This "Les Mis" does make you feel, intensely and sometimes thrillingly, by honoring the emotional core of its source material.

“Dogs” is a beguiling recreation of one irrepressible childhood. The movie is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, but always invitingly candid and relatable. In its specificity it winds up being universal: As children, we really were odd little beasts, weren’t we?

The Grandmaster, may well be the definitive illustration of kung fu in all its arcane schools and intricate styles. There's never been anything like it — a seemingly endless flow of spectacular images in a story about Ip Man (Tony Leung), the legendary kung-fu master who trained Bruce Lee.

What Mr. Hou has done is borrow power and some gentle intimations of a state of grace from one of the most enchanting images in movie history.

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.

Years after its initial release, Ornette: Made in America, part of Milestone's continuing "Project Shirley," still feels fresh - its moves always surprising, yet always somehow perfect.

In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.

The links and resonances remain largely abstract -- to understand them isn't necessarily to be moved by them -- while the individual dramas of those three lives are often stirring, and the three starring performances are unforgettable.

What you take away from Anatomy of a Fall is largely up to you, but it’s a thoroughly engrossing case study.

The age when such images held firm positions in the culture may be over, but Mr. Corbijn’s film has given it a glorious and stirring elegy.

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.

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.

Everything and everyone is observed sharply, succinctly and indelibly.

[Crowe] knows how to shape a scene and he's never cheap with characterization; adults are permitted to be as complex as their children; a rare event in pictures. [18 May 1989, p.A14(E)]

Where the film shines is in its vivid and affecting portrait of Tillman himself. Instead of the square-jawed hero memorialized by the army and lionized by the news media, we get to know a man of many gifts for many seasons.

For a filmmaker who has made his reputation with such crime thrillers as "Little Odessa" and "The Yards," James Gray reveals an unexpected gift for the mysteries of romance.

Asleep in My Palm is a virtuoso debut feature from writer-director Henry Nelson.

This remarkable piece of antiwar cinema honors its theme, and the movie medium.

The energy feels authentic, and endlessly renewable. The cultural matrix is specific, yet the passions are universal. This grand and welcoming entertainment is exactly what’s needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

The movie's metaphorical dimensions rarely interfere with the concrete, quirky pleasures of its story. The Flower of My Secret is Mr. Almodovar's most entertaining work since his phenomenal "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." [15 Mar 1996]

What it's about is also what it requires for proper appreciation -- the ability of the human mind to hold, and even cherish, diametrically opposite thoughts.

It’s a gripping historical document, regardless of where one stands on the central argument.

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

Acting may be a collaborative art form, but Mr. Ahmed also flies solo with considerable grace.

While the film handles itself well in the ring, it's brilliant in the arena of a blue-collar family that brutalizes its younger son and best hope for worldly success in the name of sustaining him.

A work of singular beauty and a significant technical achievement, the film makes water audible — the thumps and groans of calving glaciers sound like the planet coming apart — and almost palpable; heaving mountains of blue-black waves in an Atlantic storm convey stupendous mass and titanic energy as in no motion picture I’ve seen before.

Meticulously crafted and beautifully performed.

In what I think may be the filmmaker’s plan, all that stuff — that maddeningly cacophonous Stuff — is what we’re meant to cut through and get past in order to become as alert and alive as the star of Mr. Godard’s movie. In this interpretation, it’s the pooch who points the way toward perceiving beauty by learning to live in the vibrant, fragrant present.