Alan Scherstuhl

Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.

The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.

Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.

[A] strange, singular heartbreaker of a film about life still flourishing in the most inhospitable conditions.

Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.

Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.

The movie is revealing, wrenching, and important, a reminder that what feels wrong in our gut—the effort to turn free-roaming and unknowable beasts into caged vaudevillians—is always worth investigating.

Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.

Even if you know this history already, A.K.A. Doc Pomus is vital and endearing, a celebration of a great artist, a great character, and the universality of great pop.

Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.

For all the hurtling plot, and its occasional workaday scenecraft, Burning Bush proves an engrossing historical drama, low-key but in its final moments devastating.

Jenkins (director of The Savages and Slums of Beverly Hills) is always more interested in emotional truth than she is in laughs. Throughout Private Life’s tense 124 minutes, she continually achieves both.

This is a haunting puzzle of a movie, one to pick at, to unpeel, to see a second time through eyes that have adjusted to it. It's also alive with tender, tremulous feeling.

To watch Honnold think through each ledge of his climbs can stop the heart; to watch him navigate human emotion might melt it.

Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.

Mike Birbiglia's Don't Think Twice stands as the best, most revealing film about comedy people and one of the best about artistic collaboration. It's a boisterous and sensitive work of many facets.

What director Knight excels at is continually inventive framing and composition, at suggesting, through layers of window and reflected traffic, the mental state of Locke, the hero.

Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.

Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love.

Director James Ponsoldt gives us long, loose, single-shot courtship scenes, each a marvel of staging and performance.

The movie, wry and melancholy, doesn't linger over its artistry.

This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.

Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is a legitimate stunner, a river-trip that will mesmerize and jack with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day.

The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.

It's a work of community portraiture that slowly develops into collective drama

Faraut’s film doesn’t just put us courtside — it steeps us in the legend’s boiling mind.

A simple, solid, deeply affecting film.

Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a surprise.