Ben Kenigsberg

Looking for rational behavior, especially in a crucial flashback, is pointless. To the extent that Two Pianos coheres, it is in a way that might be described as musical.

Li, carrying a camera she has inherited, appears to search for inspiration in her surroundings, too. Whatever elusive quality she is seeking, Miyake has found something like it. His film gently balances tidiness and looseness, connection and alienation and artifice and the natural world.

Saleh’s tangled plotting has more verve than his pacing or visual sense. But the movie’s portrait of collaboration can’t help but induce a shudder.

The re-enactment approach may not be as novel as it once was, but it’s still a heady, creative way to excavate layers of buried history in a location that has more than its share.

The dynamics are rarely simply drawn, and if the film’s default mode is miniseries-expository, there are a few striking stylistic flourishes.

It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.

He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.

It’s a striking, mature debut.

Give Bhala Lough credit: His film simultaneously illustrates the deficiencies of generative A.I. and the dangers of investing in it emotionally, while remaining annoying and self-amused in a distinctly human way.

The third segment, “Sister Brother,” is so lovely it prompts reconsideration of the first two.

As wrenching as The Voice of Hind Rajab is, there is something uneasy-making about turning a child’s harrowing cries for help into a pretext for metacinematic flourishes. Hind’s story does not need that kind of intellectualized gimmickry, in which recordings of authentic terror serve as proof of the staging’s verisimilitude.

This crowd-pleasing documentary, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State” and “Girls State”), caters to multiple niches of moviegoer who enjoy rooting for the underdog. Even archivally minded cinephiles — the kind who get nostalgia pangs from watching long-shelved VHS tapes played anew — will find an itch scratched.

Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but The Things You Kill has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.

Some of what Mandelup captures is the result of sharp observation, and some of it is incredible chance.

The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.

At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries.

A movie that’s a little too eager to be liked. But it’s also tough to resist.

There is no single takeaway from Olsson’s film, which — apart from the musical score’s intermittent mood-setting — presents the footage straightforwardly, inviting viewers to reflect on what is in and out of frame. It’s great TV and an excellent documentary.

As David Osit’s probing, troubling documentary Predators demonstrates, the sociological implications of the show were (and are) anything but simple, beginning with what the series’ popularity suggests about the viewers who watched it.

Always intriguing, Stranger Eyes proves stronger on concept than coherence. Perhaps the loose ends are Yeo’s way of suggesting that a film director, too, lacks omniscience.

Covino and Marvin continue to forge a distinct comic sensibility — and, what’s rarer these days, they know how to make the camera work for the humor. Their knack for sight gags and staging in depth would shame the makers of the recent “Naked

Compared with “Eddington,” this summer’s other tongue-in-cheek neo-western, the movie, ostensibly set in South Dakota, is less aggressive in its efforts to appear topical; it may not even have much on its mind beyond clever plot construction. But watching its pieces snap into place is more fun.

This isn’t so much a film about geopolitics or even history as it is about two lovers torn between passion and obligation.

Life After doesn’t equivocate; neither does it offer easy answers. It tackles a thorny topic in a challenging way, with the tenderness, complexity and — notwithstanding Davenport’s earlier wish — the personal perspective it deserves.

The observations range from the incisive to the grandiose, and at nearly three hours, Videoheaven could stand a tighter edit.

Panh powerfully interweaves real footage of starvation and mass death — sometimes projecting it behind the characters or matching it to Paul’s eyeline. He also brings back the main conceit of “The Missing Picture,” which used clay figurines to depict certain events.

Invention is committed to finding its own wavelength.

The events, and the mind games, appear to have been goosed for dramatic interest. . . But it is still fun to watch Michael and CBS compete for the upper hand.