Our Land is the work of a great filmmaker exploring the boundaries of a relatively unfamiliar form.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.

Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.

Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps.

The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try.

Coppola observes the connection of big ideas to fine details, the power of intensive collaborations, and the ultimate creative helplessness once the show starts.

Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.

The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma.

I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance.

Magellan isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to Song Sung Blue.

Between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.

The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm.

Resurrection, a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It’s more like a love labyrinth—a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish.

[Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.