Alissa Wilkinson

The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.

It’s true that every documentary about a musician made with their involvement functions, on some level, as a piece of marketing, an attempt to write the narrative of their life. That mode can get a bit wearying. But when the results are this endearing, it feels like a little celebration instead.

Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly.

What we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way.

Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word.

The End is about one version of the end of the world, and about how the people who could have prevented it might feel when they get there. But to watch it is to think about yourself, at least if you have a conscience, and to ponder the sort of cognitive dissonance you live with every day.

The film gets better whenever Stiller recedes into the background, but the movie’s insistence on Michael’s redemption story as the main narrative thread hurts it. It’s impossible to care too much about this pompous, uptight, strangely boring guy. Especially because we know how his story will end.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks us to enter a family’s story, but also to acknowledge that we are part of it. We’re extras in the background, no matter how far away we are. For Rasoulof, the world he’s created is far from theoretical. The consequences have been, too.

It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.

What’s great about the movie is its performances. John David Washington brings fire to his role, matched by Deadwyler’s coolly furious resolve. Jackson’s role has him mostly observing, but he’s a magnetic presence. And Fisher is phenomenal, embodying a character who seems oblivious and a little dense but, it turns out, is more than meets the eye. Still, as a film, The Piano Lesson is the weakest of the Denzel Washington-produced Pittsburgh Cycle.

It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.

I think the real story of The World According to Allee Willis isn’t just about Willis: It’s about the community that she formed, the friendships and relationships she maintained, and the way that art, imagination and love can make a life.

“Martha” feels like a far more comprehensible key to Stewart — who has been the subject of speculation, fascination, jokes that turn cruel and plenty of schadenfreude — than half a century of media attention has managed to find.

Nothing about Dream Team is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea.

We’re drawn into their world, and that’s what makes the “Youth” movies so appealing: the takes are very long, and we get to dwell inside the frame.

Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker.

There’s a wealth of lovely performances in Bird, including Adams, who holds the film together by slowly taking on tenderness as it progresses. But the two poles of the movie are Rogowski and Keoghan, who radiate precisely opposite energies.

In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.

The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.

Most interestingly, we listen in on young Beninese as they discuss the wider repercussions in an open forum. . . It’s a rich conversation that rapidly lays out the controversies and bigger issues at stake.

A rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.

The world that Elliot creates is so strangely beautiful that it’s fun to look at. Plus, the end of “Memoir of a Snail” redeems its flights into tedium by giving us a reason to have watched them.

“Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.

What Kendrick’s film smartly weaves into the narrative is the many ways in which women are conditioned to put up with men because, as the saying goes, they’re afraid of being killed.

This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.

For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.

The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.

Piece By Piece sidesteps feeling rote by doing something that seems, frankly, bizarre. That it works at all is a product of the quirky form fitting the subject well. It’s chaotic, sure. But that’s the fun of it.