Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg invariably comes down on the side of optimism; here, that hopefulness feels right. It also feels like a rallying cry.

in spite of its historical specificity, BPM never feels like a bulletin from the past. Its immediacy comes in part from the brisk naturalism of the performances and the nimbleness and fluidity of the editing. The characters are so vivid, so real, so familiar that it’s impossible to think of their struggles — and in some cases their deaths — as unfolding in anything but the present tense.

As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in Ismael’s Ghosts, but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken.

This movie accomplishes something almost miraculous — two things, actually. It casts a spell and tells the truth.

A penetrating, sensitive, and sometimes shocking dissection of the hearts and minds of men who obviously are something less than gods. It makes for taut, absorbing, and compelling drama that reaches far beyond the close confines of its jury room setting.

Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches."

Is it the greatest motion picture ever made? Probably not, although it is the greatest motion mural we have seen and the most ambitious film-making venture in Hollywood's spectacular history.

The Warners here have a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap. For once more, as in recent Bogart pictures, they have turned the incisive trick of draping a tender love story within the folds of a tight topical theme. They have used Mr. Bogart's personality, so well established in other brilliant films, to inject a cold point of tough resistance to evil forces afoot in Europe today. And they have so combined sentiment, humor and pathos with taut melodrama and bristling intrigue that the result is a highly entertaining and even inspiring film.

The film is both a comeback story and, more profoundly, a coming to terms with aging.

Dawson City now enters that time line as an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.

Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work.

It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season.

For Mr. Sayles, whose idealism has never been more affecting or apparent than it is in this story of boyish enthusiasm gone bad in an all too grown-up world, Eight Men Out represents a home run.

Its explanatory title doesn’t begin to convey just how exhilarating or inspiring a documentary this truly is, and how excellent a trip this well-respected French director takes you on.

No Way Out has the exuberance of something freshly conceived. It's so effective, in fact, that when it's all over, you might want to sit through the beginning again just to see if the end is justified by the means. I suspect that it is.

The Prince of Tides marks Ms. Streisand's triumphantly good job of locating that story's salient elements and making them come alive on the screen.

After Life becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. It intimates that whatever happiness we may find in life comes from within and is self-created.

Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history.

The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.

The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs.

For any believer in humankind’s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. The Farthest, a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.

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.

You might think you’ve seen this all before. You probably have, but never quite like this. What Ms. Gerwig has done — and it’s by no means a small accomplishment — is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose-colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise.

It is the portrait of a soul in torment, all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed.

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.

In “Ex Libris,” democracy is alive and in the hands of a forceful advocate and brilliant filmmaker, which helps make this one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.

Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears.