For a movie with such a nose for nuttiness, its human element is genuine and warm.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

The father-daughter relationship is often witty, a seduction that never ends, and sometimes exquisitely poignant, but both roles are burdened by a script that falls into disquisition on the larger subject of men and women.

I admired the leisure and intensity of this morality tale.

Approaching the glum realities of aging with an often deft and even lightly comical tone, the Spanish-language film Calle Málaga is a pleasing character study of an elderly lady who is more resourceful than she appears.

By turns chilling, mysterious and inspiring; sometimes it's all of those at once.

Mr. Fellowes, being something of a genius at briskly established plotlines and characterizations, clearly knew that a regal visit would be an ideal way to show off the best and worst of each Downton habitué.

This small-scale film has more outsize ideas than it could possibly manage. Yet Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit, a succession of arresting images and a depth of conviction that sweeps logic aside.

This is a road movie unlike any other, the comical and mystical odyssey of old Mamo (an extraordinary performance by Ismail Ghaffari), a venerated musician who heads for Iraq from exile in Kurdish Iran with a busload of his musician sons to give a concert after Saddam's fall.

Mr. Singleton is a very good storyteller, but every once in a while he stops his story cold with speeches. You can feel the audience lost interest, as though a commercial has suddenly popped on screen. [18 July 1991, p.A9(E)]

A lot of Lucky is philosophical mischief, some of it is tediously ruminative, and some moments achieve a loveliness that belies the film’s craggy desert terrain, the earthiness of its characters and even the landscape of Mr. Stanton’s body.

What makes the film very much worth seeing—in addition to Mr. Hanks dispensing his special quality of integrity from what seems to be an inexhaustible source—is Kidd’s steadfast effort to cross the divide of mistrust between him and the girl, and her opening up after unimaginable years of shutdown.

The length of his film is an essential element in Mr. Bayona’s message about desperation and hope and, dare one say it, the resilience of the spirit. The soiled, ailing, sunburned husks of men who emerge from the mountains are heroes, though they look every bit like ghosts.

Still, the essence of the film lies in the athletes' towering charm, and the nature of their journey.

Marvelously detailed and meticulously crafted, an elegant evocation of Depression-era America and its fascination with crime. What the movie lacks is any sense of elation--it’s joyless by choice.

Ms. Zenovich possesses the interviewer’s most valuable skill, knowing when to shut up.

Timing being everything in life, Risk could hardly be more of the moment.

The cast is the main attraction in Francois Ozon's witty, even touching 8 Women.

The roots are shallow, but the sequel is good-natured, high-spirited and perfectly enjoyable if you take it for what it is.

The visuals are kinetic, the pacing frenetic; the violence, or at least its aftermath, doesn’t just border on the excessive, it makes major incursions. But given the criminal milieu at hand, nothing less would have seemed plausible, or equal to the heightened, sordid sensibility Mr. Johnson creates in the film’s opening moments and maintains right up to an ending that is among the more perverse in recent memory.

This is Mr. Fogelman’s directorial debut, and an auspicious one; it feels as if he’s long been accustomed to working with actors — with exceptional actors like those he has brought together here.

The movie's distinction, however, lies in two lovely performances, and in the passion and pain of parallel lives--both girls suffering at the hands of men, both struggling to understand the brutality of the world they must share.

I did enjoy the movie's mercurial moods -- anxiety, terror, whimsical horror -- and I welcomed its confirmation that the work of the devil includes SUVs.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.

The Strays, the feature-film debut of British writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White, is an engrossing, disturbing and even novel work, though its principal influences hang around like Hamlet’s father.

Ms. McGowan has a wonderful face, and director Jenna Mattison spends a lot of time there. But the effectiveness of The Sound really comes from its atmospherics, which are rich and disturbing and a credit not just to the director but to composer Aaron Gilhuis and the people at Urban Post Production in Toronto.

In its way, it pokes at the very delicate membrane between horror and comedy.

A chance to see four terrific actresses — let’s not use the gender-neutral term in this context — having varying degrees of fun with matters of sisterhood, sex and hope in a movie that touches on mortality and holds out the prospect of later-life joy.