This is a movie about the joys of friendship, among many other things, and the possibility of change—for the better, not only for the worse, and not only through blood-alcohol adjustment.

The whole film is unlikely, a joyous story of youth, innocence, sweet earnestness, charming ineptitude and a shaky but productive belief on the hero’s part that he can do anything he pleases.

This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same.

Readily accessible, slyly subversive and perfectly delightful film.

All three of these attractively awful figures are to egotism approximately what the sun is to light, which makes for a delightful triangular battle for supremacy not unlike the one in All About Eve. Clever plotting—an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Félix does some goofy martial-arts training turns out to be critical—and inventive character details enhance the wicked fun.

The film feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

The Innocents features some superb kid-acting, which doesn’t just entertain and convince but embellishes the malevolent intelligence (call it sociopathy) at work in Mr. Vogt’s story.

Mr. Gaines occasionally loses confidence in his audience—the parallels that can be drawn between Gregory’s times and now are pretty obvious and don’t really need the punctuation. Most of the time, though, The One and Only Dick Gregory is a memorable portrait, of someone whose story deserves to be better remembered.

The movie is both a thought experiment about individual choices (and the conditions that influence them) and a formal exercise in repetition and variation.

Musically, the film is best viewed and heard as an artifact.

Aronofsky blurs the line between reality and fantasy, turning the film into a gothic horror show that is fascinating and disappointing in equal measure. What's resplendently real, though, is the beauty of Ms. Portman's performance. She makes the whole lurid tale worthwhile.

The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art — relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp — not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.

A special film, and occasionally an exasperating one, but not, in the end, an inaccessible one. It’s a work of emotional impressionism with moments of rueful grace and startling images that evoke yearning.

Indignation is very much the sort of venture Mr. Schamus has often championed as a producer — ambitious and provocative, a must-see for anyone who cares about independent film.

It's a horror flick, and a creepily good one, that also functions as an allegory of the war that still haunts Spain seven decades later.

I can't say enough about the way Enough Said keeps its scintillating sense of humor as it grows deeper and more affecting.

The pace is nonstop, the humor abundant, the devotion of Mr. Fox’s wife, actress Tracy Pollan, is made plain, and there’s no small amount of nostalgia in store for people who know and love the Fox filmography. But the heart and soul of the film are the face-to-face interviews, which are far less delicate than one might expect. And all the deeper for it.

Yes, there’s a sermon of sorts at the center of “A Different Man.” But the message arrives post-movie, thanks to a narrative that is consistently compelling in its novelty, and twin performances—by Messrs. Stan and Pearson—that really do get under the skin.

There's no better fun for movie lovers than a small, unheralded film that turns out to be terrific -- unless it's a small, unheralded sequel that trumps the original.

In a deliberately raggedy film, we find a raggedy man.

Chile ’76 subtly illustrates how difficult it becomes to separate the personal and the political in an authoritarian state. As it goes on, it develops from a character portrait into an unusually realistic thriller, with danger asserting itself everywhere.

The film becomes an enthralling, edifying, terrifying, sometimes funny and improbably stirring portrait of a multiethnic, polycultural cauldron where fury against injustice and neglect hovers near the boiling point.

This one is nowhere near as original -- it's a flawed remake of a fine first feature from Norway -- but "Insomnia" still stands on its own as a thriller with brains and scenic beauty.

The more I think back on Kajillionaire, which goes to digital platforms in mid-October, the more I remember lovely things in it — moments of mystery and grace that go against the absurdist grain.

By turns chilling, mysterious and inspiring; sometimes it's all of those at once.

Top Gun: Maverick is not a dislikable movie, by any means: The cast is charming, the military stuff is convincing, the action sequences are, as intended, pretty astounding: In the proper theater (I saw it in IMAX) it will be a physical experience, literally, one that may lead to armrests being shredded by white-knuckling audiences in cinemas all over the world. But it’s also a little depressing, because of where it says movies are going, what it says about the lack of creativity making its way on screen, and what a precarious balance movie theaters are in.

BlackBerry is a biography of a once-great business that is fascinating enough on its own terms without being reshaped to fit a narrative formula.

Oddity is everything a horror film should be—creepy, exciting, unpredictable—and it leads to an ending that’s both shocking and inevitable.

By most standards of conventional film narrative, this movie is a mess. [25 June, 1987, p.22(E)]

Fatih Akin is a filmmaker to be reckoned with. His characters grow and change in a stunning film that pulses with life.

It is the understated, matter-of-fact tone of the story that sucks us in, and the two central performances that help make this effort by Ms. Moss such a singular addition to the monster catalog.

I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though.

A thriller with a quietly sensational performance by Tilda Swinton.

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

Genuinely and irresistibly inspirational.

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

In a tale that touches on such a diversity of subjects—loneliness, mortality, adoption, family ties, the realm of the senses, artificial intelligence—it’s the ineffable things that count.

Cate Blanchett tops anything she's done in the past with her portrait of a fallen woman who's a hoot, a horror, a heartbreaker and a wonder. The mystery of the movie as a whole is that it depicts a bleak world of pervasive rapacity, deceit and self-delusion, yet keeps us rapt with delight.

Dorothy Lewis, the subject of director Alex Gibney’s collagist masterpiece Crazy, Not Insane, is out to demolish “the myth of pure evil.” As such, she may be among the most dangerous women in the world. She is certainly a “pioneer,” as one colleague calls her, adding that pioneers are often not treated very well.

Taut, smart, intense and genuinely scary, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night fulfills the promise, and then some, of the filmmaker’s 2015 debut feature, “Krisha.”

Hugely inventive -- and smashingly beautiful.

This gorgeous film, always tender and sometimes dark, is a deeply resonant comic drama that's concerned with nothing less than life, death, love, sex, guilt and the urban logic of mortality.

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.

I can tell you that Ms. Laurent’s direction is astute and economical, that both of the film’s young stars give fine performances, and that Breathe is a very good title for a film that ever so gradually takes your breath away.

The purity is admirable. The excitement is notable. “Chapter 4” may run nearly three hours, but when we’re having this much fun calling out “Oof!” and “Get him!” the evening passes in breezy delight.

While certainly a curiosity, We Met in Virtual Reality—a pandemic-inspired documentary filmed entirely within a social platform called VRChat—is also revelatory, if not entirely ennobling of the human condition.

A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.

“Reflection” is a highly playful exercise in its kaleidoscopic approach, though “kaleidoscopic” is about as useful as “surreal” in describing the film’s effect or philosophy.

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.

This film is extraordinary on several counts: its knowledge of an arcane trade (Mr. Cohen ran his family's diamond business after his father died); its fondness for telling good life stories; and, above all, its superb starring performance.

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.

Magnificent.

Difficult too, and certainly problematic, but it's sometimes quite wonderful. Do see it if you're curious about one-of-a-kind films, and if you care about the ever-evolving career of one of our most gifted filmmakers.

In a literal sense this delightful film, in Norwegian with English subtitles, is about retirement and the prospect of loss. But Mr. Hamer, a poet of the droll and askew, sends the aptly named Odd--it's also a common Norwegian name--on a cockeyed journey from regret through comic confusion to a lovely eagerness for new adventures.

The movie has its own genuine charm and one hilarious high: Billy Crystal & Carol Kane are simply wonderful. [24 Sept 1987, p.24(E)]

In Between is full of life, a triptych of sexual and cultural combat that takes us to places that I, for one, knew nothing about.

The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.

A thrilling -- and harrowing, and beautiful -- celebration of the unpredictability of life.

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.

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.

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Succeeds at its daunting task: summing up an epic struggle with bedazzling action; with a style that progresses, apart from a few lapses, from the elegiac through the episodic to the symphonic; and with more humor, zest and feeling — the real, heartfelt stuff — than you’d dare to expect from what is, after all, an immense industrial undertaking.

Directed by James Griffiths, “Wallis Island” is warm, endearing and very funny, a quintessential indie smile-maker about nice, humble people adorably stumbling their way toward a little happiness.

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

Sizzlingly smart and agreeably sententious, Mr. Garland’s film transcends some all-too-human imperfections with gorgeous images, astute writing and memorably strong performances.

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

The Tribe is one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. It may also be among the most memorable — not only for its pitch-black view of human nature, but for the devilishly instructive way in which it turns the tables on us. As we watch in anxious confusion, it’s as if we are profoundly deaf, trying to understand what’s going on and striving to break out of isolation.

(Morton's) character here is emotionally mute -- though Morvern speaks, she can't or won't reveal what's in her heart -- and her performance is brilliant from start to finish.

Directed by his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Linklater, Mr. Hawke makes the most of what might be the year’s most brilliant screenplay, by Robert Kaplow, by delivering a Hart full of mischief and wit, desperation and self-loathing. There has never been a great book written about Hart, but at last he has this movie to renew and restore his story.

For those who’ve lived with the series for more than a decade, this fateful pause may heighten the suspense. For a Muggle like me, the storm does gather slowly.

Like the movie as a whole, she (Judy) is funny, sweet, sophisticated and adventurous.

The film is poetic in its turn, as well as deliciously funny, and pretty much perfect except for a slightly didactic coda. But that’s a minor flaw in a major achievement. To err, even slightly, is you know what.

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.

Even if snorkeling wasn't a major sport in 16th-century Sicily, where the action was originally set, the joyous spirit of the play has been preserved in this modest, homegrown production.

“Yacht Rock” is the yacht rock of documentaries.

Foreign films can be as enchanting as ever, and perspective-expanding too. The latest proof is Up and Down, a wonderfully funny, giddily intricate Czech comedy.

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

A fine Argentinean film with English subtitles.

The best part of Tracks — aside from the spectacular images, the succinct dialogue, the elegant filmmaking and the mysterious beauty of Mia Wasikowska's performance — is what's left unsaid.

The most urgent question posed by The Social Dilemma is whether democracy can survive the social networks’ blurring of fact and fiction. “Imagine a world where no one believes what’s true,” Mr. Harris says. It’s possible, of course, that the film itself is a conspiracy cooked up by chronic malcontents, but it has the ringtone of truth.

Is this movie better seen in a theater than at home on Netflix? Yes, no and what can one say? Watch it anyway.

It’s surely the most spellbinding documentary ever made about the mediation process.

It’s a coming-of-age story about the coming of unlikely, unbidden hope.

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.

An enchanting documentary by Ceyda Torun, operates on three levels, and we’re not speaking metaphorically here.

Written, directed and edited by Ivan Sen and shot (also by Mr. Sen) in black-and-white, the film is spare, sunbleached and serious in its study of people long neglected and abused. Yet the drama is thin, and the mystery halfhearted.

The result is impressively if overbearingly grotesque, boasting an ecstatic surface of blood, guts and deformities. But it’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.

If truth be told, the film is less than the sum of its parts; the main problem is the fragmented narrative structure, a legacy of the literary source. Still, it's a joy to see men and women with dense life stories played by powerful actors with long and distinguished careers.

Firmly rejecting the prevailing style in horror movies today, Mr. Eggers has created a somber, cold-sweat doomscape that is in no way a thrill ride.

This, too, is a mood piece, sometimes surreal and dominated by Chow's lovelorn sadness. But it's hard to find an emotional or narrative handle to hang on to, since the filmmaker keeps reaching for dramatic energy that keeps eluding him.

Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.

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

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

Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.

This is all very strange and a little tedious. Yet there is something arresting and oddly poignant in Mr. Van Sant's playful vision of the road to nowhere. [3 Oct 1991, p.A14(E)]

A handsome, absorbing debut feature by the fiction and television writer Henry Bromell.

Watching the actors and gorgeous trappings is an adventure in cognitive dissonance. I didn't believe a single minute in almost three hours, but enjoyed being there all the same.