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.