Loneliness and longing are at the center of these two women’s lives, at least for a while, and they’re expressed by nuance and implication in a pair of superb performances, and by a lovely evocation of the period.

What makes this droll, darting story about a loose group of family and friends so moving? The answer lies partly in its tone. Mr. Mills seems to have thrown everything he could think of into the mix, dramatic unities be damned, but suffused it all with a poetic sense of life’s goofiness, solemnity and evanescence.

Shrewdly reconceived, powerfully acted and hugely entertaining.

Rousing, provocative film.

Catching Fire is exceptional entertainment, a spectacle with a good mind and a pounding heart.

Daddio is a bracingly naturalistic conversation with a sneakily brilliant screenplay and two wonderfully textured lead performances.

This version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy turns on the presence of Mr. Oldman, and he is an actor of great experience and accomplishment who has finally found a film that fully deserves him.

A romantic comedy of grace notes and mini-epiphanies -- mini, that is, except for Ms. McDormand's Jane, who is memorable to the max.

What makes it such a singular experience is the convergence of fine acting, moral urgency and a willingness to linger on moments of great intensity.

Last Summer is a provocation and a melodrama, and yet in Ms. Breillat’s hands these characters are precisely rendered humans—in their sensitivities, their wants, their vile follies.

Persistently upends expectations without insult, as it pulls you into a netherworld filled with yearning, whimsy, and danger. [15 Dec 1992, p.A16(E)]

A cockeyed comic triumph that flashes between bright and dark like a strobe light of the spirit. And Ms. Theron, as Mavis Gary, a self-styled author rather than a mere writer, succeeds sensationally at something much harder than playing ravaged.

The movie has an elegant, almost symmetrical narrative economy. It’s at once orderly and disorienting, as though following a plan drawn by M.C. Escher.

The heart of the film, though, lies in what remains closest to Mr. Crosby’s heart—not the bum one with the eight stents but the musical one that has been churning out new songs and albums with improbable, unquenchable zest. True to its subject, who has been true to his muse, David Crosby: Remember My Name is about music in a revelatory way.

This beautifully strange and affecting comedy, which Agnès Jaoui directed from a screenplay she wrote with her husband, Mr. Bacri, is about men who are weak and insecure, and one woman, Agathe, played superbly by Ms. Jaoui, coming to terms with the price of being strong.

The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling—and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals.

The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade.

This ingenious and beautiful film by Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t for chewing so much as savoring. The more you think back on its mysteries, the more pleasure it bestows.

While the film itself isn't perfect, who cares about perfection in the face of abundant life, authentic screwiness and lovely surprises by the busload?

A movie of minimalist moments (Molly's tiniest gestures speak volumes) and lovely, almost holy tableaux.

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.

Although movies about celebrities are often fatuous and superfluous, that’s anything but the case with Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon. This feature documentary about Marlon Brando needed to be made, and Mr. Riley made it extremely well.

In Woody Allen's beguiling and then bedazzling new comedy, nostalgia isn't at all what it used to be - it's smarter, sweeter, fizzier and ever so much funnier.

Art is supposed to help us see the world in novel ways. The Sound of Silence, in its quietly exhilarating manner, may make us hear it differently, too.

Breaks through the conventions of its biopic form with a pair of brilliant performances and a whole lot more.

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

It’s serious at bottom. It means to teach and inspire, as well as entertain, and takes on more subjects of consequence than you can shake a racket at—among them race, parenting, marital dynamics, the weight of personal history and the mad commercialization of sports. Yet it’s marvelous fun from start to finish.

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.