature, is about late-life longing and needs that never completely go away.

This film's dialogue isn't much more literate than a bus schedule, but its plotting is smart and breathless enough to make up for that.

Detective Story is a hard-grained entertainment, not revealing but bruisingly real.

Witty, intelligent, sometimes cryptic.

The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005.

Louisiana's delta country has never looked more darkly, lusciously sensual than it does in Eve's Bayou, a Southern gothic soap opera, written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, that transcends the genre through the sheer rumbling force of its characters' passions.

This lively, amusing picture is not to be taken seriously as realistic fiction or even art, any more than the works of Mr. Fleming are to be taken as long-hair literature. It is strictly a tinseled action-thriller, spiked with a mystery of a sort. And, if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex.

An unexpected but certainly major force in movies at the moment, S.E. Hinton (with four of her novels being adapted for the screen), created in Tex an utterly disarming, believable portrait of a small-town adolescent. Tim Hunter's film version captures Miss Hinton's novel perfectly.

The production doesn't resolve the paradoxes in Newton's life, but it does give viewers some idea of what it might have been like to be inside his head.

Although it is questionable whether this picture has the simple, universal appeal of an old Chaplin film, for instance, or whether its meanings are as sharp as some may think, it is certainly a lively entertainment and should be a subject of discussion for months to come.

This intense documentary shows a driven creator walking the walk, so to speak, in the most perverse fashion possible. The story is both repellent and strangely inspiring.

Mr. Goldwyn has turned out a very nice comedy, indeed.

Mr. Washington and Ms. Choudhury, whose first film this is, work well together. He has a screen heft that gives the film its dramatic point. Her voluptuous presence defines the urgency of the love affair. In terms of wit and plain old good humor, they are each other's equals.

From its very first scenes, Mr. Whedon’s film crackles with a busy, slightly wayward energy that recalls the classic romantic sparring of the studio era.

If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]

The striking force and terrifying impact of this RKO melodrama is chiefly due to Bobby's brilliant acting, for the whole effect would have been lost were there any suspicion of doubt about the credibility of this pivotal character.

Kramer quietly but forcefully recognizes that the conflict cannot continue as it has.

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.

THE most irresistible thing about the characters in Ruthless People, a conspicuously overconsuming, Beverly Hills update of O. Henry's classic Ransom of Red Chief, is that they all try with such earnestness to live up to their ruthless reputations. It also has a uniformly splendid cast of comic actors - the best to be seen outside of any recent Blake Edwards movie. Its screenplay, by the newcomer Dale Launer, is packed with wonderfully vulgar, tasteless lines that perfectly reflect the sensibilities of Sam and Barbara Stone.

It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.

A yuppie mid-life crisis is in the offing, and Albert Brooks has made it the basis for Lost in America, an inspired comedy in his own drily distinctive style.

The images in Endless Poetry are arresting and sometimes disturbing, but there is an earnest commitment to ecstasy and authenticity that renders moot any question of offensiveness or exploitation.

The movie, a scorching and rigorous essay on memory and accountability, is neither a profession of guilt nor a performance of virtue. Though his inquiry is intensely, at times painfully personal, Mr. Wilkerson is above all concerned with unpacking the mechanisms of racial domination.

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.

Miss Walker, who also plays a terrorist femme fatale in "Patriot Games," makes a mesmerizing impression as she holds her own against Miss Plowright without seeming remotely ruffled.

What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French.

Modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do.

Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.

Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.

It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.

There are some precious moments of romantic charm in this bitter account of domestic discord amid surroundings that should inspire nothing but delight. And so one must seize upon them for the entertainment that is to be had, and endure the tedium of much of the picture.

The cinematography is often grainy, and occasionally Banua-Simon’s choice of interview subjects feels unfocused or repetitive. But there is tremendous educational and moral value in his overview of the history of Kauai.

Cregger sets up dozens of clichés and pulls them in genuinely surprising directions, brandishing his touchstones: American horror films of the 80s and 90s in the vein of Wes Craven.

As it turns out, nothing else in Tracks matches the dramatic pow of a camel being relieved of his testes. Despite the otherworldly scenery and some predictable tragedy — Robyn can be maddeningly careless about the welfare of her animals — this proves to be a rather logy amble.

The French director Bertrand Tavernier deploys some smart ideas in this film, a period story about wars on the battlefield and those closer to home, but there's something a bit goatish in his attention to some female charms.

The Social Dilemma is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond.

Mr. Beesley, an Oklahoma City native who has been following and filming the Flaming Lips for 15 years, is far too close to his subject to offer a critical perspective, but he achieves a level of intimacy with the band members that most rock documentary directors can only dream of.

It's Gary Busey's galvanizing solo performance that gives meaning to an otherwise shapeless and bland feature-length film about the American rock-and-roll star who was killed in a plane crash in 1959.

In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative.