Movies

"Rosewater"—set in an Iranian prison—is painful, poignant, at times funny and humanizing. "Nightcrawler"—a monster movie that wants to be a social indictment—isn't.

The reduction of character and motive to diagrammable banalities seems of a piece with this film’s lack of interest in creating anything resembling human emotion.

A mystery story, a portrait of marriage, and—more than anything else—a satire on big American expectations.

What’s quietly revelatory about 'Love Is Strange' is that its creators didn’t feel the need to turn it into a social-protest document.

Both 'buddy' films chart the male temperament as mortality heaves into view, and protagonists live in a world where religion seems to have vanished.