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.