An uncompromising, emotionally draining drama that presents the urbanization of New Zealand's Maori as a cultural disaster, one that is mirrored in the shards of a shattering marriage. This explosive first film by director Lee Tamahori focuses on the transformation of a battered wife, but its story is fueled by the machismo of the disenfranchised Maori male.

Offers an unusually astute glimpse of power at its most alluring and corrosive.

The film brings a more human understanding of a figure so noteworthy he has earned mononym status for the title. Though we only see him in still images and old performance videos in Ailey, he seems much closer.

Glatzer captures the visceral charge of moving wildly in tandem with another person, often in improvised bouts that forge strong bonds between partners, if only for a few minutes.

Written by Rita Kalnejais, based on her own 2012 play, Babyteeth works precisely because it refuses to accommodate expectation.

Filmed with dynamism and propulsive, energetic flair, The Jungle Book allows viewers the vicarious pleasure of sidling up to magnificent (sometimes mangy) beasts as if they were household pets.

With its unflinching portrayal of cynical school officials and their corrupt symbiosis with the sports teams and Greek systems to which they’re beholden, The Hunting Ground is, at its most basic, a damning indictment of entitlement and impunity.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

A remarkable film from Romania.

One of the excellent attributes of Shut Up & Sing is that it lets the cards fall where they may and really doesn't try to spin the Chicks themselves. It's quite possible, then, to watch the film and come to the conclusion that Maines has a big mouth. Spectacularly talented, the young singer is also a spectacular blowhard.

What makes Miss Sharon Jones most captivating is how its subject, in spite of hardship, remains a magnetic stage presence.

Filmmaker Clint Bentley makes a tender, visually poetic feature directorial debut with “Jockey,” a closely observed portrait of a man embarking on the downslope of his career.

As Frank Galvin, the misbegotten inspirational hero of Sidney Lumet's imbecilic courtroom melodrama The Verdict, Paul Newman takes sanctimonious satisfaction in impersonating the sorriest excuse for a crusading attorney since Anne Bancroft misrepresented Margaux Hemingway in "Lipstick." [17 Dec 1982, p.F12]

Vallée, working with a lean, lively script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, neatly avoids excess, letting Woodroof’s terrific yarn stand on its own and getting out of the way of his extraordinary actors, who channel the story without condescension or manipulative cheats.

Better Man, a delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey, chronicles the singer’s tumultuous rise, celebrates his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits, and gives the project of ensconcing Williams in the hearts and minds of the global masses another go.

It’s hard to say what is most difficult to digest about Prophet’s Prey.

A film about war and reconciliation, is deeply Christian, a study in humility and the moral uncertainty at the core of the Christian message.

An absorbing primer in one of the most fascinating chapters in American social history.

What's most fascinating are the movie's larger questions about why some people tell impossible lies -- and why others believe them.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.

What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.

How fitting that Firth should carry A Single Man, a movie of quiet but potent emotional power, perfectly suited to his singular gifts.

This conflict between love and ambition is finely depicted as far as it goes, and the period setting, in a time when birth control problems made the choice of marriage a commitment to unlimited family life, could have reinforced the poignancy of the choice. But because the character has been thinly written, her decision seems selfishly arbitrary. [14 March 1980, p.17]

From the first frames of The Color of Money, you feel, almost physically, the presence of a man singularly obsessed with the romance of movies. In this movie, Martin Scorsese enters a new period in an already extraordinary career. It would be hard to exaggerate the complex pleasure and wonderment that The Color of Money conveys.

Together, under the assured direction of first-time feature filmmaker Oren Moverman, these three actors tell a story that is at once hard-hitting and bizarrely gentle.

Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle. It also examines the hyperbolic industry of instant celebrity and ultimately shows us the complex algebraic equation that is Daniel Johnston's life.

An elegant, heartbreaking fable, equal parts Shakespearean tragedy, neo-Western and mob movie but without the pretension of those genres.