With Mr. Harrelson, Mr. Moverman has created an antihero of epic proportions and indiscretions.

With his Maasai-influenced braids or canopy of Jheri curls and his use of sex and misogyny to sell himself, James is a kind of dinosaur. But he’s also one whom Mr. Jenkins—one of our better cultural critics who happen to make films—pursues to enlightening effect.

Ms. Coppola, who is Francis Coppola's granddaughter, has made a coming-of-age film about a culture in which few people — adults included — ever grow up. It's essentially plotless and slowly paced, much like the recent work of her aunt, Sofia Coppola, but astutely observed, full of fine performances and ever so guardedly hopeful about April and the boy who adores her.

Jarmusch's uncharacteristically mainstream -- wonderful -- road trip movie.

Josephine Decker’s screen version of the Jandy Nelson young-adult novel, which was adapted by the author, embraces excess as an expression of the heroine’s mercurial spirit. Sometimes the results are excessively excessive, blithely blissed-out or simply clichéd. Mostly, though, they’re funny, affecting and endearing. And daring.

The tale doesn’t need any artificial twists. They occur naturally. There’s character development. Foreshadowing.

The movie's sense of place is hypnotic, but there's more to it than gorgeous images -- Campbell Scott's astute direction; Joan Allen's beautifully laconic performance; a sense of lively, if occasionally pretentious, inquiry into the wellsprings of art.

Yet the heart of the film lies in what it manages to say, without boldface or italics, about how hard it is for Donna, like so many of her anxious cohort, to make genuine connections, to break free of narcissistic constraints and become a stand-up grown-up.

All horror film is metaphorical. But to qualify for the genre itself—and satisfy the base demands of the base—a movie is required to both accelerate toward lunacy and entertain a certain amount of mayhem. “Bring Her Back” contains enough gore to swamp a blood bank. But it also features a performance by Sally Hawkins that may be the best of the year, or even her career.

For the mangy, flea-bitten TV reviewer, there would be no quicker route to ignominy than trashing a show about dogs. Fortunately, even cat ladies will like Inside the Mind of a Dog, which has an abundance of furry charm and retrieves a kennel’s worth of information from those sniffing around the cutting edge of canine science.

In exploring the issues that were and are involved, the film goes far deeper, as it were, than the seagoing Cold War caper thriller it naturally wants to be.

Chiemi Karasawa's unblinking documentary feature watches Elaine Stritch struggle with the toughest role of her life—being old, and in constantly uncertain health.

Eureka demands active attention, but rewards it with emotional resonance, thematic complexity and a succession of images that take up permanent residence in our brains.

The screen, like the stage, can barely contain this marvelous play of intelligence.

Barbarians is sometimes a comedy of ill manners, sometimes an exhilarating thriller, but it’s also an amusingly clever and sometimes violent parable about venality, vulgarity and territoriality. Barbarians may be an ambiguous title, but it’s apt.

Movies are seldom flawless and don’t have to be. This one speaks more eloquently to how a spell can be woven rather than broken.

Serendipity is "Sliding Doors" with no alternate versions; it's willed enchantment all the way.

“The Lost Tapes” is a chronicle of folly, which makes it perversely fascinating and, one hopes, cautionary.

The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art — relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp — not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.

More than a deadpan comedy about oddball losers. This dork has his day, and this story has its touching subtext -- growing pains relieved by unlikely hope.

A convincing, entertaining portrait of the revolutionist as a young man.

As this frequently lyrical and touching portrait of youth reminds us, for many thousands of people over the years, Cabrini-Green was simply home.

As noted in the thoroughly entertaining Oscar Peterson : Black + White, the jazz giant never seemed to struggle, not musically: He arrived on the scene “fully formed,” someone notes, a technical wonder, a master of swing who reigned over the jazz keyboard for 60 years.

The plot is so cleverly constructed that its undertones sneak up on you. Their subtlety makes them that much more effective.

Clearly Mr. Altman was enthralled by the company's work process, an alchemy through which sweat and muscularity on the rehearsal-room floor become exquisite abstractions on stage. His pleasure is infectious.

What makes this nominee for the best-foreign-film Oscar singular among Holocaust movies is the way it characterizes the banality of life underground.

It is the library as an urgent idea, and the obligations that the institution’s leaders have embraced, that win Mr. Wiseman’s admiration and attention.

Every moment strengthens the essence of the drama—the bond of love between two people who came out of their mother’s womb within seconds of one another.