Andy Webster

You may not agree with every observation in Michael Singh’s documentary Valentino’s Ghost. But this engrossing examination of American perceptions of Arabs and the Arab world gets you thinking.

24 Exposures plays like an exercise. With a thin plot — the usual parade of possible killers — it falls to the actors to provide zing.

Some movies about making movies (Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” for one) are charming. The self-references here, while intriguing, approach a comic navel-gaze. Actor Martinez has a saving grace, however: Ms. Burdge.

Crisply directed by Thomas Morgan, the film depicts a succession of challenges facing Ms. Shaar, a smart, understated and tenacious entrepreneur.

It’s Fang’s transformation, embodied by Ms. Zhou’s lean, cool authority, that carries the most weight, lending the proceedings an unforced feminist dimension, and reaffirming Ms. Hui’s status as one of China’s cinematic treasures.

The graphic evidence here, in testimony on camera and in period photographs, is absolutely harrowing.

This well-made, low-key drama, written by Mr. Gay and Tomàs Aragay, offers some insights into terminal illness.

Their stories are compelling — and persuasive.

It’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet.

It taps into something universal, and very precious, about loss, art and adolescent rebellion.

A re-creation of the night, with an actress playing the screaming victim while Mr. Genovese observes, is harrowing.

Deficient even in most of its set pieces, In the Blood does Ms. Carano (and Caribbean tourism) few favors. Somebody, please give her a better script and director.

Trapped is not a balanced analysis of the abortion debate; it makes its sympathies clear. But it is a powerful and persuasive rendering of a corner of women’s health care under siege.

Its ecological concerns, nuance and occasional lyricism place it squarely within the Ghibli oeuvre but not among its masterpieces.

This movie makes you appreciate anew the one-on-one social dimension lost in the music industry’s headlong switch to digital downloads.

There’s solid acting in Childless, but mostly there are words — torrents of them.

Predictably, the film culminates in a dance competition, irresistible to behold and leading to an ending just about too pat to believe.

Thanks to his editor, Domingo González, Mr. de la Iglesia skillfully keeps these many balls in the air, a palpable affection for his players seeping through.

A skilled portrait of a literary light shadowed by his public profile. The film, written and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, tacitly suggests a reconsideration of its subject, who deserves it.

This film nimbly straddles biography and “Trek” valentine (Adam is a longtime television director), but also recounts the fraught if ultimately devoted ties between Adam and Leonard.

The film is remarkable, considering its minimal means and surprising lack of bloodshed, given the genre. Does it stay with you? A little.

It’s often said that the Irish, blessed with the gift of gab, can be splendid raconteurs. You’ll find generous evidence to that effect here. And a bit of poetry as well.

[A] deft and comprehensive documentary.

Dark corners of the immigrant experience in New York City, especially for women, are frighteningly dramatized in Ana Asensio’s suspense film Most Beautiful Island, a modest but effective writing-directing debut.

The actors are uniformly impressive, and Mr. Wheatley’s longtime cinematographer, Laurie Rose, shooting in black and white, combines stunning pastoral compositions with bursts of graphic violence punctuated by blazing flintlocks.

Its principal merit is the quiet authority of Ms. Mumtaz, who combines a mother’s passionate concern with glimmers of an awakening consciousness.

A record of a man’s tormented youth, his broad artistic impulses and the price he paid for following them.

In the film Bill Nye: Science Guy, Mr. Nye, the 1990s children’s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of “an anti-science movement” afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.

If there’s one rewarding thing about many Hong Kong action directors, it’s that they rarely dawdle in getting to what fight fans have come for: bracing shootouts and high-impact fisticuffs and footwork.

[A] fascinating documentary.

Impressive acting (especially from Mr. Suliman and Yael Abecassis as Yonatan’s mother) enhances this thoughtful drama, directed with a sure hand by Mr. Riklis, a film veteran.

Marlon Wayans’s satire “A Haunted House” got to “Paranormal” first, and for a much smaller budget delivered bigger laughs.

Much of this movie is composed of survivors who give harrowing accounts of their experiences, and their warnings about rising ethnic hatred in Europe should not be ignored. But those seeking to learn in depth about, say, the dialects and traditions of the Roma should look elsewhere.

The movie overreaches when trying to contextualize Knievel as a hero inspiring the country after Vietnam-Watergate disillusionment. He was simply an all-American self-promoter. But Being Evel largely nails his story.

Under its slick, schematic surface, this tale of aspiration and redemption at least offers moments of genuine feeling.

Mr. Liford (yet another emergent indie filmmaker from Texas) can clearly write a script, handle a camera and construct a mood. Wuss may be slight, but Mr. Liford’s sense of pitch is spot on.

An enlightening documentary.

The humor, when it isn’t overcooked, can be downright insulting or worse.

Like many tragic visionaries, Kirk Hanna lives on through his ideas long after his death.

This winning movie — directed by Daniel Ribeiro, making his feature debut — dexterously weaves the social challenges of adolescence into a story of broader self-discovery.

The possibilities are intriguing, but the characters are underdrawn, and the pacing lags.

Rarely has a movie so humorously illustrated the meaning of “frenemy.”

German Kral’s documentary Our Last Tango is a combination of things, all fascinating.

Meet the Patels is a tidy, easygoing documentary in which peripheral players prove more intriguing than its central focus.

Onni Tommila, Mr. Helander’s nephew, has an expressive face and marvelous understatement. And Mr. Jackson has never seemed so unblustery; his scenes with the younger actor have ease and humor.

While Faults glances at the narcissism of cult leaders, its most penetrating investigation is into the root emptiness within disciples, the desperate hunger to relinquish personal initiative.

You don’t have to be a boxing fan to be awed by Claressa Shields, the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the sport. But if you are, you’ll still be knocked out.

The film climaxes with a breathless escape from Gwangju, as Kim and Hinzpeter elude government vehicles with the aid of other cabdrivers. But most impressive is Mr. Song, who persuasively conveys a working stiff’s political awakening.

Mr. Sharma has created a swirling, fascinating travelogue and a stirring celebration of devotion.

Many of the passages in this gentle film may be universal, but the love here is extraordinary.

Given [Ms. Cohn] confident hand behind the camera and gift for rich female characters, you hope to see more portraits from her in the future.

The lean handsomeness and quiet authority of Mr. Jean is a perfect complement to Ms. Rodríguez’s passionate Yanelly, while the locations — and the presence of actual inmates — underscore the harsh boundaries the lovers struggle against.

Throughout, the solitary Mr. Tower maintains an unflappable refinement, dedicated, a college friend says, to “looking for some utopian possibility of living, because that’s what kept the darkness away.”

There’s much sympathy but little tension in P J Raval’s new documentary.

Breezy, intelligent, diffuse but uncluttered, Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Bikes vs Cars could be called a tale of congestion-plagued cities.

Hunter Adams’s Dig Two Graves is that rare chiller conjuring eeriness and dread without defaulting to abundant gore or flagrant nudity.

The Vessel is a modest, but not maudlin, parable of hope about mustering the strength to vigorously plunge again into life’s uncertainties after a devastating loss.

The virtues of understatement and restraint are vividly apparent in Philippe Muyl’s The Nightingale.

This record of Washington State’s battle over Initiative 502, which legalized possession of small amounts of recreational marijuana in 2012, is predictably loaded with rancor. The battle isn’t over whether pot should be legalized, but to what extent.

Mr. Wirthensohn, who has known Mr. Reay since both were models, sees Mr. Reay’s life as a metaphor for the vanishing middle class. But Mr. Reay merely comes across as an aging casualty of Manhattan fashion, vainly chasing his fortune in a fickle industry that prizes youth.

In 1993, the documentary “Visions of Light” won critical love for its overview of Hollywood’s classic cinematographers. Matt Schrader’s tidy and informative “Score” lavishes similar adoration on moviedom’s great composers.

The Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s leisurely comedy-drama The Apostate has its charms, though the story (and its hero) could benefit from a tarter approach.

Mr. D'Souza stumbles when interviewing George Obama, the president's half-brother, an activist who voluntarily lives amid squalor in Nairobi, Kenya. "Obama has not done anything to help you," Mr. D'Souza says. "He's taking care of me; I'm part of the world," George Obama replies.

Just keep your eyes on the old folks; they are where the heart — and the sweet soul music — of this movie lies.

Effective topical entertainment, we are reminded, rarely comes without creative conflict.

Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.

This documentary, coupled with Ms. Aviv’s article, addresses unresolved issues of personal autonomy versus a patient’s inability to protect herself. It will haunt you.

Mr. Garlin has such a soft touch that at times the film feels feather-light, almost devoid of emotional traction.

Mr. Romero, manifesting a self-effacing demeanor and sensible humanity, is a most agreeable raconteur.

Mr. Hosoda is skilled with fight scenes, and his settings — the pastel-hued Jutengai and the drab Shibuya, evoked at times with surveillance-camera perspectives and crowd-paranoia angles — are impressive. But the characterizations and conflicts here are strictly generic

The American demand for drugs, which feeds the cartels, is mentioned, though regrettably not expanded upon. But as a rendering of Mexico’s agonized convulsions, Kingdom of Shadows is unforgettable.

The pleasures are modest but rewarding in Bob Nelson’s character study The Confirmation.

For all its spectacle, The Fatal Encounter is wanting for profundity.

Mr. Ruffin must carry the film, projecting interior activity and suggesting information where the script (by Mr. O’Shea) does not. That he imbues the film with a weight greater than its words is a testament to his skill as an actor.

Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams may use a time-honored premise — young lovers on the lam (see: “Badlands”) — but it does so with such quiet, gently appealing assurance that it makes the template seem fresh again.

As Salinger, the formidable Chris Cooper has a brief but masterly turn, sympathetically rendering the writer as a curmudgeon defending his literary offspring.

Fact and fiction blend nicely in Tracktown.

[A] fascinating and assured documentary.

This candy-coated confection is so irresistible that you’re captivated by its sentiment even as you acknowledge its manipulations.

At 137 minutes, the film overstays its welcome with multiple concluding flourishes (and exceeds the sentiment threshold).

To its benefit, it has rich roles for, and splendid performances by, its three principal actresses. To its detriment, their characters are each in their own way pining for the same man, whose simple actions in life seem undeserving of their considerable exertions after his demise.

Toward the end, Mr. Farr employs familiar cinematic sleights of hand, but with a finely calibrated touch.

Kabbalah Me, which distinguishes between “narrow consciousness” and “expanded consciousness,” merely walks the middle ground.

Karski & the Lords of Humanity is fascinating, but Mr. Lanzmann’s efforts tower over it.

The action sequences deliver, as do the performances. You want these characters to make it, and their destinies are compelling to behold.

The movie revels in multiple film stocks (with hairs or threads often on the camera lens) and self-conscious “Last Movie” flourishes (long intervals between credits, “scene missing” title cards, a version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) while maintaining its blithe humor.

Fascinating.

Mr. Peng has charisma, though his moves are less convincing than those of an earlier Fei.... But “Legend” does offer the hefty authority of Mr. Hung, who at 64 can still — almost — hit, kick and do wire work with the best of them.

There is nothing remotely salacious about Bitter Honey, an agonizing documentary examination of polygamy in Bali, Indonesia, from the U.C.L.A. anthropologist Robert Lemelson. There is only vivid evidence of a society that, despite limp efforts at discouraging domestic abuse, remains mired in ancient patriarchy, sanctioning polygamy and, implicitly, often attendant violence.

“As I AM” rockets through its subject’s life, teeming with testimonials from the superstar producer-D.J.s Mark Ronson and Paul Oakenfold, among many others. And then it ends, leaving you spent. And wistful.

Pushy, judgmental, tart-tongued and self-obsessed, the photographer at the heart of Otis Mass’s penetrating documentary, The Incomparable Rose Hartman, is, like her snapshots, a piece of work.

The story may be slight, but the performances and ambience resonate.

Mickey Keating’s horror outing Darling manages to conjure an effectively unsettling miasma.

Mr. Klein is well served by his actors, who exude conviction, charisma and palpable ardor.

A kaleidoscopic travelogue depicting demonstrations of faith worldwide.

Though Mr. Ryoo’s taste for heightened theatricality threatens his story’s credibility at times, there is no denying his skill with a large-scale action set piece.

Len and Company...never strains for profundity. Instead, it savors observational subtleties, especially in Mr. Ifans’s assured performance. For a baby-boomer-meets-millennial family drama, that’s plenty.

[A] short but bluntly powerful documentary.