It's a simple story, exposing the beauty that lives inside difficult relationships, and it leaves you feeling quietly exalted without ever seeming to try.

I'm still smiling as I recall Jess, the soccer star-to-be, standing behind her straitlaced mother in the kitchen and casually bouncing a head of lettuce on her knee.

The film is picture-book pretty and fairly conventional, except for the 3-D, which is emerging as a convention in its own right. Still, the prettiness comes with brains, and the whole production, like those newly eye-catching models of American-made cars, bespeaks resurgent confidence.

The film as a whole measures up to Forest Whitaker's performance...one of the great performances of modern movie history.

The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.

It’s stylish and chilling, with a lively feminist undercurrent.

Mr. Spielmann's film is full of surprises and, in its distinctive way, full of life.

Hotel Rwanda isn't impersonal, even though it only hints at the story's full horror. It's stunning.

Whether the truth sets anyone free is unknowable at this point, but the city that was being slaughtered silently has been heard, and its suffering has been seen.

Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of Bird don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.

Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney is a documentary chronicle of Whitney Houston’s life; it’s tough-minded, unsparing and far superior to the biopic and the nonfiction film that preceded it.

This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?

Ms. Mumenthaler has constructed her character study with subtly expressionistic imagination, deploying an enveloping, finely tuned sound design and finding a transporting musical motif in Holst’s “The Planets.” One daring sequence toward the end offers a vivid panorama beyond this woman’s world.

While essentially a disaster film, the visually alarming and nerve-racking “Fukushima” is also a cross-cultural psychodrama, about an industry, and perhaps a society, having a meltdown all its own.

In balancing the two sides’ competing motives, Mr. Sorogoyen has fashioned not only a taut drama but a parable that is widely applicable across many cultures at this moment.

That the film is online because of the Covid-19 pandemic might be considered a silver lining: Not only will more people be able to see it, but they can, and should, experience it through headphones. A big screen would be nice, too, given Ms. Rovner’s hallucinogenic way with pictures. But the sound, as she would probably agree, is paramount.

It’s terrific fun, and none of the things that were threatening to turn DC Entertainment into the cinematic equivalent of a black hole. Just when the world needs a superhero with a gift for silliness, here he is in a movie whose best superpower turns out to be a good heart.

One of those movies that arrives every now and then with no fanfare but a canny sense of how to grab our attention and hold it in a tightening grip.

Many movies these days are too long; this one, at 90 minutes, feels too short. That's because its purpose is so sharply defined: a tight close-up, in black and white, of a single, seminal moment -- a black and white moment -- in American history, and American journalism.

With an edgy, intelligent script by playwright Tom Stoppard, Mr. Spielberg has made an extraordinary film out of Mr. Ballard's extraordinary war experience. [09 Dec 1987]

The whole enterprise rests on Mr. Crowe's armor-clad shoulders, and he carries it remarkably well.

Mank really is about betrayal — not just what the hero does to others but how, over the years and decades, he has betrayed the precious talent at his core. Yet it’s equally about him saving his soul. The worst fix he’s ever been in yields the best thing he’s ever written.

Stylistic debts abound: the Coen brothers, Roger Deakins, the bleak, gothic landscapes of Terrence Malick's "Badlands" and Richard Brooks's "In Cold Blood." Through it all, though, is the original and memorable spectacle of violence expressed and repressed by the desperate hero.

Ambitious, visually stunning and hugely accomplished.

Visualizations are Mr. Jung's province, and they're what make his movie so deeply moving, as well as literally illuminating.

What Mr. Mungiu puts together, in tandem with the ornate private lives of several main characters, is an anatomy of race hatred.

Despite the “improvements” to the animation technique, there remains a purity to Wallace & Gromit. In fact, the most endearing aspects of the series are its links to silent comedy. And dogs, naturally. And penguins.

Vandross regularly produces sounds that seem superhuman, and does so with no visible strain. It is also no work at all enjoying a movie so full of affection for its subject and his music.