In the realm of documentary films, as in the news media, polemicists are ascendant, but Frederick Wiseman isn’t one of them. For the past half-century, since his first film, “Titicut Follies,” he’s been an observationist. Not an observer, which carries a passive connotation, but a filmmaker who’s made a distinguished career of observing in a particular way — closely, calmly, shrewdly and systematically, with an eye to the institutions and social structures that shape and reveal people’s lives.

So much movie can be made with so little plot, given sufficient humanity and dramatic tension. That's the case with Andrew Haigh's eloquent chamber piece.

In many ways the film reflects its hero’s brilliance. It’s a scintillating construction, though one that sometimes feels like a product launch in its own right.

Terry Gilliam's darkly funny and truly visionary retro-futurist fantasy is a mess dramatically, and its turbulent history echoes the battles fought by Orson Welles against studio executives bent on recutting or scuttling his films.

Like earlier Dardenne films, Lorna’s Silence is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness.

Even when it falters The Forty-Year-Old Version exudes confidence—the director has confidence in her lead actress, and vice versa; both trust the writer, whose more amusing lines are often contained in asides between characters discussing.

Though the affair dragged on so long before Dreyfus was finally cleared that Mr. Polanski confines the resolution to an epilogue, he has nevertheless made an oft-told tale lively and urgent. “An Officer and a Spy” is Mr. Polanski’s finest work in many years.

The thriller aspect of this work, happily, doesn't overshadow its real beauty -- its stark portrayal of the nightmare despair of aliens, hunted, on edge, prepared to risk all for a new start.

If you happen to need a good cry, you can’t go wrong with Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, a documentary about decent people, bewildering misfortune and how bad luck can have a ripple effect—especially if you are lucky enough to have people who love you. If you don’t want to cry, you probably will.

This immensely pleasurable film is anything but dry. It's a saga of the immigrant experience that captures the snap, crackle and pop of American life, along with the pounding pulse, emotional reticence, volcanic colors and cherished rituals of Indian culture.

The film is a sort of jigsaw puzzle that demands either paying minute attention or viewing it twice. Seemingly unimportant and easily forgotten details from the opening minutes turn out to cohere and create a conclusive emotional impact of the kind that everyone in the movie is missing.

It’s a delicate and memorable performance by Mr. Jackman. Ms. Janney does the whole Long Island thing as well as anyone ever has. The most resonant character, though, might be Rachel, whom Ms. Viswanathan imbues with the indignation of youth—something the rest of the characters have long outgrown, but which the story was always going to need.

There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.

Genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age.

Overlord feels like a small but vivid tragedy inside an epic container.

The scope of the subject is such that when Mr. Jarecki's voiceover cuts into the narrative, imposing a personal angle on the national story, it reduces the sense of significance its creator aimed for. But that's a fairly backhanded endorsement of a very potent movie.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

A pitch-black, blood-soaked comedy and phenomenal first feature by Alice Lowe, who also stars as Ruth, the pregnant heroine.

Mr. Shyamalan is a new national treasure, as attuned to our sensibilities and everyday life as Steven Spielberg.

For the most part, though, Ms. Moncrieff has given us a portrait of a young woman with a luminous soul.

Watching the film is such an intense experience that most of its flaws fall away and its red herrings serve only to enhance the local color.

The common problem of Solondz's characters is an inability to see the world in shades of grey, which is fitting in a film where color-garish, boring or just plain ugly-is so important, and the actors are working off palettes of such extreme emotions. A few of them-notably Ms. Rampling, Mr. Hinds and Ms. Sheedy-are as good here as they've ever been.

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

More to the point of this marvelous film, who knew there were kids as heroic, in their various ways, as these valiant super-spellers?

The star of Susanna Nicchiarelli’s freely fictionalized biopic, Trine Dyrholm, finds fierce beauty in the woman Nico has become. I’ve never seen a performance quite like it — unsparingly harsh, but also graceful, droll and tender, a portrait of soul-weariness laced with a yearning for salvation.

For the director, Mr. Leconte, and for the usually volcanic Mr. Auteuil, the quiet, cumulative power of this film is a striking departure from the dazzling energy of their previous collaboration in "Girl on the Bridge."

It’s the work of a contemporary master who arrives at the philosophical by way of the playful, ironic and lyrical.

Still, the cynosure of all eyes is honest, articulate Elizabeth, her own woman in an era when women belonged to men, and at the same time full of love. Lizzie is the best, and Keira Knightley does right by her.