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.

What we have from director Alex Holmes — a guy who knows a great cinematic story when he hears one — is a documentary with all the nervous-making energy of a first-rate drama; a cast of sailors who are both endearing and intelligent; and a delicately wrought suspense story.

This improbably magnificent film and Michael Giacchino’s majestic score are a perfect match.

Duma is not a masterpiece, but its deficits recede into insignificance once you open yourself to the movie's mystery and visual splendor.

In the end, The Constant Gardener is hardly more than yet another study of white, upper-middle-class martyrdom rather than the hard look at third-world suffering it might've been.

Short Term 12, a low-budget feature only 96 minutes long, is a big deal on a small scale: for what it reveals of Mr. Cretton as a filmmaker — especially as a storyteller, and a director of actors within tautly constructed scenes — and of Ms. Larson's abundant talent.

The picture sets up high expectations for itself with its wonderful casting, and the actors don't disappoint. [1 Aug 1989, p.1]

This debut film by Filippo Meneghetti, streaming on major digital platforms, is elevated by the beauty of its performances, and by its masterly technique, which would suggest a filmmaker at the height of his career, not someone directing his first feature.

This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked when it actually comes.

No, this time out, the "Star Wars" enterprise isn't anywhere as enjoyable as the original...One might argue that all this represents a gain, adding to the original, sophistication, richness, depth. But truth to tell, these developments seem little more than inappropriate. To place internal struggles within one-dimensional characters who by definition have no interior is absurd; just as it also seems misguided to take such frothy stuff as the "Star Wars" saga and attempt to give it substance and weight.

The price of the production's integrity is a leisurely pace -- but it's a worthwhile one. Though Sugar demands patience, it deserves attention.

Some of Mr. Loach's earlier feature films have been easier to admire than to enjoy. This one, which won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival, fairly vibrates with dramatic energy.

The audio recordings left by the first lady were clearly intended for posterity, and as such are discreet and politic but always revelatory, even by omission: LBJ’s legendary philandering, for instance, is never mentioned.

A magnificent documentary that flies us along with migratory birds on their intercontinental travels, it's the polar opposite -- North Pole, South Pole and all latitudes in between -- of modern feature films that rely on special effects.

The absence of any nuance in the father's character bespeaks the filmmaker's unwillingness to trust his audience. Making the movie may have been therapeutic for him, but I can't say the same about watching it.

This joyous farce is a big, big deal, and Jack Black is nothing less than majestic as a scruffy, irreverent rocker passing himself off as a pedagogue in a private school.

Star Trek goes back to the legend's roots with a boldness that brings a fatigued franchise back to life.

It may not make the masterpiece cut, but this taut horror thriller is enormously entertaining, because it’s organized around a terrific idea — the necessity of absolute silence.

The portrait that emerges is that of a fanatical protector of her public image, a movie star turned director for whom the camera was a miraculous and endlessly manipulable tool, no matter which side of it she was on.

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.

Frances Ha also marks the rare instance in which an actress has the perfect role at the perfect time. Ms. Gerwig's work here is fragile, delicate, subject to bruising; something that could wither under too much attention. Perhaps Ms. Gerwig is the greatest actress alive. And maybe Frances Ha is just the ghost orchid of independent cinema.

If you’re up for going with the fascinating flow of a mercurial tale, this distinctive feature by Mike Mills may be just the ticket.

A moveable feast of delights.

Here's an iffy proposition. If A Hijacking was in English, or if U.S. audiences weren't finicky about reading subtitles, or if life was fair, this brilliant thriller, by the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, would be playing on multiplex screens throughout the country.

A loopy, endearing documentary.

The Trip is probably too long, but I have to say "probably" because I would have been happy with an additional half-hour of Steve and Rob doing more impressions.

The right word for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is wondersful -- as in full of wonders, great and small.

George Clooney's film noir sensibility in the title role feels authentic, and admirably solid.

As a piece of filmmaking, it's stunningly effective.

An entertainment that’s as smart, witty, stylish and exhilarating as any movie lover could wish for. It’s tempting to call it the sort of movie they don’t make any more, but they didn’t make all that many way back when, because it’s really hard to pull off a production of such startling quality. If there’s a false note from start to finish I must have been laughing or gasping when it sounded.

A movie of uns — unforced, unhurried, unpretentious. Though it's sometimes underdramatized, this story of adolescents on the brink of adulthood is refreshingly, and endearingly, unlike the overheated features that have come to define the genre.

A remarkably fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage vampire.

Few viewers anywhere will be immune to the movie’s charms, or the performances, notably that of Mr. Sigurjonsson, who makes Gummi a slightly mournful, enormously lovable and quixotically heroic figure.

Taxi to the Dark Side adds something new to our awareness -- interviews with soldiers who served as interrogators in Afghanistan, and in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and who, in some cases that ended in courts martial, served prison terms themselves.

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

Much of the fun of Marjorie Prime is in figuring out where it’s going, and why. It would be shameful to reveal much more of the journey save to say that the people who make it do a splendid job.

That the film is online because of the Covid-19 pandemic might be considered a silver lining: Not only will more people be able to see it, but they can, and should, experience it through headphones. A big screen would be nice, too, given Ms. Rovner’s hallucinogenic way with pictures. But the sound, as she would probably agree, is paramount.

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.

The director, Kevin Macdonald, searches for clarity amid the contradictions of Marley's life and reaches no conclusions, but that's a tribute to his subject's complexity in a film of fascinating too-muchness.

An absolutely thrilling recreation, in documentary style, of a now-legendary story.

Le Havre stands on its own fragile but considerable merits.

There might be a sweet 90-minute movie in here somewhere. But as it stands, it’s impossible not to notice how many scenes limp along, how many have nothing to do with the previous one, and how many fizzle out.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time frames, rather than telling Karamakate’s story in linear fashion, and these juxtapositions deepen the film’s resonance.

It simply never comes together with the sort of gathering force that we witness in its own scenes of artistic creation. Mr. Kaphar might yet make a movie that vibrates with the power of a great painting. Exhibiting Forgiveness, though, still feels like a jumbled sketch.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

The situation is fascinating, and given an illuminating investigation here.

Mostly, though, The Last Black Man in San Francisco — which is what Jimmie sometimes feels like in the gentrifying city of his birth — glides from moment to meaningful moment with cumulative power and singular grace.

A splendid war movie. The combat sequences are harrowing -- all the more so for the director's spare, sharp-eyed style -- and the performances are phenomenally fine.

This one follows its own goofy rules, fills the screen with astonishing images, tells a touching tale of outcast dogs and a faithful boy, and does so with ultralively deadpan wit. My only regret after seeing it at a screening was that I couldn’t stay and see it again.

Since you can't read my lips, read my words: See this movie.

A film that asks its audience to invest serious thought, and in return, bestows serious pleasure.

The characters are really minimalist masterpieces, sculpted, polished and uncompromisingly female.

An impressive and self-impressed documentary by Jennifer Peedom, has some of the best speck shots you could imagine—not spec as in speculation, though the film offers plenty of that on the subject of why human beings choose to climb tall peaks, but speck as in the size of a human seen against a stupendous alpine landscape.

The acting is first-rate, a disquieting pas de deux written by Indianna Bell and directed by her and Josiah Allen, who edited the piece.

This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty -- heartbreaking, then heartmending -- of Melissa Leo's performance as a poor single mother who's living her whole life on thin ice.

Though the picture by no means endorses drugs, and paints the junkie life as almost intolerably dull as well as destructive, it is a welcome relief from the mostly heavy-handed Hollywood pictures that tackle the subject. [05 Oct 1989]

Just as early youth means the endless fascination of new encounters, it also brings sudden, bewildering losses. “Little Amélie” brims with feeling for every precious moment of it.

What's on screen, though, is a peculiar clutter of gentle sentiment, awkward dialogue, shaky contrivance — especially the resolution of Joey's feelings — and monotonous performances from a supporting cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Darren Burrows.

The attitude of Mr. Navalny and his colleagues is fearless, in a country governed by fear. Thrillers are rarely so inspiring.

I also know The Assassin to be so ravishingly lovely that tracking the plot is far less important than luxuriating in the images.

Deeply affecting.

Ms. Howard is nothing less than mesmerizing. She seems to be giving a master class in unswerving focus and absolute simplicity. It’s a superb piece of acting about acting, and a harbinger of great things to come in this young actor’s future.

The film succeeds on its own terms — an exciting entertainment that makes us feel good about the outcome, and about the reach of American power, rather than its limits. Yet the narrative container is far from full. There isn't enough incident or complexity to sustain the entire length of this elaborately produced star vehicle.

It’s a beautiful film, a piece of absurdism that goes straight to the heart.

This astute, subversively funny film fills a broad canvas. Mainly, though, it’s about long division, the all-too-human state of being permanently and unwittingly split down the middle.

Loving it is not the issue, of course—the level of amputating, eviscerating, decapitating violence transcends good nasty fun. The challenge is taking it in, watching it without averting your eyes—I can’t say mine stayed fixed on the screen—and seeing it for what it is, a tumultuous, graphically gorgeous entertainment for our time as well as an ineffably somber meditation on our species’ seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of savagery.

Fascinating — though overlong and sometimes slow.

The silents, as this film suggests, achieved aesthetic marvels before sound came along to set things back for a while.

For those who half-remember the novella from school (as I did) and didn’t especially enjoy it (as I didn’t), Mr. Ozon both honors his material and reinvigorates it.

Hold Your Fire is a bona-fide thriller, its elements in delicate balance.

Mike Leigh's latest film preserves the mystery of why another marriage has flourished over decades. That's not the stated subject of Another Year, but it's at the center of this enjoyable though insistently schematic comedy.

At Berkeley is more than the sum of its minutes. Narration-free and artfully discursive, it's a one-of-a-kind mosaic portrait of a great institution struggling, under dire stress, to retain its essential character at a time of declining support for public education.

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.

What’s so memorable about Ms. Lipitz’s documentary, though, is its privileged view of not-privileged students trying to dance well, learn well and think well on the way to living well in the world beyond their nurturing school.

Extraordinary...The movie has the intensity of an epic, only its subject matter is everyday life. [19 Oct 1993, p.A18(E)]

I laughed myself silly through most of A Mighty Wind, and was pleasantly surprised when it took a turn toward genuine feeling near the end.

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.

It's a comedy of crisp, mordant wit and quietly radiating warmth, as well as a coming-of-age story with a lovely twist -- you can't always spot the best candidates for maturity.

Once Mr. Cregger starts to let loose his revelations, though, disappointment creeps in, and the scale and soul of the film shrink before our eyes. It’s impossible to say how without getting into spoilers. But the movie’s potential richness, kept in play by its ever-circling narrative style, is finally brought crashing to the ground by its denouement.

This is a first-rate squealer. [07 Aug 1986]

Despite their wundercabinet of delights, the filmmakers most want to celebrate human beings in all their contradictions. Each of us, the movie says, is capable of everything.

Here's one vote for the most affecting, anguishing, revealing and prophetic scene of the movie year-and yes, it's all of those things at once in a powerful film that alternates between moments of earlier happiness and later pain.

After Love may be a bit thin on story, but it nevertheless shines with feeling.

The payoff is sneakily profound — sneakily because this small-scale drama grabs you when you least expect it, often with the help of the dog.

Just as Aubrey's authority springs from skill and knowledge, so does the film's power. They don't make movies like this any more because few people know how to make them.

This wonderfully strange and exquisite little feature was created, especially for young children, to celebrate the book through another kind of illumination that's been falling into disuse--hand-drawn animation.

The film feels freshly minted because the man who made it has such a lively mind and fearless style. At a time when all too many movies are selling bleakness and dysfunction, it also feels like a revenant from Hollywood’s golden age, when an entertainment’s highest function was to entertain.

The film is exuberant and heartfelt, and the hero’s journey takes him through spectacular territory; the picturesque land of the living pales by comparison to what Miguel discovers in the Land of the Dead.

Bridge of Spies isn’t conventionally exciting, and isn’t intended to be. Instead, it’s satisfying — thoroughly and pleasurably so.

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.

It's a portrait, by turns chilling, thrilling, mysterious and terrifying, of a woman who refuses to be terrorized.

Master of Light is a film not just about art and redemption but a character sorting out his life, and what he truly believes about art.

A droll and affecting debut feature by Tom McCarthy.

Foxcatcher is a radical departure from Mr. Miller’s previous feature, the smart and entertaining “Moneyball.” It isn’t meant as conventional entertainment, but it’s fascinating to watch from start to finish.

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

Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination.

At the center of this swirl of events, poignant recollections and utter pandemonium, Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence.

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.