'Spotlight' portrays the Globe’s reporters as heroes, but theirs is a workaday heroism without flourishes or frills. 'Truth,' by contrast, is soaked in personality.

'Selma' dramatizes one moment in the civil-rights movement when Martin Luther King, wracked by doubts and intimations of mortality, could have put his goals on hold.

Jennifer Kent’s "The Babadook" is a horror film that abjures cheap thrills and builds its terrors securely atop a base of all-too-familiar human pain.

"Room" is a work of skill, with an interesting shift that says as much about the differences between literature and cinema as it does about the talents involved.

In 'The End of the Tour,' James Ponsoldt addresses the life—and death—of David Foster Wallace, served as the Platonic ideal for a generation of younger writers.

The footage once used to exploit the Winehouse miseries have been carefully sequenced by director Asif Karpadia so that they bring her humanity home to the viewer.

Feeling emotionally robust, moviegoer? You’d better be if you intend to see 'Leviathan,' the acclaimed Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for best foreign film.

Alex Garland's "Ex Machina" is a deceptive movie about deceptions, most of all about the very human tendency to deceive oneself in order to feel needed.

You won't see a movie more carefully premeditated than Allen's latest, which is too much like a machine, its characters more like well-oiled gears than human beings.

To hell with postmodern irony. Here are two earnest movies with straight-arrow heroes: "The Martian," with Matt Damon, and "Bridge of Spies," with Tom Hanks.