“Yacht Rock” is the yacht rock of documentaries.

Movies often turn on slender notions worked up to look like full-fledged ideas. Once in a while, though, a notion will be fertile to begin with, a self-renewing source of delight. That's the case with Luc Besson's Angel-A.

The film is all the more powerful for its grounding in fact. How powerful? Sufficiently, during most of its length, and extremely during several eruptions of searing drama.

The brute force of Terminator 3 is relieved, I'm happy to say, by Claire Danes's winning performance as John Connor's reluctant accomplice (whom the production notes describe, not inaccurately, as an "unsuspecting veterinarian"); by many of the special effects, which don't seem obsolete at all, and, yes, by the sinister trix of the Terminatrix.

Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-'em-ups like "Smokin' Aces" and "The A-Team." But here he is with The Grey - certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

“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.

One of the funny things about America: The Motion Picture—not all of which is screamingly funny—is that the more you know about America’s past, the more amusing it probably is (the past and the film).

An improbably delicious comedy.

I floated in and out of states that included suspense, surprise, delight and shock, all of them adding up to steady-state enjoyment.

The drama is by turns rushed and overplayed, but it has a haunting core and moments of slippery, surprising cinematic style that make the movie linger in the mind, if only for a little while

This ambitious and mutedly angry film also assumes an ironic tone in examining the Hitler phenomenon from angles political, sociological, psychological and, very intriguingly, cinematic.

By the Grace of God is overlong, and loses dramatic momentum as the group works out a social-media strategy and debates potential clickbait. But Mr. Ozon’s film is notable for the range of its concerns — the Church’s belief in redemption versus the legal requirement of punishment; the power of forgiveness versus the need for revenge; and before and after everything else, the special pain inflicted on innocent, uncomprehending children.

Too often the film languishes as Mr. Kasdan poses Big Questions and then has his characters answer them in conversations that are so casual they seem improvised. [26 Dec 1991]

Stephen King fans will respond immediately to the atmosphere writer-director John Lee Hancock creates at the outset of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone—a world of perpetual autumn and incipient unease, a white-clapboard Maine where the chill gets into the bones and the soul.

While Ms. Gillespie can’t solve the mystery of why exactly her subject did what he did, she has created a novel kind of crime film, one aided in no small way by what seems to be the complete flight recording from Russell’s mad act. And a group of loved ones willing to listen to it.

If you're looking for an action thriller, this isn't it. The pace is deliberate, the tone is pensive, albeit punctuated by occasional violence, and the style is exceedingly lean; characters reveal themselves mainly through moral choices.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

The vision of office work that's offered up by Haiku Tunnel is as chilling as it is funny.

The script, adapted by Matt Greenhalgh from a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, is flagrantly Oedipal; almost every scene between John and his mother is sexually charged. The curse is taken off most of these encounters by Anne-Marie Duff's eloquent work in the mother's role.

Presley Chweneyagae's Tsotsi makes his presence deeply felt. In a world of heedless children wielding guns, his tale is a heartening one.

The writing sometimes collapses into overkill, but sometimes it is precisely on point.

By its end, “Misericordia” emerges as a drama by turns chilling and absurd, with some of its twists daring us toward incredulity. Yet Mr. Guiraudie’s mix of mischief-making and straight-faced conviction keeps us continuously unsettled, and continuously curious.

Kristin Scott Thomas is the best though not the only reason to see Leaving.

Munich is a Spielberg film for better and worse, a vivid, sometimes simplistic thriller in which action speaks louder than ideas.

[Cher's] never been better. [5 Jan 1988, p.22(E)]

The film succeeds on the strength of the boy, and the remarkable young actor who plays him, Kodi Smit-McPhee.

The pace is deliberate, verging on slow — Australian filmmakers aren't keen on short takes or quick cuts — but the content is constantly surprising.

The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.