Nightmare Alley is, in its entirety, a beautifully visualized period piece that holds our attention and evokes plenty of horror, to be sure, but never brings us under the tent of wholehearted involvement. This time the beauty is screen deep.

The narrative engine leaves the rails when Irving, like Hughes, plunges into paranoia (though Irving actually is the object of a high-level plot) and the style turns to the sort of intensely manipulated surrealism that Charlie Kaufman practiced, not successfully, in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

Who Killed the Electric Car?, a fascinating feature-length documentary by Chris Paine, opens with a mock funeral, then follows the structure of a mock trial in which multiple suspects are found guilty.

Makes an eloquent case for John Kerry's courage, both during and immediately after his service in Vietnam.

Winningly human, and wonderfully funny.

Mr. Penn has been praised lavishly for his work in "Mystic River," in a role that was no reach for him at all, but this is one of the stand-out performances of his career, layered and exquisitely nuanced. And, remarkably, he's only one-third of a stellar ensemble.

Merchants of Doubt, a provocative and improbably entertaining documentary by Robert Kenner, means to make people angry, and to make them think. It will surely do the former. I’d like to think it will do the latter.

An enthralling, even visionary drama that regards its subject with empathy and horror, locates him on the actual piece of land he once owned in Montana and portrays him through a stunning performance by Sharlto Copley, who finds emotional mercury in Kaczynski’s boiling cauldron of rage.

This English film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is also wonderfully funny, terribly touching and a vehicle — with comically dilapidated vehicles — for the boundless gifts of Maggie Smith.

All but one of the actresses in Caramel are nonprofessionals -- not unprofessional, just untrained in the craft -- and they are, to a woman, enchanting. So is this Lebanese comedy.

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

Writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t do a great job finding anything fresh to say about this unnerving situation, with one exception.

The result is a raw look at not just celebrity, but also what it is to parent and grow up in the 21st century.

Rough around the edges, it's humor decidedly sophomoric in parts. But that's part of its charm. [19 Jan 1995, p.A16(E)]

There are clashes of philosophy and practical action that need sorting out, and After the Bite treats both sides with respect.

“Focuses” is a relative term for a documentary that dispenses lots of information without organizing it very well, but Fantastic Fungi is never uninteresting, and often startling in the natural beauty it reveals.

What makes The Old Guard special is that, for all its canny action tropes, the film really does deal with the prevalence of evil in the world, and the limits of doing good. It’s a lot to squeeze into a smaller screen.

As Only the River Flows follows its winding course, the movie seems to lose its grip not merely on the mystery but on its protagonist, becoming less psychologically penetrating and more haphazardly hallucinatory. Looking for clues, we find only the fragments of a fractured mind.

Pieces of April would deserve your attention and respect even if all these colorful threads didn't come together into a luminous whole. But they do, beautifully and unaffectedly, because what's been on Mr. Hedges's mind is not just a comedy of alienation but a drama of acceptance and reconciliation.

I wanted to believe in Bad Santa. At least half of the time I did.

Real-life events have overtaken District B13, and they give this feverish, yet oddly flat French action adventure a whiff of substance to go along with its spectacular stunts.

This lovely debut feature by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz trafficks in the pleasure of watching intriguing people working through outlandish problems in unlikely ways. Go in expecting the best and you’ll come out smiling.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

The result feels perfectly American — I wonder if Conrad was named in honor of the troubled brother in “Ordinary People” — yet the film lives and breathes with a lovely intimacy and density of detail that we associate with fine independent features from Europe.

The main thing about Cedar Rapids is that it makes you laugh-often and out loud.

There are degrees of villainy in “Operation Varsity Blues,” but it’s hard to peg the privileged, bribe-paying parents as the worst of a bad lot. Besides, they have to live not just with their criminal convictions but with those wiretapped conversations, in which they reveal what they really think of their own children.

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.