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.

Unfortunately, the climax comes with more than a half hour to go, and the film, losing its focus on Jane Jacobs, turns its attention to the urban-renewal plague that devastated cities across America.

In its agreeably eccentric spirit, Tommy’s Honour evokes the Scottish comedies of Bill Forsyth; here it’s oddballs among the handmade, undimpled golf balls.

The payoff is sneakily profound — sneakily because this small-scale drama grabs you when you least expect it, often with the help of the dog.

A quietly transfixing drama.

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

One of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies I’ve seen in years.

Kasper Collin’s splendid documentary feature starts with an event that shook the jazz world.

In a production based on a nonfiction book by Diane Ackerman, a brilliantly specific story has been reduced to conventional drama and synthetic heroics.

For a film that moves at a deliberate pace, Frantz grows remarkably involving; Mr. Ozon is a formidable storyteller, as he has previously demonstrated in such films as “Under the Sand” and “Swimming Pool.”

A pitch-black, blood-soaked comedy and phenomenal first feature by Alice Lowe, who also stars as Ruth, the pregnant heroine.

For all its flashy trappings, weighty ruminations and zero-gravity floatings aboard the International Space Station, Life turns out to be another variant of “Alien,” though without the grungy horror and grim fun. In space no one can hear you snore.

[Kore-eda's] latest film, though, has a special warmth and grace. It unfolds slowly, sneaks up on big questions about intertwined mysteries of family and personal destiny, and pretty much answers them, though the biggest question for Ryota is whether he’ll be changed by what he learns.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

The ghost story gets to be silly, and wants to have it both ways, as ghost stories often do, on the question of whether various signs from beyond the grave are real or imagined.... Yet Ms. Stewart’s portrayal has the ring of truth and the urgency of terror.

This French-language horror film is shockingly well made for a debut feature: Julia Ducournau, who wrote and directed it, really knows her stuff and is clearly bound for mainstream success, if that’s where her appetites take her.

I’ve gone on about the creatures because there’s so little to say about the humans, who, in their turn, have little to say about the creatures, because the writers haven’t written enough lively dialogue.

To those who, like me, are ever so slightly beyond the young-adult cohort, it may seem silly and derivative but sometimes affecting as well, a high-school pageant version of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

After seeing The Shack — after enduring, that is, its 132 minutes of blissed-out New Age religiosity — I’ve become a believer. I believe there is no role Octavia Spencer can’t play with convincing feeling and an impeccably straight face.

The R-rating does represent truth in advertising, and it has conferred a kind of liberation on what strikes me, a violence-averse moviegoer at heart, as the best superhero film to come out of the comic-book world, and I’m not forgetting Tim Burton’s “Batman” or Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.”

Magical is not an oversize word for this exquisite film.

Get Out starts with a great title and a promising idea — a black man’s fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb. Then it delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance.

The computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

A godawful gothic horror flick.

An act of expiation, Land of Mine is honorable, harrowing and stirring.

What’s unusual, and admirable, about the film is its close concern with colonialist machinations that make Seretse and Ruth the pawns of implacable power. What’s unfortunate is that Ms. Asante’s direction and Mr. Hibbert’s script aren’t up to the dramatic task; the pace grows slower as the couple’s plight deepens.

An enchanting documentary by Ceyda Torun, operates on three levels, and we’re not speaking metaphorically here.