Ben Kenigsberg

Their stories are as harrowing, complicated and rife with imponderables as any Lanzmann filmed. And together, collected in a form that is much less labyrinthine than “Shoah,” they represent an ideal introduction (and capstone) to Lanzmann’s project.

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.

Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.

To judge Greene’s experiment, not least because of its visible salutary effects, feels like intruding on private breakthroughs. But the discomfiting power of Procession comes from its ability to show and, to all appearances, facilitate them.

Although the narrative contains echoes of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” — and perhaps “Casino,” in that much of it is structured as a flashback from an assassination attempt — “Gangs” lacks the poetry and character interest of those films.

The existence of a debut as confident and allusive as Columbus is almost as improbable as the existence of Columbus, Ind., where the movie is set.

Foreign Correspondent seems a sterling example of how the director could help the war effort by using current events as a launching point for his signature brand of suspense.

Here’s a summer movie that is about — and offers — escape.

If Happy Hour doesn’t quite deliver all it promises, that may only be because it promises quite a lot.

The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.

There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.

“En el Séptimo Día” pulls off the tricky feat of feeling utterly natural as it ratchets with the mechanics of drama and suspense.

Jane will delight those familiar with Ms. Goodall and provide a vibrant introduction for newcomers.

For the director, putting family members on camera clearly had a therapeutic value. Witnessing that unburdening feels almost ancillary, even intrusive. But Rewind could only be made by this filmmaker in this way, and that gives it an unsettling fascination.

In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.

Maidan is a film of scale and immediacy, finding artistry, for better or worse, in bearing witness.

Hummingbirds is pretty tight filmmaking at less than 80 minutes, and the laid-back presentation makes the political commentary register strongly from the periphery.

Newnham and LeBrecht deftly juggle a large cast of characters past and present, accomplishing the not-so-easy task of making all the personalities distinct, and a build a fair amount of suspense in their nearly day-by-day account of the sit-in.

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 film captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism.

It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely.

Behemoth proceeds placidly, making it easy to become lulled. Its haunting power grows in retrospect — as if you’ve returned from a journey and can’t believe what you’ve seen.

If Starless Dreams inspires conflicted feelings in viewers, it may be by design. It’s hard not to want to flee, and it’s hard to look away.

The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.

Vermiglio is so devoted to evoking a time and place that much of its subtlety does not become apparent until a second viewing. It is a rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.

An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, The Eternal Memory doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands.

Fans of structural film, “Jeanne Dielman” and Google Maps will find much to treasure, even if the narrative elements — and occasional cutaways to imagery shot in a more remote area in western Victoria — upset the movie’s rigor and purposeful tedium.