Even without an upbeat ending, though, Betting on Zero would be persuasive advocacy.

The cast is appealingly natural, the cinematography subtly seductive, and the Colombian pop songs on the soundtrack establish a sinuous groove.

Mr. Kazan catches the poetry of immigrants arriving in America. With some masterfully authentic staging and a fitly hard-focus camera, he gives us as fine an understanding of that drama as the screen has ever had.

The Outwaters conjures a swoony, dreamlike atmosphere that heightens the shocks to come.

It’s a typically sly, off-center comedy, once again set against the machinery of the motion-picture business. And, as usual with the Coens, it has more going on than there might seem, including in its wrangling over God and ideology, art and entertainment.

Candy Mountain...seems to be a small, quirky film, but it easily assumes the weight, ambition and success that many larger films aim for and miss.

While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.

As opaque as it is mesmerizing, 4 demands open eyes and open minds, but neither is it as difficult as all its weighty silences, oblique detours and countless images of glistening, sweating animal flesh - Mother Russia's raw and seriously overcooked - might suggest.

When I Saw You is a soft-centered child’s-eye view of alienation, toughened by fine acting (Saleh Bakri shines as a fighter drawn to Ghaydaa) and Hélène Louvart’s full-bodied photography.

An interestingly wild hybrid of visual styles and cultural references.

Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is.

For the first two hours, it’s absorbing: big song-and-dance numbers and emotional set pieces, dynamic performances from everyone, and a feeling of reverence for the story and what it’s meant for 40 years give it gravitas and heart. . . Yet by the end it’s clear that the story remains slippery to would-be adapters.

We are not exactly in the present and not precisely in the past, but in a dreamy cinematic space where distinctions of genre and tone are pleasantly (and sometimes shockingly) blurred.

A tale of two brothers, one band and a boatload of psychological baggage, Mistaken for Strangers is, like its maker, scruffy, undisciplined and eager to be loved. The big surprise is how easy it is to comply.

Mr. Martin and Mr. Candy are an easy twosome to watch even with marginal material, though, and the film is never worse than slow.

Although Igby has its share of glitches and tonal inconsistencies, it packs an emotional wallop similar to that of another cultural golden oldie as beloved in its way as "The Catcher in the Rye": "The Graduate."

There’s substance here, and talent in spades, but it needed a little more time to gestate.

That time machine - a wonderful-looking gizmo with some lasers stolen from a medical laboratory - really exists. Whether it works or not, you'll have to see for yourself. It's worth the wait.

Even as Ms. Hall’s performance makes you believe that something profound is at stake, the movie noncommittally nibbles at the edge of larger meaning, nodding at current events.

Another fast, gripping spy story with some good tricks up its sleeve.

Has to be the most excessive film around. It piles every known element of the action genre onto the flimsy story. [15 July 1988]

The spectacular feature-directing debut of Qiu Sheng.

A modest film, less interested in advocacy or analysis than in sympathy.

It is a disarmingly and consistently sensitive movie that remains engaging even when its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp.

It’s hard to emerge from “Into Darkness” without a feeling of disappointment, even betrayal.

It’s easy to root for Malcolm, to admire his pluck and share in his enthusiasm. It may be a little harder to buy what he and Dope are selling.

[Lee] may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception.

Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.

It’s hard to imagine what message children will take away from this film other than that monkeys are just like characters in a fictional Disney movie, which they are not.

Really, though, the reason to watch Bugonia is its leads.

A lively, fun one.

Attempts to be a kind of all American, slapstick Orpheus Ascending, a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.

The narrative of this sympathetic movie wobbles on the edge of sentimentality, though there are only a few sticky moments. But—unlike the novel, which moved swiftly—it has been directed at far too slow a pace, which means that the comic possibilities and the social comment have been diminished.

Smartly written and flawlessly acted, Lovers of Hate is a Trojan horse, the kind of movie that begins so self-effacingly that we don't expect any surprises.

Morally cunning and with a tone as black as pitch, Pieta, the 18th film from the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, is a deeply unnerving revenge movie in which redemption is dangled like a cat toy before a cougar.

Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies.

Rockwell intentionally reminds his audience of the rich history of American independent cinema, where filmmakers across decades have built dreamscapes out of the textures of everyday interactions.

Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.

"Author” is most interesting — and least self-aware — as a study in the gullibility and narcissism of the celebrity class.

Possessor is a shocking work that moves from disquieting to stressful with ruthless dispatch.

One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.

By ignoring Israeli voices and focusing only on the immigrants, Mr. Haar has produced a documentary filled with immediacy but free of analysis, a fascinating but ultimately unenlightening record of their plight.

A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.

There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all.

Mr. Liford (yet another emergent indie filmmaker from Texas) can clearly write a script, handle a camera and construct a mood. Wuss may be slight, but Mr. Liford’s sense of pitch is spot on.

As the film makes abundantly clear, if left untreated, contagions — of ignorance, fear and conflict — will spread wherever they can.

India’s Daughter is a portrait of a place and time. And for all of its horrors, the movie has a positive message, too: Out of tragedy — and this case is just one of many — can come galvanizing change.

Directed slickly by Paul Dugdale, “Olé” is less a concert film or travelogue than a historical account — swiftly, smartly assembled, reflecting events only six months old.

The barbarity described in Finding Oscar is stomach-turning, but moments of courage still shine through in this unsettling yet vital documentary.

Though not nearly as mindful or meaty as Mr. Miike’s 2011 triumph, 13 Assassins, “Blade” is creatively gory fun.

Summer in the Forest is an extraordinarily tender documentary that asks what it means to be human. Here, even the most gentle scenes raise mighty questions.

Alice (rightfully) regards the choices of its heroine with respect and empathy. But its picture of sex work as an easy out, devoid of any real danger, feels like a simplistic fantasy.

Consider this film a master class in world-building, a bewildering but poignant dream — one that will leave you with plenty of burning questions.

The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.

A blizzard of fractious sport and clowning, a whirlwind of gags and travesty, a snowdrift of suffocating nonsense.

While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.

Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, The African Desperate is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection.

The film is moving for the intimacy it depicts, an archive as unlikely as the love story itself.

Lesage’s characters may talk a lot, but because he avoids exposition, he ends up overloading the story with dramatically heightened episodes. These keep things simmering, but they often overstate the obvious as much as any telegraphing dialogue might.

Its ideal audience would be full of Three Stooges fans with streaks for grotesque humor. [13 Mar 1987, p.C18]

A feel-good and slightly bad comedy-drama about a young man's fight against cancer, aims to put a tear in your eye and a sob in your throat, if not for long.

Gives a remarkably thorough and detailed account of the difficult conditions facing American soldiers in Iraq.

The don't quite do for "Oklahoma!" what they did for heavy metal, but they come close. [31 Jan 1997, p.C6]

While, in many respects, it is conventional in form, alternating archival footage from the late 1970s and early ’80s with newly shot interviews, the movie has a momentum (aided by an exemplary soundtrack of songs from the era) and a rare interrogatory spirit.

Like his (Abrams) previous features, "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek," Super 8 is an enticing package without much inside.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender.

There is something eerily disconnected about Heaven Can Wait. It may be because in a time of comparative peace, immortality — at least in its life-after-death form — doesn't hold the fascination for us that it does when there's a war going on, as there was in 1941 when Here Comes Mr. Jordan was released and became such a hit. Or perhaps we are somewhat more sophisticated today (though I doubt it) and comedies about heavenly messengers and what is, in effect, a very casual kind of transubstantiation seem essentially silly.

In short, there is energy and intensity but little clarity and emotion in this film. It is like a great, green iceberg: mammoth and imposing but very cold.

Mr. Escalante is an exceptionally deft and subtle realist, and you sometimes feel, in “Heli” and even more so in The Untamed that he is drawn to extremity partly out of boredom with his own skill.

It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.

Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.

Easy A isn't nearly as good a movie as "Clueless," Ms. Heckerling's contemporary pastiche of the Jane Austen novel "Emma." But the one-liner-loaded screenplay has the same insouciant charm.

Viewers jaded by daily doses of digital dazzlement might not fully register the reality of the wonders they are witnessing. But that doesn’t, in the end, make The Eagle Huntress any less wonderful.

Paul’s performance was often overshadowed by Cranston’s during the series’s run, but he’s phenomenal here.

It's an anti- romantic comedy that resolves on a minor chord of grief.

The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.

A freshness and intensity that recall the television series "My So-Called Life."

Puts a bitterly ironic spin on the Army's best-known recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be."

An essential amendment to the historical record, Censored Voices reminds us that no war is entirely virtuous and makes clear that, even at the time, the dangers of becoming an occupying force were evident.

Even though the picture runs more than two hours and a half, it moves swiftly and gets where it is going. J. Lee Thompson has directed it with pace and has seen to it that the actors give the impression of being stout and bold.

It is a hearty and lively show, the story of which is just about equal to that of other musical offerings.

It has staying power. In place of large revelations, you’ll find yourself remembering scenes like the one in which Abu Jandal sits absorbed by a news report of a bombing in Kabul, until his son requests a change of channel. It’s time for “Tom and Jerry.”

Trapped in a hopelessly alienating world, Cristovam would rather buck than surrender; a fatal end would seem inevitable, but wisely, Miranda Maria pulls back the reins with a glimpse of empathy that teases a potential way forward.

Almost a quarter of a century in, the Bridget Jones movies are coalescing into an evocative portrayal of a character coming to terms with both her imperfections and her strengths in real time.

The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.

Donald Siegel, a talented director, is too handicapped by his limited means to do much with the fragments of plot about a fall guy involved with a mail robbery, a devious redhead and double-crosses following in predictable sequence. His actors seem dispirited by the script.

Until it fizzles in an anticlimactic train crash, it is extremely entertaining.

The achievement of this film is to forestall and complicate easy judgment. You emerge shaken and bothered, which may sound like a reason not to see the movie. It is actually the opposite.

A tiny film that reflects a large talent.

As a comedy of manners it has a dependably keen aim, with its most wicked barbs leavened by Mr. Mazursky's obvious fondness for his characters.

As snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited. Its originality extends well beyond the limits of ordinary high school histrionics and into the realm of the genuinely perverse.

The creativity grows like kudzu in Beauty Is Embarrassing, Neil Berkeley's enlightening and often hilarious portrait of the Los Angeles artist Wayne White. And it yields a thousand blossoms.

The fearless streak displayed by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble deserves its equivalent in a bolder movie technique. But Mr. Atlas delivers a rousing finale.

Mr. Ma paints a persuasively bleak scene that could use more psychological and philosophical nuance to go with its painstaking grimness.

Canners is a testament to its director’s indefatigable humanism, and to the human beings who feed it. The movie follows the money, a nickel at a time, and discovers something far more valuable.

It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens. The dread inexorably builds in Candyman, which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman.

It was created under different circumstances and it is, perhaps inevitably, a less powerful work than “When the Levees Broke,” more diffuse in its storytelling and more uncertain in its point of view.

The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.