The Dark Horse brings Cliff Curtis back home, and he gives a performance that’s transcendent in more ways than one.

Judged, though, as the action extravaganza it means to be, Rise of the Planet of the Apes wins high marks for originality, and takes top honors for spectacle.

The Past plays out within narrower bounds than "A Separation," and often at lower velocity — a few moments feel almost Chekhovian. Yet the film is commanding in its own right, another exploration of a volatile situation — an estranged husband returning from Iran when his wife requests a divorce — in which flashes of insight or understanding lead to new mysteries.

Mr. Vasyanovych’s approach is literally and figuratively visionary.

It's been a good while since I've seen a movie whose most powerful sequence was both unforeseen and entirely unpredictable as it played out.

A magnificent concert film of Latino jazz.

It’s all painfully exact and true. Myself a product of exactly this kind of blue-collar New England community, I winced as I laughed at this gang of badly dressed, foul-mouthed reprobates. My people!

A spectacular record of rehearsals for a show that wasn't to be.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

Never lacks for extravagance — the film looks as striking as it sounds — and some of the tales certainly seem outlandish. Yet they’re part of a truly remarkable origin story that the film and its subjects explore with uncommon thoughtfulness and depth of feeling.

This is only the second feature for the director: the first was "True Adolescents." But Mr. Johnson's work with his actors is impeccable, and his style is freewheeling.

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

This magnificent documentary, directed by David Sington and presented by Ron Howard, rises to the occasion by interspersing its interviews with NASA footage that evokes the grandeur of the whole Apollo adventure.

Real life is not the movie's concern. Mr. Anderson's lovely confection — that's a pastry metaphor — keeps us smiling, and sometimes laughing out loud. Yet acid lurks in the cake's lowest layers.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

In Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy takes a good idea and runs with it, soars with it, and turns it into a great, if wildly erratic, twofer tribute — to a singular legend of black entertainment culture, and to the transformative power of raunchy, outrageous humor.

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.

Mr. Hardy's Brooklyn accent is not only flawless — a Londoner by birth, he's a vocal chameleon who played a Welshman in "Locke" — but tinged, I do believe, with a blithe, spot-on tribute to a blue-collar guy from another borough, Ernest Borgnine's immortal Marty. Here's a far-from-minor performance by a major star in the making.

Deeply affecting.

A thrillingly, thoroughly wonderful film.

This is hardly a film to recommend as entertainment. As an act of remembrance, though, it is singular and, in its way, soaring.

Nair's movie, far from being paste, is a string of small, exquisite gems.

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.

Minus the flash, the neon, the tailoring and the quipping, LifeHack is a kind of Ocean’s Eleven for Gen Z: a breathless, ingenious caper that moves at about 200 megabits per second.

Blissfully funny, terrifically intelligent and tender when you least expect it to be.

The stuff of heroism is always mysterious. In this case it’s also marvelously strange.

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.

In scene after scene we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait, especially because of Ms. Rapace’s presence.