Ms. Buckley brings her own truth to this mostly synthetic confection, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

This award-winning picture from Belgium is the kind Hollywood seems no longer interested in making: a sophisticated drama that presumes a level of insight and maturity in an audience that doesn't need winks and arrows to understand what's going on.

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women stands head, shoulders, boots, tiara and lasso above many independent films of the moment. See it and you’ll come away with a new appreciation for the polywonder of creativity.

Hell of a Summer, as written and directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, manages to mine some fresh mirth out of the mayhem while lampooning a format’s classic conceits.

A minor comedy, though a major delight.

This freewheeling account of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s is problematic as narrative drama, but stunning as provocation.

It’s a piece of urban history seen through the lens of magic realism, a fragile but beguiling fantasy, tethered now and then to gritty reality, about a do-gooder doing the best he can against daunting odds.

A wonderfully generous spirit. It's a film about cultural yearning and fearless love.

Awash in terrific performances.

Winningly human, and wonderfully funny.

Mr. Birney’s exotically low-fi imagination makes for a freaky and feverish trip.

This startlingly accomplished debut feature by Nia DaCosta has the eyes and ears of a documentary — the opioid crisis is everywhere, the nearest hospital is far away — but the heart of a drama, and a stirring one.

Filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, a native of the state, has done a breathtakingly expressive job of capturing the strangeness, the beauty and the devastation of her homeland in the poetic, entrancing documentary King Coal.

The outcome is distinctive and entertaining. There's no way you'd mistake this for James Bond, and no reason you would want to.

Mr. Wright and his colleagues have made a movie with a spaciousness of its own, a brave willingness to explore such mysteries of the mind and heart as the torture that madness can inflict, and the rapture that music can confer. Bravo to all concerned.

Manipulative, but confidently so, and improbably but consistently affecting.

By the end there isn't anyone to cheer for, except the makers of this thoughtful and absorbing piece of work. [02 Aug 1984]

It's very funny, terrifically lively and, considering how awful it might have been, surprisingly tender in its portrait of a young guy who learns sensitivity the hard way.

5 Broken Cameras is short on facts and, like the demonstrations themselves, provocative by nature. Still, it casts a baleful light on anguishing, seemingly incessant scenes of tear gas hurled, bullets fired, villagers fleeing for their lives and, on one shocking occasion, a life lost as the camera rolls. This is how the conflict looks from the other side of the barrier.

Creed III brings up unusually troubling questions for a formula picture, and the care the script takes to add depth to Donnie strengthens the final third of the film, which in accordance with the sports-drama rulebook leads us through a rousing training montage and a climactic competition, this time in Dodger Stadium.

Borrowing the look of The Lego Movie, Piece by Piece is as bouncy and playful as a room full of rambunctious toddlers.

This prequel draws new energy from supersmart casting, plus the shrewd notion of setting the beginnings of the X-Men saga in the early 1960s.

We tend to think of gangland tales as exhibiting clear demarcations between those who are and are not “in the game.” La Civil catapults us into a considerably more disturbing environment, a sort of toxic sinkhole that pulls everyone into its horrors.

Taken at face value, these two women are simply despicable. But the screenplay has a bracing tincture of Grand Guignol, and nothing is simple when the two women are played by a couple of superlative actresses who clearly delight in one another.

What works best is what's readily accessible, the startling power of performers who understand the drama all too well.

All the backing-and-forthing between olden and modern days intensifies the emotional impact of a compelling story, and underlines the enduring power of narrative itself.

Haunting, troubling documentary.

Watch them march to the very extremes of extremis, though, and it's easy to feel awe.

Director David Gordon Green, working with screenwriter John Pollono’s adaptation of the book by Mr. Bauman and Bret Witter, maintains a brisk pace. There’s barely a maudlin moment, which is remarkable given the subject matter.

It's as good as anything that Hurt has ever done -- a study in explosive understatement.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

Richard Jewell has much to recommend it. The story is compelling — from hero to reviled heel in no time flat. In a jauntier time it might have been raw material for social satire; in our day it’s a cautionary tale about abuse of power by the press and government alike.

The Last of the Sea Women is, like its subjects, beautiful and charming.

It’s a pleasure to report that the 100-minute conversation is as wonderful as the actors who deliver it—by turns witty, wistful and revealing, steeped in an appreciation for the hard learning that comes with age.

Before and after plot mechanics, a drama of family tension and warmth.

Intriguing and affecting documentary.

Gives us the same sort of perverse pleasure that's been a staple of "60 Minutes" over the years -- watching world-class crooks tell world-class lies.

Ms. Kim strives to remain true to her subject’s sensibilities—her imagistic narrative amounts to energetic homage—and this includes not romanticizing his life.

“All Dirt Roads” is difficult to firmly grasp, sometimes frustratingly so, but its textures linger.

The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.

The two lead actors, both superb, strike a delicate imbalance.

With his co-writer, Randy Sue Coburn, and composer Mark Isham, director Alan Rudolph has created a sense of time and place that authentically conveys what it might have been like when writers were celebrities and special effects came from words. [10 Jan 1995, p.A18]

There are many more questions in “CHAOS” than hard answers, but one thing is clear, namely the hypnotic quality of Mr. Morris’s filmmaking, enhanced to no small end by the dread in Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score and even in the demo recordings by Manson of his songs (which might have been sung by someone like Johnny Mathis, weirdly enough).

The flashbacking narrative addresses, with surprising subtlety, buoyant wit and fearless theatricality, several matters that superhero sagas aren’t supposed to trouble themselves about.

Who doesn’t love Bill Shatner? The theatrical documentary “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill” reminds us why, stylistically channeling what became the actor’s signature: a dedication to sustained gravitas so portentous that it becomes absurd, then keeps going until it emerges, triumphantly, into the realm of the genuinely spellbinding.

Movies about the mini-problems of normal people are vanishingly rare these days, mainly because it’s hard to make normal people seem interesting enough to be worth the price of a ticket. Ms. Holofcener has more than managed that, in a thoroughly engaging conversation-starter of a film.

It declines to take itself seriously, yet manages, sometimes simultaneously, to be exciting, instructive, cheerfully absurd and genuinely affecting.

It tests your tolerance for ambiguity as well as your visual acuity. Yet the spell it casts justifies the intense anxiety it creates by depicting a black-and-white society in which men have worth and women don’t.

Daring in its own right, this broodingly sumptuous saga explores the primacy of feelings, the nature of memories and the essence of being human, framed as the difference between being manufactured or born.

The filmmaker has put two familiar pieces of music to such glorious, full-throated use toward the end that I can’t resist mentioning them: Donovan’s “Deep Peace,” and “Unchained Melody” done in close harmony by the Fleetwoods. For Nathalie in the uncertainty of the here and now, peace and harmony are great ideas too.

Most powerfully about what violence does to the soul: Joe is almost dead to the world, and to himself. Not quite, though. This harshly beautiful film is equally about his regeneration during the course of a journey that amounts to a parable of humanity trying to climb out of the pit of endless slaughter and retribution.

This autobiographical meditation is seductively funny, as well as deliciously strange, and hauntingly beautiful, as well as stream-of-consciousness cockeyed.

This wise and funny film, in Japanese with English subtitles, works small miracles in depicting the pivotal moment when kids turn from the wishfulness of childhood into shaping the world for themselves.

As a piece of entertainment, Ms. Johnson’s documentary is exuberant, to say the least, and instructive in the bargain.

What's fun about this movie is the sight of Mr. Irons's Claus stalking the mansion like a tall, skinny ghost smiling at the perverseness of it all. [18 Oct 1990, p.A14(E)]

Like no one before or since, she had what she valued most in others - good, old-fashioned pizazz.

Immensely likable, and allows Mr. Smith to fulfill his manifest destiny -- as an urbane comedian who is also, shades of Cary Grant, a romantic hero.

By the end I felt sure it was the most obsessively, graphically violent film I'd ever seen, but equally sure that Apocalypto is a visionary work with its own wild integrity. And absolutely, positively convinced that seeing it once is enough for one lifetime.

The result is a raw look at not just celebrity, but also what it is to parent and grow up in the 21st century.

One of the great strengths of Farewell Amor is its intimacy, the sense it conveys of three people close together yet emotionally distant in Walter’s small, narrow Brooklyn apartment.

I never saw the original, but the sprightly remake couldn't be more delightful. As the ultra-suave Lawrence Jamison, Mr. Caine wears his hair and mustache Niven-like -- slicked down but never greasy. He manages to draw more laughs by merely reacting than most comics can pull out of a punchline. With his calculated coarseness, Mr. Martin is a perfect foil. Behind the scenes is former Muppet Man Frank Oz. He pulls the strings so deftly he never disturbs the froth. [15 Dec 1988, p.1]

It’s hard to make a compelling movie about a character defined by indecision, Hamlet notwithstanding. Ms. Hittman, however, has done it.

Playing With Sharks has its visual thrills but also tells one good story after another, not only about making movies and flirting with death but about the nature of the fish and the steely character of the movie’s human subject.

The result is a movie more concerned with movie-making than with the stuff of Sterne's great book, but a movie that's good for lots of laughs if you share its fondness for actors and for fatuous actors' banter, which I do.

Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it’s compulsively, preposterously and steadfastly funny.

An off-kilter romantic comedy in which everything turns out the way you might have hoped it would if you hadn’t been kept in a state of happy suspense along the way.

Mr. Timberlake has displayed his many gifts in multiple formats, but nothing quite like “Palmer,” not in his character’s complexities or in the way he navigates Palmer through the social circumstances explored by Ms. Guerriero’s canny script. Young Ryder Allen is also something to see: He makes Sam’s matter-of-fact self-acceptance funny, yes, but inspiring as well.

The carnival is loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining.

What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.

A work of fiction, Mr. Féret's film is ardent in its inventions, modest in scale, playful in its speculations about Nannerl's influence on her brother's music, and graced by the filmmaker's daughter, Marie Féret, in the title role.

The film, playing in theaters, is very long, relentlessly intense, murmured more often than spoken, and photographed, by Greig Fraser, with a glowering gorgeousness that must be seen to be felt. It’s also enthralling and tailored to our time, an extended rumination on finding one’s moral compass in a world of all-encompassing evil.

I’m glad it got made—not a sure thing at all in a relentlessly commercial market—and made with such intelligence and respect for the factual details of the discovery by people who obviously loved what they were doing; glad it’s available to a wide audience on Netflix; and glad to have gained from it a heightened, and lengthened, sense of human history that the filmmakers convey in a style that’s the antithesis of grandiose.

Why, then, should we be eager to see a story of such incomplete inspiration? Because it's thrilling, and stirring. And because it is truth.

The film's special mixture of sadness, comedy and hope sneaks up on you and stays in your memory.

Straightforward in form but surprisingly intricate.

Clemency is a meditation on capital punishment from a singular perspective. Call it Dead Warden Walking.

Ms. Jean-Baptiste portrays a character on an extreme end of human temperament, and she brings to it an intensity of focus and feeling that abolishes the easy contours of caricature.

The malignity can be oppressive -- this is a far cry from Fellini finding poignant uplift in the slums -- but the dramatic structure is complex, the details are instructive, and the sense of tragedy is momentous.

This delightful and useful documentary by Mariem Pérez Riera catches its subject at a piquant point in her career

Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves.

This faux-documentary is droll, aerosol-thin and ultrameta.

The final act of the film turns into an extended shootout, made gripping through Mr. Kurosawa’s expert construction of the scene, which is methodically paced and adept at keeping us oriented within the labyrinthine warehouse in which it unfolds. But beneath the action-movie surface lies a more despairing subject.

The truth is, Mr. Farina would be considered Oscar material if "Joe May" were a bigger film. As it is, he'll have to settle for being great.

More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.

Isolated brilliance is precisely what helps The Good Nurse shine, and it could hardly be otherwise given the story.

I have minor misgivings about the use of a few Disney-esque sound effects, as well as some conventionally garish voicings in the score by Danny Elfman, Hollywood's current master of the macabre. But none of that diminishes the educational value of Deep Sea 3-D, which was directed by Howard Hall, or the sometimes ethereal, sometimes fearsome beauty of its cast of trillions.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. (What a terrific title!) This precocious, faux-primitive first feature, in Persian with English subtitles, and a sensationally eclectic score, was shot in wide-screen black-and-white, and frequently mimics the dreamlike rhythms of silent films.

The otherworldliness of “Tina,” which exists for many minutes in a kind of vacuum created between the various silent images and the distanced voiceover, is transporting; the ambient score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans helps transform what might have been a series of mere tawdry recollections into a kind of prison memoir.

The result feels perfectly American — I wonder if Conrad was named in honor of the troubled brother in “Ordinary People” — yet the film lives and breathes with a lovely intimacy and density of detail that we associate with fine independent features from Europe.

Stirring, profound, poignantly funny and almost literally transporting.

I am glad to be able to say that all these clever and talented people have actually come up with the goods. The biggest goodie is Tom Hanks as the little boy after his wish has been granted. Much of the comedy in this movie is physical. Without forcing the matter Mr. Hanks has a startling ability to take on the mannerisms and facial expressions of an adolescent. [2 Jun 1988, p.1]

With his co-writer, Randy Sue Coburn, and composer Mark Isham, director Alan Rudolph has created a sense of time and place that authentically conveys what it might have been like when writers were celebrities and special effects came from words. [10 Jan 1995, p.A18]

Red Army is about many things — politics and sport, service and servitude, integrity trumped by money. Most memorably, though, it celebrates a good man living a great life by his own lights.

If you’re looking for something to lift you up and take you away from the tumult and anguish of the moment, seek out Our Little Sister, a lovely new film, in Japanese with English subtitles, that’s going into national distribution this week.

It’s family entertainment in the freshest sense of the term, a biographical drama, based on a true story, that vibrates with more colors — emotional as well as visual — than I can name.

Beautiful images can be a distraction in a serious documentary, but that's hardly the case here. They draw us in so we can better understand the hurtling changes that endanger the future of Cambodia and, by extension, much of the developing world.

While inseparable from Ukraine and its echoes, the film argues quietly but convincingly that its story is not specific to its time and place, necessarily, but is rather about how traumatized children everywhere might respond, react and/or rebel.

Nicole Kidman places the bereaved heroine of Rabbit Hole in a nether land between life and not-quite-life. Her beautiful performance transcends the specifics of the script, which David Lindsay-Abaire adapted from his play of the same name.