Bursting with joy and throbbing with music, Rize has a tragic dimension too. When you see the clown cry, you'll be with him all the way.

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.

The most compelling reason to see A Private War is Rosamund Pike’s stunning performance as Marie Colvin, the American war correspondent who died in a bombardment while covering the Syrian government’s 2012 siege of Homs.

Based on the Le Carré memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel allows Mr. Morris to exercise his extraordinary gift for making the interview format irresistibly cinematic, and feels like a collaboration of kindred spirits.

Truly transporting film.

[A] moving and poetic documentary portrait.

This one is both demanding and extremely rewarding, because it's really a meditation on violence.

A stunning drama about the desperate state of women in Iran.

Depends on comic timing so precise that it seems weightless and all but effortless. And it depends on performers, of course, who can do a comic turn just as readily as a deft writer can turn a phrase. In that department, Ocean's Eleven is at least 11 times blessed.

The pair’s growing fascination for each other is as unmistakable as the beauty of their surroundings, and so a film about inanimate elements turns out to be a delightfully human love story.

What Ron Howard gets, to a degree that's astonishing in a two-hour film, is the density and complexity, as well as the generous entertainment quotient, of Peter Morgan's screenplay.

Tully turns out to be a twofer. There’s the movie you see, which is whipsmart, intimate, affecting and fearlessly funny about the mixed blessings of motherhood. And there’s the movie you replay in your mind to sort out its several mysteries. That one is richer, deeper and strangely beautiful.

A treat that becomes a chilling enthrallment, one of those closely observed dramas you love — for its intimacy, calm authority and mystery — even before you begin to get what it’s really about.

Caught up in the coils of Princess Diana’s hot lasso, I am bound to tell the truth: Wonder Woman is wonderful, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment. She is also learned, charmingly funny and, for a goddess, touchingly human.

An improbably beautiful work of barnyard art.

It’s film as a fugue state, a Buddhist flow, a collection of memory fragments that drift together into a haunting evocation of Lola’s and Laurie’s intertwined lives.

Ingeniously scary.

The Wave, Scandinavia’s first-ever disaster film, is the polar opposite of a disaster. It’s a triumph of modest means, a tribute to the power of storytelling on a human scale.

With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.

The result is a documentary that keeps drawing you in, even when you think it’s keeping you at a certain distance, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who, through good times and dreadful ones, has remained devoted to his art.

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 film's centerpiece is Mr. Isaac's phenomenal performance. He's an actor, first and foremost, who is also a musician.

An enthralling, even visionary drama that regards its subject with empathy and horror, locates him on the actual piece of land he once owned in Montana and portrays him through a stunning performance by Sharlto Copley, who finds emotional mercury in Kaczynski’s boiling cauldron of rage.

Ms. Wilson may put a viewer off balance with a lack of concrete detail, but it is a seduction technique that works, to satisfying effect.

Forswearing anything like a pedantic message and giving the audience plenty of reasons to be sympathetic to the viewpoints of all three characters, Ms. Chinn has created a heartbreakingly real coming-of-age story.

The climax, in which police slowly drag the truth out of the central figure, is harrowing.

This is filmmaking of a high order, even though the production's scale is modest and the climax is not without its facile contrivances.

This clearly qualifies as a heist film, and a hugely entertaining one, notwithstanding a few plot perforations and a running time of two hours plus that might have been trimmed a bit.