The energy in Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's — what a great title! — is genuine, infectious and superabundant.

Ms. Hurwitz’s film, which was written by Michael Levine, is modest in scale yet far-ranging.

Sandra Goldbacher's gorgeous debut feature (shot by Ashley Rowe) stars Minnie Driver in a lovely performance as Rosina da Silva. [31 Jul 1998]

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

[Ms. Huppert] is fascinating again, but in a wonderfully nimble way that could be considered campy if her style weren’t so assured and her performance weren’t so witty and precise.

Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.

It's the set pieces that mark the film as something special: swirling crowds at a casino in the opening sequence, Trudy's ordeal by trailer trash, a climactic firefight that puts lightning in the shade. Very impure, and very impressive.

If there’s any fault to be found with Ammonite, it’s in the film’s deliberateness.

What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Appeal lies on the bright, shiny surface of its ostensibly simple plot, and in its rat-a-tat-tat language, which often sounds like Mamet-visits-Spyne.

The heroes are two hit men, and the tone is often absurdist. But the film is also very funny and surprisingly affecting.

Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet

Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film.

Anyone who doesn’t have a grand time watching Shaun the Sheep Movie is suffering from a fractured funny bone that needs to be reset.

The film's power is undercut by its narrow geographic focus, which seems to associate bullying with conservative or working-class areas in red states. The filmmakers could easily have found similar cases involving the children of urban sophisticates.

Lost in Paris is nonsensical by design, a comedy of the absurd that’s always entertaining and occasionally pure.

Don’t Think Twice really shines as an improv procedural, a film that celebrates, in illuminating detail, the skills and anxieties of this showbiz subgenre.

The most daring part of this wonderful film, which was written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is its calmness. Momentous events move at a human pace while Richard and Mildred Loving — a matchless pair of performances by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga — try with varying success to comprehend what’s happening to them.

Mr. Haynes, a notable stylist whose work is sometimes tinged with surrealism, was an improbable choice to direct this material, though a fine one, as it turns out. Like Rob, the film isn’t flashy, but it is honorable, admirable and improbably stirring.

Still, one needn’t be British to feel the epic loss and grief of 1917, thanks to some very committed performances, the intimacy achieved by the movie’s style and camera — the cinematographer is the celebrated Roger Deakins — and Mr. Mendes’s obvious devotion to what he’s doing.

After countless films in which immigration plays a central role -- one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic "The Immigrant" while one of the best, Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," has never migrated to DVD -- you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies.

Breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school.

This is more than a respectful remake; Let Me In is quietly stylish and thoroughly chilling in its own right.

What We Do in the Shadows has nonmedicinal virtues that many large-scale movies lack: unflagging energy, entertaining inventiveness, sustained ridiculousness and even, dare I say it, a spasm of eloquence in Deacon’s twisted tribute to the frailties of the human race.

His story is instructive, as well as chilling and occasionally hilarious -- a brief, probably foredoomed career during which a would-be Orson Welles, playing shamelessly to the camera, draws from a bottomless cesspool of hubris, bile and rage.

Apollo 11's mission was a singular chapter in the story of mankind; The Dish finds a whimsical, winning way of telling it anew.

In the title role, Sydney Sweeney must be relieved to be giving people a reason to discuss her acting. She’s excellent in the role, small and vulnerable yet tough and fierce, a pink-clad dynamo who is nevertheless beholden to others.

Herb and Dorothy, a documentary by Megumi Sasaki, grows on you just as its subjects do.

Mr. Wiseman’s film shows us, without telling us, that American cities continue to be laboratories for rebirth and innovation. The spirit of this one is embodied in its mayor, Marty Walsh.

Has its flaws, but it's better, as well as darker, than the first. It's also longer, by nine minutes, but hold that protest to the Kidney Foundation; the time flies, albeit in fits and starts, like players on a Quidditch field.

This lively little film, a comic take on Shakespeare's tragedy, is really entertaining.

All the more remarkably, then, this flawed but startling biopic stars another performer, Chadwick Boseman, who fills Brown's shoes with a dynamism that transcends imitation.

The main thing about Cedar Rapids is that it makes you laugh-often and out loud.

It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.

In the end, though, the success of American Gangster doesn't flow from the originality of its ideas, or its bid for epic status, as much as from its craftsmanship and confident professionalism. It's a great big gangster film, and a good one.

Calls to mind Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" and beguiles all the way from the parade of umbrellas decorating the opening titles to the closing credits.

It's spectacular, to be sure, but also remarkable for its all-encompassing gloom. No movie has ever administered more punishment, to its hero or its audience, in the name of mainstream entertainment.

It's a film of modest means and great ambition, a darkly comic drama concerned with nothing less than the place of faith, and an embattled Church, in modern life.

This vibrant, buoyant drama, intimate in scope instead of vast, takes us to Oslo—not exactly another planet, but an adventure all the same—where it builds a world of mercurial passions while its enchanting heroine, Julie ( Renate Reinsve ), belatedly and erratically comes of age over the course of several years.

In the realm of documentary films, as in the news media, polemicists are ascendant, but Frederick Wiseman isn’t one of them. For the past half-century, since his first film, “Titicut Follies,” he’s been an observationist. Not an observer, which carries a passive connotation, but a filmmaker who’s made a distinguished career of observing in a particular way — closely, calmly, shrewdly and systematically, with an eye to the institutions and social structures that shape and reveal people’s lives.

So much movie can be made with so little plot, given sufficient humanity and dramatic tension. That's the case with Andrew Haigh's eloquent chamber piece.

In many ways the film reflects its hero’s brilliance. It’s a scintillating construction, though one that sometimes feels like a product launch in its own right.

Terry Gilliam's darkly funny and truly visionary retro-futurist fantasy is a mess dramatically, and its turbulent history echoes the battles fought by Orson Welles against studio executives bent on recutting or scuttling his films.

Like earlier Dardenne films, Lorna’s Silence is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness.

Even when it falters The Forty-Year-Old Version exudes confidence—the director has confidence in her lead actress, and vice versa; both trust the writer, whose more amusing lines are often contained in asides between characters discussing.

Though the affair dragged on so long before Dreyfus was finally cleared that Mr. Polanski confines the resolution to an epilogue, he has nevertheless made an oft-told tale lively and urgent. “An Officer and a Spy” is Mr. Polanski’s finest work in many years.

The thriller aspect of this work, happily, doesn't overshadow its real beauty -- its stark portrayal of the nightmare despair of aliens, hunted, on edge, prepared to risk all for a new start.

If you happen to need a good cry, you can’t go wrong with Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, a documentary about decent people, bewildering misfortune and how bad luck can have a ripple effect—especially if you are lucky enough to have people who love you. If you don’t want to cry, you probably will.

This immensely pleasurable film is anything but dry. It's a saga of the immigrant experience that captures the snap, crackle and pop of American life, along with the pounding pulse, emotional reticence, volcanic colors and cherished rituals of Indian culture.

The film is a sort of jigsaw puzzle that demands either paying minute attention or viewing it twice. Seemingly unimportant and easily forgotten details from the opening minutes turn out to cohere and create a conclusive emotional impact of the kind that everyone in the movie is missing.

It’s a delicate and memorable performance by Mr. Jackman. Ms. Janney does the whole Long Island thing as well as anyone ever has. The most resonant character, though, might be Rachel, whom Ms. Viswanathan imbues with the indignation of youth—something the rest of the characters have long outgrown, but which the story was always going to need.

There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.

Genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age.

Overlord feels like a small but vivid tragedy inside an epic container.

The scope of the subject is such that when Mr. Jarecki's voiceover cuts into the narrative, imposing a personal angle on the national story, it reduces the sense of significance its creator aimed for. But that's a fairly backhanded endorsement of a very potent movie.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

A pitch-black, blood-soaked comedy and phenomenal first feature by Alice Lowe, who also stars as Ruth, the pregnant heroine.

Mr. Shyamalan is a new national treasure, as attuned to our sensibilities and everyday life as Steven Spielberg.

For the most part, though, Ms. Moncrieff has given us a portrait of a young woman with a luminous soul.

Watching the film is such an intense experience that most of its flaws fall away and its red herrings serve only to enhance the local color.

The common problem of Solondz's characters is an inability to see the world in shades of grey, which is fitting in a film where color-garish, boring or just plain ugly-is so important, and the actors are working off palettes of such extreme emotions. A few of them-notably Ms. Rampling, Mr. Hinds and Ms. Sheedy-are as good here as they've ever been.

Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.

More to the point of this marvelous film, who knew there were kids as heroic, in their various ways, as these valiant super-spellers?

The star of Susanna Nicchiarelli’s freely fictionalized biopic, Trine Dyrholm, finds fierce beauty in the woman Nico has become. I’ve never seen a performance quite like it — unsparingly harsh, but also graceful, droll and tender, a portrait of soul-weariness laced with a yearning for salvation.

For the director, Mr. Leconte, and for the usually volcanic Mr. Auteuil, the quiet, cumulative power of this film is a striking departure from the dazzling energy of their previous collaboration in "Girl on the Bridge."

It’s the work of a contemporary master who arrives at the philosophical by way of the playful, ironic and lyrical.

Still, the cynosure of all eyes is honest, articulate Elizabeth, her own woman in an era when women belonged to men, and at the same time full of love. Lizzie is the best, and Keira Knightley does right by her.

Part 2 of The Deathly Hallows, is the best possible end for the series that began a decade ago.

Either way, though, Mr. Assayas, whose previous work has ranged from the tossed-off beguilements of “Irma Vep” to the docudramatic brilliance of “Carlos,” has created a small but special diversion that fairly vibrates with stylish performances and flies in the face of marketing fashion — a talkie with an abundance of good talk.

What’s remarkable about Arrival is its contemplative core—and, of course, Ms. Adams’s star performance, which is no less impassioned for being self-effacing.

While it contains little for the devoted in the way of outright revelations, it’s an affecting film around which admirers and newcomers alike can gather to bask in the unique beauty of her work, and to follow the similarly distinctive trajectory of her painful and abbreviated life.

Mr. Ostlund positions his troubled characters in an environment of polished ash and Scandinavian spotlessness, under which there are dark mutterings — the constant creak of tow cables and un-oiled metal.

The film is a fable, to be sure, and one that unfolds at a leisurely pace, not a tough-minded psychological drama. But it’s sharp-witted as well as soulful, reasonably suspenseful.

A very entertaining black comedy for very mysterious reasons.

His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same.

Alternately inspiring and dismaying—why is the large, affable Mr. Andrés filling this global vacuum of governmental response?—the movie is also informative, engaging and reads like an application for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Armando Iannucci’s absurdist comedy reveals this in an extremely loose manner of speaking, with malice aforethought, straight-faced glee and formidable sharpshooting that occasionally misfires. It isn’t history but free-range fiction, a venomous farce containing nuggets of fact, and if its subjects bear any resemblance to present-day dictators and authoritarian mugs or thugs around the world, then the movie has hit its archetypal target.

“Montage” is about expression. As such, it’s a more honest tribute to Mr. Cobain than any conventional documentary could pretend to be.

The distinction of this lovely, if slightly tentative, debut feature is its willingness to set forth mysteries of the human heart without solving them; everyone's fate stays unsealed.

Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.

A beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure.

The deliriously talented Lake Bell wrote, produced, directed and stars in this peculiar bit of comedy magic, set amid the cutthroat world of Hollywood voiceover artists.

An unusually engaging portrait of a legendary chef who can be insufferable, as his most ardent admirers acknowledge, but who is also a brighter-than-life charmer, raging perfectionist, world-class hedonist, self-styled dandy and all-too-human survivor of the highest-end restaurant wars.

Laurent Cantet's fascinating, troubling drama has many meanings.

A smart, suspenseful drama, starring Hayden Christensen, that honors its own factual roots as no movie about journalists has done since "All the President's Men."

Knowing the score in advance is no obstacle to reveling in The Redeem Team, a documentary about motion, emotion, motives and a mission.

A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine--the news about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but good.

Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether.

The Vietnam echoes are everywhere. The vocabulary is mere embellishment

Marvel’s new “Captain America” is anything but bleak — what’s so audacious about the film, and so pleasing, is its quicksilver mix of hardcore action and bright comedy.

Lee's journey of the body and soul is something else. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes it strangely touching, a revelation.

Strong stuff, and all the stronger for having taken itself so comically.

Satoshi Kon, whose previous film was the remarkable "Tokyo Godfathers," uses the complex plot as a pretext for joyous psychedelia.

A bright little screwball comedy that speaks for the vitality of new movies.

Has its share of contrivances, some more successful than others, but center stage is occupied by truth, and austere beauty.

Mr. Miller tells several interlocking stories with such daring and intensity that you sense he could go on indefinitely, spinning one terrific yarn off another.

Surprise, surprise. X-Men: The Last Stand, the third big-screen convocation of mutant shape shifters, weather changers, ice makers, energy suckers, healers and telepaths from Marvel Comics, has shifted the shape of the franchise from pretty good, if uninspired, to terrifically entertaining.