The most intriguing question it raises is whether our feelings about Vermeer may be changed by the likelihood of him having used optics of one sort or another. The answer is yes, unavoidably, but not necessarily for the worse.

Blink your eyes and you've lost track of them, but one of the interesting things about the experience is that you don't want to lose track; though the film moves as slowly as its hikers, it demands, and deserves, to be watched closely. (The cinematographer was Inti Briones.)

It’s serious at bottom. It means to teach and inspire, as well as entertain, and takes on more subjects of consequence than you can shake a racket at—among them race, parenting, marital dynamics, the weight of personal history and the mad commercialization of sports. Yet it’s marvelous fun from start to finish.

For all its verbal combat, and marital strife that’s echoed and amplified by a younger academic couple in the manner of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the story works best when the dialogue tides subside. In those fleeting moments Ms. Moss is able to convey, eloquently and almost wordlessly, a tormented soul.

When the film leaves the realm of the impolite or even criminal for something far more extreme, it achieves a level of excess that makes the whole enterprise increasingly cartoonish, rather than just awful.

The Ashman story itself is the stuff of a Broadway musical. It just needed some music—what’s here is doled out in penurious and unsatisfying morsels.

What We Do in the Shadows has nonmedicinal virtues that many large-scale movies lack: unflagging energy, entertaining inventiveness, sustained ridiculousness and even, dare I say it, a spasm of eloquence in Deacon’s twisted tribute to the frailties of the human race.

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.

Represents a big growth spurt in Mr. Cronenberg's career. Its measured pace, along with a style that is sometimes austere (though sometimes anything but) repays close attention with excellent acting and a wealth of absorbing information.

Nicole Kidman places the bereaved heroine of Rabbit Hole in a nether land between life and not-quite-life. Her beautiful performance transcends the specifics of the script, which David Lindsay-Abaire adapted from his play of the same name.

Knowing the score in advance is no obstacle to reveling in The Redeem Team, a documentary about motion, emotion, motives and a mission.

We tend to think of gangland tales as exhibiting clear demarcations between those who are and are not “in the game.” La Civil catapults us into a considerably more disturbing environment, a sort of toxic sinkhole that pulls everyone into its horrors.

It is by turns harrowing, affecting, unexpectedly funny, truly scary and fantastical. (The cinematographer was Juan Jose Saravia.) The fantasy grows overlush from time to time, but Ms. López has created an original work of art in genre disguise.

In the end, though, the success of American Gangster doesn't flow from the originality of its ideas, or its bid for epic status, as much as from its craftsmanship and confident professionalism. It's a great big gangster film, and a good one.

Absurdist, but also condescending and self-infatuated; The Royal Tenenbaums is at least three times too clever for its own good.

Jeff Nichols's third feature traffics unerringly in truth, delicious surprise, unadorned beauty and unforced wisdom.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s startling portrayal is far from the only distinction in this impeccably crafted feature film. Mr. Gilroy’s directorial debut connects its hero’s tacit madness to the larger craziness of a broadcast medium that teaches vast numbers of viewers to live with a false sense of insecurity.

Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?

The film is a fable, to be sure, and one that unfolds at a leisurely pace, not a tough-minded psychological drama. But it’s sharp-witted as well as soulful, reasonably suspenseful.

The trip is entertaining and even instructive — not about the facts of the case, which go from murky to opaque, but about the slip-slidingly elusive nature of truth.

Asteroid City may be infused with the powers of the Atomic Age, but no Anderson movie except “The Darjeeling Limited” runs so low on energy.

The movie's considerable emotional force springs from the splendor of its visual poetry. Mr. Bertolucci allows the sweep of 60 years of Chinese history to unfold around Pu Yi as background noise to his peculiar, poignant role in the emergence of modern China. [25 Nov 1987, p.1]

Catching Fire is exceptional entertainment, a spectacle with a good mind and a pounding heart.

Wonderfully funny and subversively affecting.

The film is neither kind nor cruel, but wise, great-spirited and wonderfully enjoyable. It’s an addled dream of beauty unlike any other.

Sly, wry, adorable and deplorable, Guillaume Marbeck is priceless as the endlessly irritating and yet frustratingly charismatic Godard in one of the year’s brightest pictures, a rare standout in a sea of multiplex mediocrity.

What's most memorable, most striking about Superbad is the canny evocation of male friendship in all its richness and complexity.

Modest in scale but formidable in its impact.