Elia Kazan gives a penetrating, thorough and profoundly affecting account of the hardships endured and surmounted at the turn of the century by a young Greek lad in attempting to fulfill his cherished dream - getting to America from the old country.

Featuring excellent performances by Shahab Hosseini (“A Separation,” “The Salesman”) and Niousha Jafarian (“Here and Now”) as a married couple with a baby daughter and a frayed relationship, this predominantly Farsi-language production sneaks up on viewers and delivers a knockout final act.

A bangup filmusical in the topdrawer Goldwyn manner.

The simple humanism here makes the case for nurturing and celebrating America’s immigrant population in a more eloquent and persuasive way than a more polemical film ever could.

Magnificent production, combined with excellent casting and direction, make The Day of the Locust as fine a film (in a professional sense) as the basic material lets it be. Nathanael West's novel about losers on the Hollywood fringe has lost little of its verisimilitude in adaptation.

Crawford’s dominating performance makes David no hick but a sensitive and accommodating man a bit intimidated by his admittedly “much smarter” wife, flailing in his efforts to hold together a family unit he can’t go on without.

People of all sizes will get a bang out of Darby O'Gill And The Little People. [29 Apr 1959, p.6]

While wholly sympathetic to the cause, Transhood isn’t just a work of blandly cheery activism: Liese frankly observes the practical obstacles and psychological swings endured by its four young subjects and their families, sometimes to upsetting effect.

The intuitive selection of the four leads, and their complex, perceptive playing of the material, is a credit to Lawrence’s deft direction of both veteran and non-professional talent.

The more familiar one is with Canadian history, the funnier it is. But even without prior knowledge of our neighbor to the north, it can be enjoyed for its combination of supreme creativity, jaw-dropping audacity and amusing tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

Director Sidney Lumet has crafted a film with real pathos while writer Vincent Patrick (adapting his own novel) injects enough bawdy humor to create a delightful mixed bag spiced with almost a European sensibility.

In its middlebrow celebratory way, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart reveals the Bee Gees’ saga to be one of the most fascinating and, at times, awe-inspiring in the history of pop.

A happy combination of good humor and warm drama has been put together with neat results in Room for One More.

For the jazz devotee this is nearly two hours of top trumpet notes. For the regular filmgoer, it is good drama.

Period of Adjustment is lower case Tennessee Williams, but it also illustrates that lower case Williams is superior to the upper case of most modern playwrights.

Meet Me in St. Louis is wholesome in story [from the book by Sally Benson], colorful both in background and its literal Technicolor, and as American as the World's Series.

Huston catches the feel of the community with a lean, no-nonsense economy, a hard-boiled but humanly alert feeling which raises the tale from a purely naturalistic lowlife depiction of the characters to make a statement on the life style of the drifters and those who accept a moderate place in the smalltown hierarchy.

An outstanding example of topflight writing structure and dialog, enhanced to full fruition by a knowing director.

I’d call it a deftly sincere and canny portrait, one that works precisely because it takes the time to sweat the small stuff.

The Train Robbers is an above-average John Wayne actioner, written and directed by Burt Kennedy with suspense, comedy and humanism not usually found in the formula.

Marking her fifth feature, Bergroth flexes her considerable cinematic powers, conjuring vibrantly expressive visuals and confident performances from her talented cast, especially the petite theater thesp Pöysti, who excels in her first leading film role and strongly resembles the real Tove.

Richard Matheson's scripting of his novel Hell House builds into an exceptionally realistic and suspenseful tale of psychic phenomena.

Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.

Mike Hodges' top-notch adaptation of a Ted Lewis novel not only maintains interest but conveys with rare artistry, restraint and clarity the many brutal, sordid and gamy plot turns.

Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.

If the first mission made roughly $50 million domestically, the sky could be the limit for this much better sequel -- a clever spoof of "Rambo" and a dozen other movies that employs the usual scattershot "Airplane!" approach but boasts a higher shooting percentage than its forebear. Look out, comedy fans: Fox is coming to get you.

Not all the tricks translate, nor do they need to, since DelGaudio has shrewdly constructed the experience around the theme of identity, revealing deeply personal elements of his own history in such a way as to prime audiences to look inward as well. The result is a kind of epiphany that leaves them with a feeling of discovery rather than deception.

Head-swiveling directorial debut of Lili Fini Zanuck lays out a tough masculine scenario [based on Kim Wozencraft's book] in a way that is always emotionally riveting.

Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.

The brief, meteoric, tragic life of martial arts star Bruce Lee forms the basis of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The film is an unlikely pastiche of traditional biography, Hollywood saga, chopsocky set pieces and inter-racial romance. Seemingly contrary elements and styles nonetheless mesh into an entertaining whole and the result proves extremely touching and haunting.

The performances are all on the money, but two are outstanding. Newcomer Witherspoon manages to strike exactly the right note as the tomboy on the verge of womanhood while Waterston works on several levels at once.

Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.

The truly chilling aspect of Killing Zoe is the correlation Avary makes between the gang’s nihilistic attitude and its penchant for violence. He pinpoints the schism in a precise and unnerving manner.

If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.

A film that is continuously enjoyable from its action-filled opening to the dazzling final shot, one that offers a very generous welcome to newcomers to the play, and reminds those familiar with it of its heady pleasures. Only real drawback, and not an insignificant one, is pic’s visual quality, which is unaccountably undistinguished, even ugly, especially considering the sun-drenched Tuscan location.

So I Married an Axe Murderer may have to dodge some angry Scotsmen but otherwise should click with those looking for slightly upscale humor that’s not averse to a few well-placed cheap shots. It’s a delightful and unexpected surprise.

The story [from The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White] is sometimes eerie and eventually melodramatic, but it’s all so well done as to make for intense interest.

Expertly directed and co-written by respected filmmaker Robert Connolly (“Balibo,” “Paper Planes”), The Dry has all the character intrigue, clever plot twists and red herrings to keep viewers guessing.

Softie clearly sees a beam of long-term hope for Kenya’s future in Mwangi and his political allies — including his no-bull, vinegar-tongued campaign manager Khadija, as delicious a documentary scene-stealer as we’ve seen this year. Yet Soko doesn’t go in for easy, crowd-pleasing uplift.

In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.

In the end, however we take Amin’s story, the film is an incredibly intimate act of sharing. The question shouldn’t be whether we can trust Amin, but whether he can trust us enough to reveal himself fully. Truth be told, we don’t need to see or know everything to respect the gift of hearing all that he’s been through.

The result of a nine-year labor of love from a Norwegian-Latvian team, it combines distinctive cutout animation with family photos and archival footage to forge a look at an authoritarian society through a young girl’s eyes. It also encompasses her eventual realization of the painful history repressed beneath the platitudes and propaganda of her school days.

Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.

It’s calculated and precise and meticulously constructed in a way that will be of considerable interest to audiences who appreciate stories that unsettle, and those who recognize the precision of Sisto’s approach.

It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.

There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.

After the 140 minutes of “The Sparks Brothers” zip by like a tight half-hour, even the previously uninitiated may well feel like they’ve known Sparks all along – or at least that they should have.

Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.

This immensely enjoyable biography of songstress Tina Turner [from her and Kurt Loder's book I, Tina] is a passionate personal and professional drama that hits both the high and low notes of an extraordinary career.

An hilarious sequel featuring equal parts creature slapstick for the small fry and satirical barbs for adults. Addition of Christopher Lee to the cast as a mad genetics engineering scientist is a perfect touch.

Test Pattern — tiny, sedate yet urgent — is like the tinkling of a warning bell that somehow signals the five-alarm fire of ingrained racism, sexism and the faulty American medical and judicial systems, that rages just outside the door.

Anyone can pull off a jump scare or three. Graham immediately manages the considerably more difficult task of conjuring a mood of general dread, suffusing ordinary settings with supernatural unease.

While it’s true that the Croatian filmmaker’s experimental lulu employs such methods as rotoscoping and collage, it’s also vibrant and alive in a way that few films falling under the wide umbrella of animation even attempt to be. And though the audience for elliptical fare of this nature tends to be self-selecting, anyone willing to get on Barić’s wavelength will find the experience strangely rewarding.

The most amazing thing about Another Stakeout is that even though some of its skits are dopey and cloying and its plot recycled and derivative, the movie is still very amusing.

Made You Look is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?

Told mostly through the eyes of primary school-aged characters, “Farewell” operates firstly as a film that can be deemed as suitable for children, while also offering plenty for adult audiences to read between the lines.

Brainy, mannered, dryly amused, “The Inheritance” can appear willfully inexpert; the self-conscious acting feels both deliberate and the work of a director who hasn’t spent much time working with actors. But Asili dives confidently into big ideas — ideas as ideology, as wondrous inspiration, as both.

Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.

This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.

[A] lengthy but absorbing and illuminating documentary.

Although it exists primarily to send an audience into a bloodthirsty frenzy and has major credibility problems in the bargain, "Unlawful Entry" is still a very effective victimization thriller. Strongly following the "Fatal Attraction" pattern--to the point of having a very similar climax--well-crafted concoction trades in the sorts of elemental concerns and fears that get people mightily worked up. This, combined with controversy pic may engender based on its prominent plot element of excessive police violence, gives it the potential to become a summer sleeper hit.

It’s a commercial comedy that has a delirious good time poking fun at Nicolas Cage, celebrating everything that makes him Nicolas Cage — and, in the end, actually becoming a Nicolas Cage movie, which turns out to be both a cheesy thing and a special thing.

A feature documentary about a day in the life of the bug universe, Microcosmos is a surprisingly entertaining, visually stunning treat.

William Wyler has polished the legit hit by Pulitzer-prizewinner Sidney Kingsley into a cinematic gem. Scripters have stuck almost to the letter of the original play. Even the location seldom changes from Kingsley's single set, the realistic headquarters room of the detective squad.

An audacious but not always palatable mix of drama, tragedy, romance, satire and dark humor.

The tension that drives Here Before is our curiosity as to whether or not the film is taking place in the world of the uncanny. In a way we want it to be, because that would make it scary fun; in another way we don’t want it to be, because that would make it corny scary fun.

“I’m Fine” teases the structure of comedies in which something must be achieved in too short a span. Only, instead of ha-ha challenges, Danny encounters the poignant, the frustrating, even the perilous.

For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

Unpretentious, funny and touching, Edge of Seventeen rates as a quintessential Amerindie sleeper.

Along with his editor Kent Bassett, Bruckman weaves these events together rather conventionally yet thoughtfully, making plenty of room for Barkan’s home life and appealingly chipper character that he somehow manages to maintain through all his battles.

Australian director Fred Schepisi does a careful job of bringing the western legend to light with endearing performances from actors Willie Nelson and Gary Busey.

An enjoyable romp through the early days of television, My Favorite Year [from a story by Dennis Palumbo] provides a field day for a wonderful bunch of actors headed by Peter O'Toole in another rambunctious, stylish starring turn.

Clint Eastwood's film isn't an African adventure epic, as those unaware of Peter Viertel's 1953 book may surmise from the title. It's an intelligent, affectionate study of an obsessive American film director who, while working on a film in colonial Africa, becomes sidetracked by his compulsion to hunt elephants.

Chen’s delicate, nuanced portrait of the heartbreaks afflicting a dedicated schoolteacher and dutiful wife is suffused with love and humor, and directed with striking maturity and restraint.

The plot shifts as often as the desert in White Sands, an absorbing, tightly coiled thriller not always easy to follow, with a fine cast, no-fat direction by Roger Donaldson, and nasties belonging to the all-purpose CIA-FBI consortium of evil.

The script broadens the 1927 short story considerably without losing the Hemingway penchant for the mysticism behind his virile characters and lusty situations.

Aesthetically, too, Norbu’s film offers steady, muted levels of intoxication, giving constant pleasure while never quite tipping into flamboyance.

Jennifer Eight is an unusually intelligent and unexploitative late-season thriller, which probably won't help its chances at the box office. Involving without being exciting, pic is notable for avoiding most of the standard suspense film contrivances, as well as for Conrad Hall's utterly smashing cinematography. Interesting cast and sober approach will mean more to critics and sophisticated viewers than to general audiences, resulting in OK results during brief release window before Christmas heavy hitters put this out to video pasture, where it might fare better.

Setting a buoyant, anything-could-happen tone from the outset, Alda as director creates what he’s striving for: a feeling of being caught up in the warm craziness of this family, as all its vivid characters push and tug to impose their will on the proceedings. His punchy, inpertinent script is equally good.

Key to film’s success is how the case gradually uncovers new layers of corruption and insidious racism, with escalating awareness (and danger) for Hutton. Nolte is outstanding, bringing utter conviction to the stream of racist and sexist epithets that pour from his good ole boy lips.

Well-mounted and very traditional, Of Mice and Men honorably serves John Steinbeck’s classic story of two Depression-era drifters without bringing anything new to it. Fine performances down the line and sensitive handling justify this attempt to introduce a new generation to the small tragedy of George and Lennie, although lack of any edge or fresh motivation to tell the tale will keep enthusiasm, and B.O. results, at a moderate level.

Plan B is a girls-behaving-badly all-night-long road-trip comedy that’s built on a formula chassis, but it’s fast and funny, with a scandalous spirit, and it’s got a couple of lead performances that, if there’s any justice, should have the town talking.

A hard-hitting, well-organized documentary grounded in the stories of five Hungarian Jews who lived through the Holocaust.

Faya Dayi is predominantly a mood piece that seeks to evoke the leaf’s own perception-altering properties.

A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.

Much of the appeal of Terence Rattigan's play was due to the remarkable change in characterization they were able to make as they assumed different roles in each of the segents. Rattigan and John Gay have masterfully blended the two playlets into one literate and absorbing full-length film.

Coming away from “Just a Girl,” it’s impossible not to be convinced that Moreno is the rare screen legend who found a way to stick the Hollywood landing.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

An unusually fine dramatic story handled excellently from a production standpoint. Built along gangster lines, but from an international crook standpoint, with a lot of melodramatic suspense added.

Containing razor-sharp witticisms about feminine intuition, gendered sexual politics and relationships (both platonic and romantic), it excels beyond its self-deprecating title.

Night Warning is a fine psychological horror film. As the maniacally possessive aunt and guardian of a 17-year-old boy, Susan Tyrrell gives a tour-de-force performance.

All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.

Toplining British comedian/wit Stephen Fry in a once-in-a-lifetime role as the brilliant, acerbic playwright, and mounted with a care and affection in all departments that squeezes the most from its $10 million budget, movie is a tony biopic that manages to combine an upfront portrayal of the scribe's gayness with an often moving examination of his broader emotions and artistic ideals.

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 isn’t just the best of the Netflix horror trilogy; it also recasts the prior two entries, “1994” and “1978,” in a more favorable light by deepening the mythology and underscoring just how crucial it is to watch all three chapters consecutively.

There’s solemn respect here for the fragile interior peace of others: This restrained, humane film seems most interested in how that serenity is reflected back into the world.

Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will.

If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.