Alissa Wilkinson

Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place.

There’s a reasonably OK movie somewhere inside Animal Farm, but it’s drowning in ideological confusion, which wouldn’t be such a big deal — one rarely asks children’s cartoons featuring talking pigs to be wellsprings of thoughtful political theorizing — except that this is “Animal Farm.”

While his celebrity has largely faded, Bernstein’s Wall makes the case that his charge to artists to lead the way in culture is timeless, and more vital than ever.

I was left befuddled about the movie’s message and, indeed, what I was supposed to make of the whole thing. That’s frustrating, and it’s not the sort of feeling you want to have when leaving a movie like this; it overwhelms whatever impression the rest of the movie might have left.

Here, what we are left with is a string of musical set pieces, like a greatest hits album, performed ably by the stars — in his debut role, Jaafar Jackson dances like he is possessed by his uncle’s talent — but strung together in repetitive false-note ways that are insulting both to audience and subject.

Even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place.

An exquisite debut feature.

Goodman’s career is fascinating on its own merits, and the film is full of footage of her doggedly chasing down politicians and sources who clearly would prefer to control their own story. But more important, the movie gradually explores the fundamentals of journalism that she believes in and passes on to colleagues.

I have rarely enjoyed watching two actors’ rapport the way I loved watching McKellen and Coel; it could have gone on forever and not been long enough.

Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.

"The Cathedral” embodies everything that’s lovely about [Grashow's] work — its impishness, its openheartedness and its darkness, too — and Jimmy & the Demons captures all of that with a spirit that matches its subject.

There’s a flat empty nothingness to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, even more than its flat empty predecessor, and that’s a huge bummer.

The result is less clarifying than bewildering, though it’s often very interesting.

It’s funny and beautiful and lively.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.

It’s a properly scary movie, the kind that merits watching in a theater with a good sound system (or headphones in a dark room, at home). And “Undertone” provides terrific evidence of what a filmmaker can do even under constraint. The most powerful tool in an artist’s toolbox just might be the audience’s imagination.

It’s a fable, really, with a science-nerd edge and some charming animal friends. You could do a whole lot worse at the movies.

With In the Blink of an Eye, Stanton is juggling quite a bit, including many landscapes to create and a lot of imagination for exploration. While the visuals are not exactly eye-popping, the movie is plenty serviceable.

It’s a fan’s dream, to be sure. But in getting so close to a man who has so often been turned into a caricature, “EPiC” goes beyond just the concert: We enjoy both the performance and the man who loved nothing more than to perform.

It’s actually when the film returns to the main, quest-driven plot that the film lags, particularly around the middle; there’s just not enough interest among the team members and the action to sustain narrative tension, and the film feels like it loses its drive.

It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick.

Kennedy sticks largely to conventional documentary techniques for Queen of Chess, which is not a bad thing: It’s a good story, well told, and Polgar makes for an interesting subject.

Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.

The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.

The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.

What does work about H Is for Hawk (aside from Mabel, whose presence is enough to recommend the film) is its refusal to make grief facile or tidy, or to proclaim that healing must look the same for everyone.

Though Seeds is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.

DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.

Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge.

This is what The Plague does best: Its storytelling inhabits a world so heated and confusing to its characters — that is, burgeoning adolescence — that it’s sometimes unclear whether things are actually happening or just in Ben’s head.

That it may not be to everyone’s taste, or to yours, feels almost besides the point. When an artist takes a swing this colossal and stays true to their vision in every way, the resulting work deserves respect, and is always worth seeing.

If you’re an aficionado of ’70s cinema, there’s probably not much new here. The films covered are certainly a murderer’s row of masterpieces, but they’re familiar to cinephiles. Yet despite its lack of depth, there’s value to Breakdown: 1975 as an introduction to an era, particularly for younger people or newer movie lovers who might relish learning about the films of the time and the ways they weave into history.

Borrowing on certain familiar erotic thriller tropes — let’s all point and stare at the cray-cray lady — it does some back flips and corkscrews appropriate for our time and lands with a cathartic smack.

Ella McCay is a bizarre movie that would have worked better if it went all-in as an homage to another era. Since we won’t get to see that version, you’ll just have to buckle up and enjoy the very strange ride.

It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.

Inevitably, the results do not quite cohere narratively or tonally. But the film still has a strange, old-fashioned charm. You can’t really imagine anyone other than Clooney playing Jay, but Sandler is equally good; he brings a pathos to Ron, a man who has perhaps loved not wisely but too well.

Some scenes are remarkably intimate — Nikola in his house on a stormy night drying off the stork, who falls asleep on his shoulder — and some are sweeping, which makes it an amazing portrait of a place on many scales.

What really makes Wake Up Dead Man work is that Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks.

Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along.

The truth is that Shackleton isn’t settling for one mode; he’s working in a bunch of them at once, mixing affection and critique. Just like any true fan would.

It’s hard to imagine anyone but Edgerton in this role. Though he’s a prolific actor, he’s still underestimated; he’s at his most superb when his manner is gentle, and he’s capable of doing so much with so little.

Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.

It’s all jocular and surface-level, but it’s also not trying to be anything more than old-fashioned blockbuster entertainment — neither overly serious nor, on occasion, allergic to a bit of sentimentality.

Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk is not just a document of a life and a hope extinguished. It is also the best way to hear from Hassouna. And it’s a film about crossing borders; we get to see just a little of what she saw.

Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.

Of course, you could argue that any documentary tells its story as much with what it omits as with what it includes. But by letting the news footage, speech clips and documents “speak,” the transformation of the rhetoric is undeniable, as are some of the causes. The tale is not flattering, but it is illuminating.

Ballad of a Small Player contains a great story, but it’s bogged down by its trappings. Perhaps it just got a little too greedy.

Lo’s construction of each person’s story grants them dignity and compassion. And their agreement at the end speaks volumes about what they saw in the film, too.

Really, though, the reason to watch Bugonia is its leads.

The way to enjoy Blue Moon — and I think it’s terrifically enjoyable, despite the bright thread of melancholy running down the middle — is to settle into the theatricality, especially Hawke’s performance.

Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters.

After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”

Ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”

This isn’t just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness. Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.

Johnson’s performance is the magnetic center of the film, and unless you’re a huge fan of watching this kind of fighting, it’s also the whole reason to watch the movie.

There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.

James has a great capacity to pull fragility and strength together, and her performance is the movie’s backbone. The movie itself is both shakier and shallower.

Lost in the Jungle can’t really explain how the children survived, or how, ultimately, they were rescued. Miracles and mysteries happen in the jungle. What the film does elucidate, in rich and tense storytelling, is that no headline story like this is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.

Streamlined a little, it would have made for a rich text. But as it is, it’s too much to wade through.

It’s a compelling history, one that’s especially vital in a time when irony and satire can be hard to pin down. Oliphant is the vehicle for the story, but there’s a bigger point here: that American politics, in particular, are built on a rich heritage of protest, of challenging authority, and that cartooning has been a part of that from the start.

Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.

I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault.

Meddeb keeps her focus on several young Sudanese activists. It’s a wise choice, creating an intimate portrait of their dreams and fears.

It takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart.

I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just “important” or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.

By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.

The film does not fully succeed, though that’s a tall order for anyone. Too many things need wrapping up by the end, so the concluding rhythm drags. There’s just too much to say, and that always leads to saying less than you might want.

Harvest, which takes place over one week’s time, is gorgeous and strange and a bit winding, though not unpleasantly so.

“2000 Meters” is bruisingly intimate nonfiction.

To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.

Shari & Lamb Chop is a charming introduction to a remarkable artist and the characters she created, which have endured across generations because they reflect the playfulness at the heart of their creator.

Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature.

It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.

I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful.

As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.

By those standards, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.

If the franchise wants to be more than a shell of its former self, it’s going to need to recapture the wonder so many felt as kids, or adults, when faced with something so beautifully grand as a dinosaur.

Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.

It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise.

The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.

Deaf President Now! skillfully draws the lines for all viewers. It’s not just a story about a moment in history: It’s also about the ways the movement for deaf education led to the broader disability rights arguments, and how everyone’s rights depend on everyone else’s.

The film skirts gimmicks to go in a more tricky and unsettling direction. It’s an almost soulful portrait of the artist under capitalism, rather than another exposé on robotics and artificial intelligence.

These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.

Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.

It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.

It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.

It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at.

This is the kind of relatively pedestrian musician documentary that’s intended mostly for fans, who will encounter plenty of nostalgia. It’s a vulnerable glimpse at an artist figuring out what the creative life looks like in a world that keeps changing.

The Legend of Ochi is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses.

The Wedding Banquet is so charming, and then so unexpectedly moving, that its strengths eventually outweigh the bits of mess.

It’s a sweet-tempered film that celebrates the animals we love and seems to have a secondary purpose, too: to convince viewers to support and even develop a love for animal rescue.

It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)

Comedy was not really his subject. Laughter wasn’t either. Instead, a few interviewees suggest, it was time — a part of existence we normally take for granted. Kaufman had a preternatural ability to remain unperturbed by time passing, even when his audience became disgruntled, hostile or upset.

As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.

Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.

Art for Everybody — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters.

Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.