Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present.

The R-rating does represent truth in advertising, and it has conferred a kind of liberation on what strikes me, a violence-averse moviegoer at heart, as the best superhero film to come out of the comic-book world, and I’m not forgetting Tim Burton’s “Batman” or Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.”

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

With a calmness that bespeaks confidence, this small, spellbinding second feature by Hilary Brougher brings together two women, trapped in separate states of denial and distress, who manage to end each other's entrapment.

A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.

This is a woman's work in the best sense -- empathetic, inferentially erotic and delicately intuitive, as well as fiercely intelligent.

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

Gleeful and smart, funny and serious, this sequel surpasses the endearing original with gorgeous animation — a dragon Eden, a dragon scourge, an infinitude of dragons — and one stirring human encounter after another.

Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.

Mr. Nelson’s movie is a gossipy and very musical primer on Davis, who is, needless to say (though it is said and said), among the giants of jazz.

Mr. Herzog’s film may not be a model of organization, but I loved every meandering minute.

Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.

Father Mother Sister Brother is no doubt true enough to many a family gathering this Christmas—awkward, amusing, a bit dissatisfying, but not a disaster. Sometimes that’s reason enough to call for a toast.

Ms. Miller proves to be an original, setting her comic characters in motion like mini-planets that spin in eccentric but overlapping orbits.

There's no shortage of felicitous lines or interesting performances, yet the movie, like the amusement park of its title, feels constructed from familiar parts.

How long has it been since a movie left you literally speechless?

Thanks to this new film, though, any questions about her potential have been dispelled. Alicia Vikander has fully and memorably arrived, a luminous presence with a gift for tenderness, an instinct for understatement and formidable reserves of passion—she not only rises to the challenge of Vera’s climactic speech, but elevates the pacifist rhetoric into furious poetry.

The greatest fascination is watching these three people when they're planted firmly inside the frame, talking at cross-purposes while trying to perceive one another in the reflected light of their needs and risky assumptions.

Boils with humor, surprise and dramatic energy.

Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.

It’s a graceful, unassuming portrait of relationships old and new as a handful of characters consider their pasts and look wonderingly toward their futures, soju flowing freely all the while.

Too bad it isn't more engaging — and dramatic — than it is, but this new film, in French with English subtitles, is still worth seeing for what it says of the turbulent state of France in the early 1970s, when Mr. Assayas was a high-school student in Paris, and of the zigzag pursuit—of painting, beautiful girls and independence from a demanding father—that finally culminated in his becoming the filmmaker he was meant to be.

Sensitive as the film is, it might be most effective to those who haven’t sat through scores of iterations of what has come to be known as the Sundance Film.

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.

A likable lightweight, though it's heavy enough on cosmic combat and dazzling effects.

The pace is deliberate, verging on slow — Australian filmmakers aren't keen on short takes or quick cuts — but the content is constantly surprising.

The production, which grew out of the filmmaker’s friendship with the two men, Iván and Gerardo, is so heartfelt, and the material so intrinsically powerful, that I Carry You With Me slowly catches up with itself, and lights a fire fueled by food and love. That’s a winning combination in this story, just as it is in real life.

Magic suffuses this film -- performances that approach perfection, or achieve it, moments of exceptional grace as a troubled family plays out a contemporary version of a classic immigration saga, healing itself in the process.