Mr. Trier’s experimenting mostly works, especially when the genre pieces dovetail with his gifts and Thelma’s story.

With a likable cast and a wholesome message about the true meaning of success, The Tiger Hunter might balk at the harsher details of immigrant life, but it has a generosity of spirit that lifts everyone up.

Suffused with sorcery and silvery light, November, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, is a bizarre Estonian love story — a mishmash of folklore, farm animals and scabrous fun — in which beauty and ugliness fight to the death.

If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.

Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.

The action is creatively staged, without ever getting too intense or scary for young viewers. And the script balances humor, pathos and wish fulfillment as it portrays Alex’s rise from mopey dreamer to confident warrior, without overdoing the mythic portent.

The result is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre.

A low-key character study whose gently repetitive rhythms mask an unusually keen sense of nuance and subtlety.

The film isn’t perfect — Mr. Chon’s wild camera motions seem more undisciplined than electric — but it does find an angle on the riots that hasn’t been seen much onscreen.

The ending is puzzling, when it wants to be devastating, and the political and personal sides of the story, rather than illuminating each other, fight to a stalemate. Ms. Kruger, however, who won the best actress award at Cannes in May, leaves a vivid, haunting impression.

The film is a good-natured potpourri of gags, funny bits, populist sentiment and anti-intellectualism.

A surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait of Whitney Houston’s rise and struggles with fame and drugs before her death at 48.

The Divine Order effectively illustrates how peer pressure can influence the political process. Collective silence, whether it’s from women unwilling to publicly press for their rights or men afraid to voice agreement with their wives for fear of looking weak around co-workers, proves more of an obstacle than any opponent. That message gives Ms. Volpe’s lark a timely edge.

It takes much longer than might be expected for Bachelor Party...to degenerate into a mindless mob scene. Until it takes that turn for the worse, the movie is actually funny. That is, it's as funny as "Police Academy," which like this film was written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft. And it's certainly funnier than it has been made to look by its advertising campaign, which seems to feature the usual gang of suspects enjoying the usual sophomoric sex romp.

The Drowning...distinguishes itself by applying a depth of psychological observation that yields a genuinely unsettling vision.

With a soft tone, respectful to opponents but insistent on the data, Food Evolution posits an inconvenient truth for organic boosters to swallow: In a world desperate for safe, sustainable food, G.M.O.s may well be a force for good.

An enjoyable paperback of a film, a lightweight, breezy experience that, by never pretending to be anything more than what it is, disarms criticism.

Pushy, judgmental, tart-tongued and self-obsessed, the photographer at the heart of Otis Mass’s penetrating documentary, The Incomparable Rose Hartman, is, like her snapshots, a piece of work.

The filmmakers rarely delve into the spiritual aspects of the story, but that’s O.K. You don’t have to believe in Padma and Urgain’s religion to believe in them.

The more Hope’s own obsession grows, the more involving the movie gets, even as it raises ethical questions about its making — and about those who continue to watch.

Shot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.

Prepare yourselves rather for a lengthy and restless stretch on tenterhooks.

Marrying fact and fiction, Jane Goldman’s seamy screenplay is wildly overstuffed; but the director, Juan Carlos Medina, gives the music hall scenes a rowdy authenticity.

Its enchantments are dark, its ideas somber and brutal.

It’s a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.

You’ll have to wade through several topics to get to the heart of Legion of Brothers, but once you’re there, some intense stories make the effort worthwhile.

The gravity and force of Mr. Phoenix’s performance and Ms. Ramsay’s direction are impressive, but it’s hard not to feel that their talents have been misapplied, and that there is less to the movie than meets the eye.

24 Frames can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating.

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

This film is sensitively wrought. It’s credible in its evocation of mid-’70s suburbia. The acting is excellent throughout, and Ross Lynch in the role of Dahmer elicits genuine sympathy for an increasingly lost but not yet monstrous soul. But in abandoning the subjective perspective of the graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer feels a little lacking in purpose.

Lost in Paris grows a bit tiresome at feature length, but it’s a winning divertissement.

The material about Kubrick’s process is finally more interesting than the discussions about his temperament.

There are times when the characters — and their director — surprise and genuinely delight.

The hoops our heroes jump through become increasingly surreal and hilarious.

Like "Agatha" and the rock drama "Stardust," other movies of Mr. Apted's, Coal Miner's Daughter does a better job of setting its scenes than of telling a story. Its characterizations and its atmosphere work better than the action, which becomes shapeless and, in the manner of biographies of living subjects, slightly cramped by its good intentions.

Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting.

Swim Team mostly aims to educate and inspire; on those counts, it succeeds.

While Sami Blood can sometimes seem didactic, Ms. Kernell, who has Sami heritage, richly conveys a sense of the time and place, with elegant shots that glide through the Nordic wilderness.

Michael Bonfiglio, the film’s director, provides a concise overview of the issues.

Yoshinari Nishikori’s period action film Tatara Samurai does not skimp with its swordplay, but its narrative arc takes you to a resolution uncommon for its genre.

The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair. Mr. Perkins and Miss Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam do well enough in other roles.

Ultimately, Ascent is a genuinely poetic portrait of a place, and various people’s relation to it.

Indeed, the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer's point of view, is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra's nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities. And Mr. Capra's "turkey dinners" philosophy, while emotionally gratifying, doesn't fill the hungry paunch.

Most of the time, though, For Your Eyes Only is a slick entertainment...not the spaced-out fun that "Moonraker" was, but its tone is consistently comic even when the material is not.

The Fog is more spooky yarn than streamlined scream machine; it’s the sort of crowd pleaser best enjoyed with an audience.

Tag, unlike too many of its recent ilk, at least bothers to be a movie, rather than a television sketch distended to feature length. The performers don’t seem to have been shoved in front of the camera and instructed to be funny. They have to work for their laughs, and to find coherence as an ensemble.

Has the manners and the gadgetry of a sci-fi adventure film but is, at heart, an engagingly mean, cruel, nasty, funny send-up of television. It's not quite Network, but then it also doesn't take itself too seriously.

Even if Last Flag Flying isn’t quite persuasive, it is nonetheless enormously thought-provoking, and its roughness is a sign of how earnestly it grapples with matters that other movies about war prefer not to think about.

For those who take Mr. King seriously, this is high-proof King corn, which is to say it has a kick to it even though it hasn't much taste.

Niftily paced and tight as a chokehold, the script (by the comic-book writer Scott Lobdell) delivers just enough variation to hold our interest.

It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.

Nothing about Tales From the Darkside is likely to give anyone much of a scare. But thanks to casting that is savvier than the horror norm, and to direction by John Harrison that is workmanlike and sometimes even witty, at least it's fun.

In the Mouth of Madness has enough menace and novelty to please fans of Mr. Carpenter's horror films (among them The Fog, Christine and Halloween) without the wider interest of an enchanting parable like Starman, which he also directed. Still, this is a film with the temerity to think big, if only for the magnitude of the wickedness it invokes.

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.

Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.

A film like this is quite naturally a showcase for its star, and as Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona.

The Land Before Time isn't heavily plotted; it doesn't do much more than concentrate on the amusingly lifelike dynamics among the dinosaur children as they make their journey. Luckily, it isn't very long either. At a just-right length of 73 minutes, it ought to win audiences' hearts without wearing out their patience.

Mr. Sonnenfeld repeats some of the first film's favorite visual stunts without wearing out their welcome, and he sustains much more exuberance than a sequel might be expected to have. The cast, which now includes Carol Kane playing Granny Addams, remains foolproof and great fun.

There’s a lot of labor and conflict shown here, and rarely have they looked so good.

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.

These people are not victims of blind forces; they make choices, defend them and grow in understanding, not always happily, as a result. Their story would be more enjoyable in a more polished film, but it has a power that is not dissipated by this one's weaknesses.

Mr. Pacino has not been this uncomplicatedly appealing since his Dog Day Afternoon days, and he makes Johnny's endless enterprise in wooing Frankie a delight. His scenes alone with Ms. Pfeiffer have a precision and honesty that keep the film's maudlin aspects at bay.

In addition to tossing in the occasional spy-movie homage (there's certainly a Hitchcock touch to Mr. Franklin's choice of villains), he has kept the story moving and the actors lively.

Soapdish, directed with good-natured zest by Michael Hoffman, has as serious a split-personality problem as any of its characters, perhaps because its screenplay is the work of Robert Harling (who wrote the story) and Andrew Bergman, two screenwriters with decidedly different comic sensibilities.

Santoalla ends with the mystery solved. The threads that remain hanging imbue this peculiar story of paradise lost with a tragic resonance.

This feature-length concert film is hilarious, putting Mr. Murphy on a par with Mr. Pryor at his best.

It’s a pleasure to spend 80 minutes in Mr. Berry’s company.

Except for some dutiful splattering of gore, it ticks along rather steadily, under Richard Fleischer's unruffled direction. There is a take-it-or-leave-it air that snugly suits the star's performance, or vice versa.

Pilgrimage raises a question or two about unexamined beliefs and religious zeal. Those questions, as well as all that blood, won’t appeal to everyone. But those who can stomach them will receive some dark rewards.

Mr. Dalton, the latest successor to the role of James Bond, is well equipped for his new responsibilities.

There is a marvelous escape from an alligator farm (deadly reptiles are rather a motif in this movie), a superb collection of grotesque ways of killing, and a fine sense of pace and rhythm.

In the end, The Wrong Light is an engrossing cautionary tale teaching one of philanthropy’s oldest lessons: Caveat emptor.

Paul Hogan is a delightful Crocodile Dundee. He has an easy, extremely likable screen personality -a mixture of warmth, sex appeal, disarming innocence and dry humor.

Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.

Runaway doesn't stint on the gizmos, and its inventiveness in that respect is its best feature; it comes up with, among other things, foot-long metallic spiders with a deadly sting and heat-seeking bullets that can be programmed to track specific human targets.

It’s a little amazing how a story so guilty of gross-out violence can retain a share of comic innocence.

The chief thing it counts on is a built-in appreciation of the Murray sense of humor, which is growing ever more refined as Mr. Murray proceeds with his movie career. Mr. Murray hasn't yet reached the point at which his routines can be sustained for more than 10 minutes at a time. But he has achieved a sardonically exaggerated calm that can be very entertaining.

The film climaxes with a breathless escape from Gwangju, as Kim and Hinzpeter elude government vehicles with the aid of other cabdrivers. But most impressive is Mr. Song, who persuasively conveys a working stiff’s political awakening.

The lines, like the movie itself, don't scan perfectly, but they are funny in the knowing, cheerfully bigoted way of Cheech and Chong's brand of comedy...Cheech and Chong's Next Movie is casual, slapdash and rude, and it's frequently hilarious in the way of some intense but harmless confrontation between eccentrics on a street corner.

In this splattery George A. Romero movie from 1977, the title character is not your typical vampire. In fact, he may not be a vampire at all. I mean, did Count Dracula ever need hypodermic needles (for sedation) or razor blades? Mr. Romero, the director who gave the world the ravenous 20th-century zombies of Night of the Living Dead, plays around with the possibility that Martin is just certifiably psychotic.

Benny and Joon is a dangerously fanciful story of cute eccentrics, characters whose quirks are the very essence of their appeal. Some of us experience a form of red alert at the very notion of adorable oddballs on screen, but Benny and Joon turns out to be remarkably benign in that regard.

The movie is at its most entertaining when detailing the making of “Midnight Express” and the contentious personalities involved.

The humor is dry and the acting deadpan in Women Who Kill, a comedy that plays it droll and is all the funnier for it.

A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.

If marijuana has a way of heightening the hilarious aspects of things that might not otherwise be funny, then this is very much a marijuana movie. But Nice Dreams also has a more general appeal than that. These are high spirits that don't have to do with being high.

Brad’s Status at its best is genuinely thought-provoking.

In the end, “Water and Sugar” proves the best view of Di Palma is still the gaze from his own eyes.

Any Which Way You Can is a loose, lighthearted Eastwood vehicle aimed at the good-timey sector of this actor's audience. The real star of this series is Clyde the orangutan, and it looks as if Clyde has another hit on his hairy hands.

Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.

David's habit of grabbing, berating or otherwise challenging anyone who insults him gives School Ties a muscular quality not usually found in films about this subject.

Technically, it's a good job. Mr. Webb has prepared a tough, tight script and Mr. Thompson has directed in a steady and starkly sinister style. There is no waste motion, no fooling. Everything is sharp and direct. Menace quivers in the picture like a sneaky electrical charge. And Mr. Mitchum plays the villain with the cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate...But this is really one of those shockers that provokes disgust and regret. There seems to be no reason for it but to agitate anguish and a violent, vengeful urge that is offered some animal satisfaction by that murderous fight at the end.

Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.

Mr. Garland likes to play with tones, mixing deadpan in with the frights, and later “Annihilation” becomes something of a head movie, swirling with cosmic and menacingly lysergic visions. He keeps the tension torqued throughout this phantasmagoric interlude, sustaining the shivery unease that is one of this movie’s deeper satisfactions.

This third installment of the silly and often hilarious send-up of cop cliches is slower to start than the earlier Naked Gun movies. As always, it is a scattershot mix of throwaway lines, topical references and sight gags (a newspaper headline that reads: Dyslexia for Cure Found).

Apart from its virtues or defects as a general feature film, Fame - in its attitude toward the performing arts - strikes a new note. It is a streetwise film with streetwise characters. In its deflating moral for every protagonist, it sees these arts as meshed into a smog of urban existence. Its novelty is its anti-Romantic, ironic view toward these callings. [27 July 1980, p.8]

My Bodyguared is a sweet little movie about characters who really seem to be people, and that sort of verisimilitude is rarer than it ought to be nowadays.

The documentary Company Town, by Natalie Kottke-Masocco and Erica Sardarian, feels fueled by pure desperation; even the rudimentary qualities of the filmmaking (cheap-looking camera work, poorly punctuated title cards) somehow add to its urgency, as if the movie needed to get its message out by any means necessary.

Although there's a lot more science-fiction than there is first-vintage James Bond in You Only Live Twice, the fifth in a series of veritable Bond films with Sean Connery, there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun.