No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

That old master of screen melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, and Writer John Steinbeck have combined their distinctive talents in a tremendously provocative film—indeed, a surprisingly unique one—titled Lifeboat.

The theme music, from Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" album, is a haunting accompaniment to Mr. Hopper's sometimes stunning imagery. The best moments of "Out of the Blue" have both the beauty and the banality of found art.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.

The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.

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.

A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.

Remarkable concert documentary.

In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.

Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish.

The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.

Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.

Fastidious and smart, and Ms. Swinton's fixated intensity isn't ever remote; we're always aware of how deeply she's feeling. Her work is magnificent.

Skarsgard and Headey deliver perfectly meshed lead performances in a small, beautifully acted film that will make you squirm.

A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.

For all its narrative glitches and its homemade quality, Thirteen evokes the rhythm, texture and tone of Nina's world in a way that a more carefully scripted film never could.

Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.

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.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

In “Public Speaking,” Martin Scorsese’s enormously enjoyable and perceptive documentary about her, Ms. Lebowitz’s endearing narcissism is a study in the notion that arrogance and insecurity are largely two sides of the same cocktail coaster.

Mr. Loznitsa doesn’t lighten the mood with any familiar filmmaking tricks: there are, for instance, no musical cues to guide you over the troubling or ambiguous passages. Like the characters, you work through each surprising turn.

Makes jaunty, imaginative use of both extraordinary technology and bold storytelling possibilities within the insect world.

The film has the feel of a gift. Particularly noteworthy are Mr. Haroun's eloquent silences, visual and aural.

It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.

Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.

A revealing film and an invaluable document.

Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.

It is a small, plain movie, shot in 16 millimeter in dull locations around Boston; but also, like its passive, quizzical heroine, it is unexpectedly seductive, and even, in its own stubborn, hesitant way, beautiful.