The aesthetics of Mr. Wiseman’s visual storytelling have seldom been so prominent or important as in “Menus-Plaisirs.”

The Israeli journalist Dror Moreh has hit a documentarian's trifecta with The Gatekeepers. It's an exemplary piece of enterprise journalism, a vivid history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a polemic that's all the more remarkable for the shared experience of the polemicists.

As a work of nonfiction, it deserves its own nomenclature. "Docu-poem" is too inelegant; "masterpiece" works, although it's been used before.

A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film.

It's "My Dinner With Andre" for the relationship generation.

The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace.

This vibrant, buoyant drama, intimate in scope instead of vast, takes us to Oslo—not exactly another planet, but an adventure all the same—where it builds a world of mercurial passions while its enchanting heroine, Julie ( Renate Reinsve ), belatedly and erratically comes of age over the course of several years.

[Mr. Anderson's] screenplay soars above and beyond literal references by creating the oddest power couple you’ve ever seen. Whatever the psychodynamics between Gary and Alana may be, their bond has its own brilliant logic.

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

First Cow is vividly alive on arrival and grows into pure enchantment, although it starts at a saunter and its physical scale is small.

The loveliest part of Mad Max: Fury Road is its grungy, quasi-Gothic imagery — the production was designed by Colin Gibson and photographed by John Seale. And the fullest flowering of its images can be found in its muscle cars, muscle trucks, muscle trailers and muscle buggies.

Spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency.

Marvelously smart, funny and entertaining film.

Kasper Collin’s splendid documentary feature starts with an event that shook the jazz world.

The film, though lush, thoughtful and at times affecting, never fully escapes a certain therapeutic mode. It doesn’t depict life lived, exactly; it depicts life theorized.

A harrowing lesson in unintended -- and intended -- consequences.

The performances are nothing less than astonishing. It's easy to understand why the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival went to both actresses, though not easy for me to see why the movie itself was included in the unprecedented joint award.

Pirandello didn't have a patch on its complexities. Here's a popular entertainment with an eclectic soundtrack raising penetrating questions of identity in astonishing sequences that interweave live action with comic-book art.

The rhythms are unhurried, the drama pinpoint-intense, the style intimate, the wit Hitchcock-perverse.

A wickedly astute and beautiful comedy of manners-cum-murder mystery, it's too dense, and occasionally confusing, to grasp fully the first time around. How lucky, then, that it's also too much fun to see just once.

The film has a remarkable formal and narrative fluidity, not presenting its three stories as discrete chapters but cutting effortlessly from one to the other, with Ms. Enyedi sometimes dipping into a period for the length of only a shot or two before spinning off to a different storyline.

Ms. Hogg has outdone herself with an even stronger film about grief, self-discovery, the daunting uncertainties of the creative process and, before and after everything else, the mysterious power of the movie medium.

Against all odds, an unquenchable artist has made yet another piece of powerful art.

An undersea treasure all the same, and a prodigy of visual energy.

The attraction is in the haunting texture of the picture, its delicate, breathy wonder.

It’s unclear what if anything Mr. McQueen or his co-writer, Alastair Siddons, lifted from judicial transcripts, but the inherent boundaries of a courtroom help give more shape and momentum to the storytelling. The setting also allows the characters to stop telling each other things they’d never say.

A work of huge, if unobtrusive, ambition -- a vision of modern life, appropriate for sophisticated adults as well as for kids, that is both satirical and, of all things, inspirational. It's a great film about the possibility of greatness.

Uncompromising in its style, story and characterizations.