Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

As a family-approved document, In Her Own Words is celebratory rather than probing, critical or comprehensive.

[A] sometimes fascinating, often convoluted, movie.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

Omar feels as trapped and enmeshed in hopelessness as the vicious political cycle it depicts.

Maurice succeeds because [Merchant/Ivory's] trademark flatness is appropriate for the subject.

Based on the ingenious novel "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris, it keeps the nerves racing on fear-fuel until its oddly anticlimactic climax. [15 Aug 1986, p.N29]

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.

The animated comedy-adventure has a sweet and very modern message, plus strong characters. More important, the movie blends the music-minded mentality of yore with the more recent ambition (thank you, Pixar) of truly appealing to all ages.

The most cinematic of the three films. It tells its story in stark, often wordless scenes.

Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary.

Life, Animated makes fascinating points, about the power of cinema, about meeting our loved ones where they are and, as Ron says, about who gets to decide what constitutes a meaningful life.

Among the joys here are the supporting players, each with well-defined stories and quirky personalities. Cheryl Hines (HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm") and Shelly play fellow waitresses searching for their own happiness, and good ol' Andy Griffith is memorable as the curmudgeonly diner-owner who takes a shine to Jenna.

Like his other films, this one takes an admittedly slender thread of an idea — one that would make a perfectly good premise for a four-minute comic sketch — and stretches it to almost the breaking point, and sometimes beyond, twisting and intertwining it with other nonsense along the way, just for the heck of it.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.

Chabrol arranges his story with a subtle, almost clinical accumulation. And it takes close attention to the movie's seemingly innocuous details to understand his deeper purposes.

Our culture may be drifting toward the sort of calamity that Stone describes in Natural Born Killers, but the hysteria he depicts seems to come from within him. His soul is in turmoil and so he keeps trying to convince us that we're sick.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl succumbs to the same cloying too-cuteness and solipsism that often plague its glib and sentimental genre. But those limitations are leavened by the film’s lively, ultimately affecting flourishes and sprightly voice.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

Douglas Tirola’s documentary is brisk and entertaining, if not especially thoughtful.

While the movie can feel disjointed at times, bouncing around to cover so much territory, the climax of the kids’s ballroom competition makes up for any quibbles. If nothing else, it’s heartening to see the kids so transformed.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things: The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it. His Sicko, an investigation and indictment of a system choking on paperwork, greed, bad policy and countervailing goals, turns out to be a fuzzy, toothless collection of anecdotes, a few stunts and a bromide-rich conclusion.

An okay movie made nearly great by one great thing: the bravura, mercilessly watchable performance of Charlize Theron.

The effect, in this French period drama, is something like a moving pop-up book, in which characters seem to be two-dimensional cardboard cutouts come to life.

A Bigger Splash manages to infuse even the most straightforward questions with vicariously alluring ambiguity.