Family dysfunction has seldom been as flamboyant—or notable for its performances and flow of language—as it is in this screen version of the Tracy Letts play.

I found Hustle & Flow hard to get into at first, if only for its dialogue. But DJay's turf turns out to be everyone's turf -- a jagged landscape of hopes, disappointments, folly and fulfillment.

It's hard to say if Volver is a great film -- hard because every woman and girl in it is so damned endearing (the men are either impediments or bystanders to the real business of life) -- but safe to say it's right up there with Mr. Almodóvar's best.

The strangest thing about his latest picture, Hairspray, is how very sweet and cheerful it is. In his own weird way, Mr. Waters has captured the gleeful garishness of the early '60s, when high-school girls wore demure bows in their ratted hair and deadened their lips with palest pink lip gloss -- and believed that racial harmony was inevitable if teens of all flavors could dance together on TV. [25 Feb 1988, p.1]

Ms. Mirren and the film do us all a service in declining to paint Meir as a legendary figure but instead observing that although she was a strong leader who can rightly be credited with saving her country from annihilation, crisis forced her to make grueling decisions whose psychic burdens she bore heavily.

It's not fair to say that Ms. Davis steals scenes - one of the movie's strengths is its ensemble cast - but she supercharges every scene she's in.

How does it play? With the same verbal and musical fireworks as the stage version, and with the same emotional kick, which is rooted in the casting.

A small independent feature that's everything an independent feature -- small or big -- should be.

As directed with a wonderful combination of whimsy, deadpan humor and childlike exhilaration by Ms. Regan, the film is impish and full of bounce.

Golden Arm could be interpreted as having a profound feminist message and liberating agenda. Mostly, it’s just goofy fun. An antic romp. A briskly paced gag fest. A lot of wrist, no relaxation.

Any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction.

The bad news about the Ennio Morricone documentary Ennio is its length: 2 1/2 hours. Far too short!

Influencers both dwells in and demolishes an online, text-happy, selfie-saturated world, one that thrives on misinformation and FOMO-mongering and drives CW more than a little crazy. Watching poseurs brought down is fun, though. So is Ms. Naud.

As director, Mr. Branagh and his cameraman have chosen to shoot his film tight and drab, a style that allows the actors to speak the poetry without affect. Nothing's prettified. [09 Nov 1989]

Much of Summer Hours, which was shot by the excellent Eric Gautier, feels like a Chekhov play and resonates like a Schubert quartet; it’s a work of singular loveliness.

Living in Emergency is anything but bleeding-heart propaganda.

Full of entertaining vignettes that eventually make a happy mockery, as they're meant to do, of the tragedy vs. comedy dialectic.

That the circuitous international influence of the western should manifest itself in South Africa is no surprise. Neither is the fact that someone as charismatic as Mr. Dabula should be the star of such a story, which is ripe with indignation, injustice, righteous violence and, ultimately, a shootout of cosmic resonance.

All of the performances are superb. Ms. Smit is a special revelation. This is only her second feature, though you’d never know it from the alacrity and intensity of her scenes with Ms. Cruz.

The intimacy of Ms. Johnson’s performance is extraordinary. She is the least assertive of movie stars, yet the courage, despair and fury she finds in Nicole will lift you up and spin you around.

A single seeing isn't enough to take in the eccentric marvels of The Triplets of Belleville, an animated feature by Sylvain Chomet that creates a visual language all its own.

A must-view film for our media-besotted age.

What's so mesmerizing about this film is the sight, in an endless rush of color and images, of so much of his work in one place, including pieces we don't often see.

Mr. Franklin has always been easy with quicksilver moods -- and Mr. Washington is terrifically appealing as a fool for love who loses his cool as he learns about fear.

The celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie is the subject of a wonderful documentary called Touch the Sound, although calling her a percussionist is like calling Brancusi a demolitionist.

The intricacies here are moral and ethical, and they're fascinating.

The real head-scratcher is how such an endearingly modest, gentle film can say so much with such eloquence about a professional partnership that amounts to a love affair; about the mysterious business of being funny; and about the toll taken by the passage of time. (Messrs. Reilly and Coogan are both wonderful; so are Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as, respectively, Ollie’s wife, Lucille, and Stan’s wife, Ida.)

Silence makes the film interesting by enticing us to concentrate in ways we're not used to, while artistry carries the day. The Artist may have started as a daring stunt, but it elevates itself to an endearing - and probably enduring - delight.