Well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.

The vicious-cycle narrative is familiar, but For Ahkeem comes uncomfortably close at times to crossing the line between shining a light on a problem and exploiting one, despite the filmmakers’ good intentions.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest. [U.S. theatrical release]

Kids for Cash proves that the abuse was both more nuanced and more tragic than the public understood.

It’s a creative, fresh take on a story that is much more complex than your standard fairy tale.

A dexterously balanced killer thriller by the idiosyncratic Frears, whose every scene becomes a matter of life and death.

Peppering “Norman” with obliquely mordant observations about Middle East politics, Cedar effortlessly propels the narrative into a sweetly pensive character study of a familiar archetype, which he invests with an angel’s share of humanity and heart.

Lucas is about as likable as this kind of movie ever gets.At the heart of Lucas is an interesting idea -- a Woody Allen movie for kids, with a bespectacled, nerdy hero -- that never gets developed. Still, director David Seltzer has kept it low-key, sweet and personal -- it's like a nice "Afterschool Special."

A portrait of a hero.

Relentlessly funny satire.

Even at its most daft and infectiously ditzy, Mistress America is a sharp, aware and surpassingly kind portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.

Here are old people in all the magnificence of their elderliness. The movie doesn't pretend like getting old is any fun. But it's about the transcendental power of -- well, yes, music; and each of these folks has a talent whose expression is a fuel to survive.

Depp possesses one of the finest speaking voices in the business - a nimble, mellifluous instrument that can go from sexy growl to fey warble in no seconds flat.

What’s most satisfying about the movie is getting to know Ali and Ava separately. They’re endowed with warmth, depth and believability by Akhtar and Rushbrook, veteran supporting actors who are rarely cast in leading roles. Ali and Ava may not be entirely convincing as lovers, but they’re both exceptionally likable as individuals.

A kind of gravitational pull emanates from Aubrey Plaza as the title character in Emily the Criminal, a passably diverting crime thriller where, in place of a moral center, Plaza delivers a performance that is entertainingly blackhearted.

Beneath those puppet-headed antics, and true to its title, Frank is improbably, disarmingly honest.

There are a great many movies about the tragic experience of the Jews during the Second World War, but only a handful as passionate, as subtly intelligent, as universal as this one. In Europa Europa, Agnieszka Holland tackles a great theme and, in the process, has made a great movie.

The story and cinematography are gritty, but the portraits of these characters are impressively human.

Director Philip Kaufman and producer Robert Solo cleverly entwine such elements as disorienting low-angle shots, an ominously pulsating soundtrack and eerie gloom with the tried-and-true plot and come up with a tight thriller. [29 Dec 1978, p.20]

The greater charm of Tin Men is in its affectionate portrayal of small-time hucksters who gloat over classic scams (like cutting seven inches out of the middle of a yardstick so the square footage will be higher). In its own way, the film is a bittersweet drama, a sort of Glengarry Glen Ross without the vitriol.

Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

Tornatore’s tendency toward information overload is balanced by a clear affection for his subject — the film treats Morricone with the tenderness of a close friend, insisting that we see him for more than the melodies that made him famous.

This quietly odd and hilarious tale is a bit like a Japanese version of the popular BBC comedy series "The Office" or perhaps the "Dilbert" comic strip at its peak.

A wild, inventive ride through the unconscious, by way of Art History 101 and An Introduction to Film Tropes. The story of a famous psychoanalyst struggling with his Oedipal demons with the help of some hardened burglars isn’t a story at all, really, but a decidedly rickety scaffold on which Krstic can hang his images, an array of ecstatic references to the painters and directors who have inspired him.

An instructive account of the perils of attempting to privatize decrepit public utilities in countries with stagnant economies.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

Written and directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond with superb control and insight, My Little Sister never goes precisely where the audience expects, as the filmmakers dole out crucial information at well-timed intervals, illuminating the pieces of Lisa and Sven’s past that have brought them to this life-or-death point.

An absorbing, illuminating film.

Jarmusch likes to make movies that are slow and desultory and unresolved, and to beat him over the head with his vision would be unfair. In Down by Law, he's made that kind of movie, but he's worked from the outside in. He's made a Jim Jarmusch film instead of just making a film; his self-consciousness leaves you at arm's length.

It's beautiful. I loved it. And it broke my heart.

[Kurzel] delivers another warning in the form of a timely American crime story — one that, arriving in theaters a month after the U.S. election, many will deem too late.

The Punk Singer, like the best documentaries, captures more than just its subject, fascinating though she may be. Anderson manages to capture the feel of an era and the excitement surrounding a fresh feminist voice.

Despite small but powerful gestures in the finale, it leaves the audience feeling just as immobilized and powerless as its characters. Labaki chose the title Capernaum because the word was often used to mean “chaos” in French literature. That’s precisely what she presents to us, with precious little relief in sight.

Manages to be both engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.

Elizabeth Olsen delivers an utterly transfixing turn as the title character of this chilling psychological thriller.

There are moments in Dina that invite viewers to wonder whether Santini and Sickles aren’t veering into voyeurism, such as when Dina presents Scott with a copy of “The Joy of Sex” and proceeds to have a conversation about masturbation and other matters.

The wine Coogan and Brydon are opening this time may lack some of the novel fizz of the first one, but The Trip to Italy is like most vacations: a few bumps here and there, but over all too quickly.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

The picture seems muted, the flower's petals a little brown at the edges.

Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.

Warmhearted and slightly edgy seriocomedy, these sisters experience some pretty entertaining ups and downs. Entertaining, that is, for people who appreciate irony.

Well-made, if rather predictable, new-age melodrama.

In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.

Testament to the emergence of a visually masterful filmmaker, capable of ingenious, low-tech special effects.

Through some astonishing archival footage and perceptive commentary from Who guitarist Pete ­Townshend, the filmmaker puts the band in its complicated context as both reflector and creator of the postwar British teenage gestalt.

As a winsome glance back, and as a piece of artistic preservation, Stan & Ollie would be enjoyable enough. But it becomes truly transcendent in the hands of John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, who play Ollie and Stan with intelligence and spirit that go beyond their own uncanny physical performances.

This crafty sociological thriller, set amid the pristine townhouses and lawns of a quiet Reykjavik suburb, builds slowly but surely into a film that feels utterly of a piece with a much wider world.

In the end, police descend on the block at the very moment their presence becomes irrelevant. They misinterpret everything; locals watch as they blame all the wrong people. Soon their flashing lights will drive away, and the block will go back to taking care of itself the best it can.

The Wolf of Wall Street remains one-note even at is most outré, an episodic portrait of rapaciousness in which decadence escalates into debauchery escalates into depravity — but, miraculously, not death.

It's a story with serious human drama that will make you think a little differently the next time you watch your favorite team take the field.

The result is a panorama of European radicalism. Depending on your politics, you may think "long live the revolution" or "curse the day the CIA ended its assassination program."

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

Dark Horse is earnest, sweet and told with sentimentality, featuring shots of horses frolicking in fields set against beautiful string music by Anne Nikitin. Surprisingly, the effect isn’t melodramatic or overbearing, but disarming and endearing.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

This lively, intriguing and insistently humanistic flight of fancy — imagined conversations between hard-line conservative Pope Benedict XVI and his more progressive successor, Pope Francis — brims with wit, warmth and some tantalizing what-ifs. Whether the fact that it’s mostly pure speculation will get in the way of the audience’s enjoyment will depend on each viewer’s threshold for artistic license.

A mesmerizing documentary.

Trinca delivers a marvelously unfussy performance, rendering her complex character gradually, along with the effects of the opposing forces that tear at her.

A weak handshake of a movie, it is slightly repellent -- hardly gripping, much less knuckle-whitening. This "Psycho" for fatsos is as self-aware as it is styleless.

In spirit, and sheer joie de vivre, it's everything the movie business should aspire to. Win Win exemplifies movies the way they oughtta be.

It's the moral journey of Nolte's character that is the real story in Clean, but Assayas instead focuses on the manipulative habits of an addict, resulting in a mannered study of narcissism and self-pity.

Meryl Streep teams with director Fred Schepisi for "A Cry in the Dark," a compelling account of the media witch hunt and subsequent trial of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian mother accused of murdering her 9-week-old daughter Azaria.

What elevates Heaven Knows What above other run-of-the-mill wallows in aimlessness and self-destructive compulsion is Arielle Holmes.

Unfortunately, a good deal of Touch the Music"is devoted to vacuous interviews with Glennie, who seems positively incapable of saying anything substantial. Nor is most of the music very good.

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

The movie is pure pro-choice agitprop, as it tracks Homer's conversion to the cause of choice and posits the heroism of the abortionist. Pro-lifers will hate it on that point alone.

Janet McTeer doesn't imitate Mary Jo Walker, and she doesn't act her. She becomes her. It's almost spooky.

Demonstrates that a movie need not be good to be cool.

All canapes and haute bourgeoisie, it is a smart comedy of conversation, like "My Dinner With Andre" but with eight place settings.

Even when it doesn’t intend to, the Netflix film makes a strong case that people are, on the whole, no good. It also notes the many hurtful ways that Fyre’s failures are not just fodder for laughs; the actual suffering continues.

The French provocateur Catherine Breillat gets her kicks with unnerving tales of sexual coercion, but a clothed, close-up first kiss in “Last Summer” may be her most excruciating to date.

Hytner has filled the cast with good actors, but he's used them in obvious ways. Day-Lewis is not required to be anything but noble. Allen is such a purse-mouthed wife that you see why her husband ran to Ryder's nubile temptress (Hytner keeps turning Allen sideways, as if to emphasize that she has no chest). Ryder might as well have S-L-U-T tattooed on her forehead. None of these performers is bad, but what they're doing is shallow and ultimately uninteresting.

The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.

The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

Like rubbernecking motorists, we can't help but watch with lurid fascination.

Doesn't progress or deepen, it just gets weirder, and to no good end.

Interspersing "real" people with professional actors, Linklater creates a vivid, gossipy Greek chorus that serves as a kind of collective unreliable narrator -- an altogether appropriate stance given the moral gray zone the sweetly confounding Bernie inhabits.

Chasing Ice aims to accomplish, with pictures, what all the hot air that has been generated on the subject of global warming hasn't been able to do: make a difference.

Wiig has the natural beauty and self-deprecating expressiveness it takes to be a star comedienne; she spends much of Bridesmaids looking like a slightly girlier version of Lucinda Williams.

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

The Invisible Woman is less a conventional love story than a wise, often troubling contemplation of myriad modern impulses, from the lure of celebrity and public acclaim to the compartmentalizing of identity and the gender politics of Great Man-ism.

Things are never exactly what they seem here — but there’s a deeper, more authentic story Reitman and Cody are interested in telling, even when — maybe especially when — the film veers toward fantasy. If Tully is a movie that cheats, even lies to us a little bit, it’s to get at a more real and recognizable truth.

Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.

The Muppets is both a delightful family film about the Muppets and a winking, self-referential satire about how lame the Muppets are.

The movie sometimes dillydallies, but the unhurried rhythms ultimately have a hypnotic effect.

Handsomely filmed, intelligently written, accented with just a dash of outright hokum, Darkest Hour ends a year already laden with terrific films about the same subject — including the winsome comedy-drama “Their Finest” and Christopher Nolan’s boldly visual interpretive history “Dunkirk” — and ties it up with a big, crowd-pleasing bow.

In The Automat, Hurwitz and writer Michael Levine trace the rise and fall of Horn & Hardart, illuminating not just a surprisingly compelling corporate history, but a facet of American culture that feels both brimmingly optimistic and thoroughly extinct.

Surprisingly absorbing film.

Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.

A densely plotted, visually dynamic post-apocalyptic thriller.

What you get for your entertainment dollar in Lady Vengeance is Korean director Chan-wook Park's brilliantly orchestrated story of how Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae ) got her groove back.

Even if its most ironic humor will sail over the heads of very little ones, Enchanted is that rare comedy that will appeal to the whole family.

Strikes several beautiful and lingering chords about the human condition, but the notes of the music ultimately never come together to form a coherent song.

It's an intriguing experience.

Kitano the filmmaker makes sure that everything is beautiful, from the wonderful colors and passing tableaux to the intricate fighting choreography. This blind swordsman, you realize, has vision to spare.

One wishes the same wit and energy had gone into the story. That's Shrek 2 in a nutshell -- very pretty to look at, very hard to care for.

Obstreperous, male-bashing pain in the patoot.