What’s remarkable about Arrival is its contemplative core—and, of course, Ms. Adams’s star performance, which is no less impassioned for being self-effacing.

While it contains little for the devoted in the way of outright revelations, it’s an affecting film around which admirers and newcomers alike can gather to bask in the unique beauty of her work, and to follow the similarly distinctive trajectory of her painful and abbreviated life.

Mr. Ostlund positions his troubled characters in an environment of polished ash and Scandinavian spotlessness, under which there are dark mutterings — the constant creak of tow cables and un-oiled metal.

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.

A very entertaining black comedy for very mysterious reasons.

His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same.

Alternately inspiring and dismaying—why is the large, affable Mr. Andrés filling this global vacuum of governmental response?—the movie is also informative, engaging and reads like an application for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Armando Iannucci’s absurdist comedy reveals this in an extremely loose manner of speaking, with malice aforethought, straight-faced glee and formidable sharpshooting that occasionally misfires. It isn’t history but free-range fiction, a venomous farce containing nuggets of fact, and if its subjects bear any resemblance to present-day dictators and authoritarian mugs or thugs around the world, then the movie has hit its archetypal target.

“Montage” is about expression. As such, it’s a more honest tribute to Mr. Cobain than any conventional documentary could pretend to be.

The distinction of this lovely, if slightly tentative, debut feature is its willingness to set forth mysteries of the human heart without solving them; everyone's fate stays unsealed.

Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.

A beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure.

The deliriously talented Lake Bell wrote, produced, directed and stars in this peculiar bit of comedy magic, set amid the cutthroat world of Hollywood voiceover artists.

An unusually engaging portrait of a legendary chef who can be insufferable, as his most ardent admirers acknowledge, but who is also a brighter-than-life charmer, raging perfectionist, world-class hedonist, self-styled dandy and all-too-human survivor of the highest-end restaurant wars.

Laurent Cantet's fascinating, troubling drama has many meanings.

A smart, suspenseful drama, starring Hayden Christensen, that honors its own factual roots as no movie about journalists has done since "All the President's Men."

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

A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine--the news about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but good.

Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether.

The Vietnam echoes are everywhere. The vocabulary is mere embellishment

Marvel’s new “Captain America” is anything but bleak — what’s so audacious about the film, and so pleasing, is its quicksilver mix of hardcore action and bright comedy.

Lee's journey of the body and soul is something else. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes it strangely touching, a revelation.

Strong stuff, and all the stronger for having taken itself so comically.

Satoshi Kon, whose previous film was the remarkable "Tokyo Godfathers," uses the complex plot as a pretext for joyous psychedelia.

A bright little screwball comedy that speaks for the vitality of new movies.

Has its share of contrivances, some more successful than others, but center stage is occupied by truth, and austere beauty.

Mr. Miller tells several interlocking stories with such daring and intensity that you sense he could go on indefinitely, spinning one terrific yarn off another.

Surprise, surprise. X-Men: The Last Stand, the third big-screen convocation of mutant shape shifters, weather changers, ice makers, energy suckers, healers and telepaths from Marvel Comics, has shifted the shape of the franchise from pretty good, if uninspired, to terrifically entertaining.