The movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate.

Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.

Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.

A brash, vivacious concoction of dark comedy, light drama and musical performance.

There is plenty of substance in Absolute Wilson, as it provides a concise and absorbing portrait of a powerful creative personality.

This eerie and indelible documentary about suicide juxtaposes transcendent beauty with personal tragedy.

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

Of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you're trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.

Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.

A thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.

Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.

If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation.

An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”

Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.

Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series "Lucky Louie." The acting, especially by Ms. Hamilton, is better than serviceable.

There is something good-natured about Jaan-E-Mann that makes it possible to forgive its many faults -- even the film's opening, a "2001: A Space Odyssey" ripoff with a space station gliding through the cosmos to the tune of the "Blue Danube" Waltz.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine.

Smart, resourceful indie.

Not as morose as it sounds, the film also features playful humor and steady promises of hope. And the boys, like the film, come off as very human: flawed, frequently awkward, but full of goodness at the core.

The film’s guileless, heartfelt style veers perilously close to corniness at times, but the superb cast dares you to mock.

Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.

The terrain is so familiar that it has a slightly stifling effect, even in Mr. Plympton’s demented hands. We long ago loved these characters to death.

Over all, though, the hands-off approach leaves the viewer to draw his own conclusions, but without providing enough information.

Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.

It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes.

Co-starring as Rome, the ringleader with "intimacy issues," Robert Patrick appears to be enjoying himself. That makes one of us.

Neither sensationalistic nor sentimental, Ms. Berg’s film is clear-sighted, tough-minded and devastating, a portrait of individual criminality and institutional indifference, a study in the betrayal of trust and the irresponsibility of authority.