Director Lu Chuan ("The Missing Gun," "Kekexili") is not a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, nor is he a troublemaker.

Audiences of the new fashion documentary “The September Issue” looking for a Prada-wearing Devil are likely to be disappointed.

One of the most highly anticipated movies of the year, “Coco Avant Chanel” is not a film about fashion per se, but instead it is about a pioneering woman in the fashion industry.

Once in a while, a movie arrives at such a perfect moment, its message and meaning so finely tuned to the current zeitgeist, that it seems less a cinematic event than a cosmic convergence, willed into being by a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars.

Atop the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the high-wire walker Philippe Petit is an epic poem in motion. In "Man on Wire," the site of his accomplishment -- he walked back and forth between the towers eight times in his 1974 acrobatic feat -- registers, in its own balletic way, as potently as King Kong climbing to the top of the Empire State Building.

Christmas has come early this year, yet with such repetitive undertones that you might not be sure whether you were glad to see it again.

The 1980 suicide of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the British rock quartet Joy Division, is a poignant side plot in 2002’s raucous survey of the Manchester music scene, “24 Hour Party People.”

On Dec. 8, 1995, 43-year-old Jean-Dominique Bauby, the stylish, high-living editor of French Elle magazine, suffered a stroke and went into a coma, awaking 20 days later having lost his power of speech, able to move only his left eyelid.