Firing off a deluge of immigrant-hardship vignettes with the thudding consistency of a tennis-ball machine, Under the Same Moon presents a genre somewhat at odds with itself: the gritty fable. Read more>>

Poignant in a way that pokes and prods — a little uncertain of itself — until it pierces through, The Band’s Visit is a truly lovely film, as patient and generous with its characters as viewers should be with its delicately latent politics and occasional over-love of eccentric tableaux. Read more>>

Set in Beirut, the title refers to the heated sugar and lemon juice used instead of hot wax in the Si Belle salon, a hub for the five women (including Labaki, who plays the owner, Layale) whose relationships to men, themselves and each other provide the film with its intimate, huge-hearted look at life in a city notorious for conflict and contradiction. Read more>>

Refreshingly blunt utterances keep “Praying With Lior,” Ilana Trachtman’s documentary about a boy with Down syndrome about to have his Bar Mitzvah, from dissolving into gunky disingenuousness. Read more>>

Scene for scene, Orthodox is somewhat uneven — for many of the intriguing set pieces (who knew there was so much girlish drama involved in fight weigh-ins?) there are alternately dull sequences Read more>>

Gibney, best known for his last chronicle of another Great American Meltdown, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, begins his wide-ranging takedown of the Bush administration’s military policies on torture and interrogation with the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver caught up in an all-too-common intelligence boondoggle. Read more>>