Ben Kenigsberg

The movie can be frustratingly deferential toward Watson, but it is never less than urgent.

Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic.

Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.

As potentially valuable as Robin’s Wish is for illuminating Williams’s death — initial reports noted his past struggles with addiction and depression — it is more affecting and appealing as a tribute. Stories of Williams as a matchless improviser, an unpretentious neighbor and a man who had a gift for consoling others suggest the world lost not just an uproarious presence but a kind one.

Davis strives to keep himself out of the film, favoring a harrowing yet compassionate you-are-there aesthetic that underscores the hardship of the migrant workers' struggles.

It’s both a credit to, and a shortcoming of, the movie that it suggests an illustrated bibliography. It makes you want to stop watching and, instead, read or reread all of the pieces mentioned.

A German Life is likely to be the last new movie of its kind: a documentary that presents contemporary testimony from someone who witnessed the inner workings of the Nazi high command.

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.

The thesis of the movie — that art can be restorative and help overcome cyclical, systemic failures — might seem trite. But Morton’s devotion to his painting and his loved ones makes it difficult not to be moved.

If Durkin’s writing doesn’t always match his formal flair, The Nest has a bracing economy, cramming a lot into tight quarters.

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

Whether Sauper’s travels delivered a cohesive movie this time is debatable, but what he does find is always interesting.

The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.

The sound effects are emphatic enough to call attention to themselves, and serve as a tacit, admirable acknowledgment that this material has been shaped. Even so, some of the clatter distracts from the purity of these great images.

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

The Divine Order effectively illustrates how peer pressure can influence the political process. Collective silence, whether it’s from women unwilling to publicly press for their rights or men afraid to voice agreement with their wives for fear of looking weak around co-workers, proves more of an obstacle than any opponent. That message gives Ms. Volpe’s lark a timely edge.

While Peace Officer could offer more information, what is here is disturbing and sometimes eye-opening.

There’s something tough to resist about how “We Kill for Love” rescues works from the shadows.

As a late-summer caper movie, it hits the spot. The film offers the intriguing contrast of actors and a director (Daniel Schechter) taking a different approach to known material.

McCullin is not a groundbreaking documentary, but it wears its conventional format well, taking its cues (and its power) from the photographs themselves.

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

Known for his genre pastiches, the director, Álex de la Iglesia (“El Crimen Perfecto”), rarely lets the pace flag, and the buddy comedy, gross-out humor and horror elements make for a harmonious mix.

While it is generally engaging to learn about the influences of the screenwriter Dan O’Bannon or the artistic process of H.R. Giger (who designed the alien), the documentary is at its least fawning when it focuses on technique.

The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.

Alayan’s light directorial touch can make the storytelling seem overly straightforward. But his tight control over the proceedings becomes clear in a closing shot that elegantly encapsulates the film’s complexities.

Even without an upbeat ending, though, Betting on Zero would be persuasive advocacy.

Vanishing Pearls is most illuminating when offering a historical perspective.

It is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit.

The film is accessible and often hypnotic on an intuitive level.

Even if this minor coda plays to an increasingly closed circle of admirers, it gives the trilogy a pleasing, moving symmetry.

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

While Jetter and Wickham’s political fight is not resolved as of the end of the movie, the thread in which Jetter works to raise money for the new van she needs to commute affordably to her job has a crowd-pleasing finish.

Is “What Lies Upstream” persuasive in all respects? No. Will it make you think twice about what’s gone unnoticed in your tap water? Absolutely.

The more Hope’s own obsession grows, the more involving the movie gets, even as it raises ethical questions about its making — and about those who continue to watch.

In the closing scene, Saada, relying on a fierce bit of acting by Fabian, finds a way to pose the question directly to the audience of what Rose’s life should look like. The answer is clear.

Three Peaks has a placid surface, but Zabeil uses abstraction — with edits that elide information or play tricks with spatial perception — to deepen a trite scenario.

Decade of Fire is at its best when showing how the fires affected individuals effectively left to fend for themselves.

[A] taut and commanding primer.

The documentary is conventionally structured and sometimes placid, but it has an alarming message.

As the geological, financial and personal barriers the cousins face grow increasingly absurd, the movie works up a satisfying sweat.

It’s a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.

Despite its focus on as fluid and mysterious a subject as art, Vision Portraits addresses blindness in concrete, comprehensible terms.

Loushy skillfully and briskly excerpts the material, although the film falls somewhere on the line between formal documentary and assemblage.

In its form, Notes on Displacement mirrors the terrifying, dangerous journey it chronicles.

Leaning in to the style its patchwork of source material requires, Combat Obscura, is an eye-opening dispatch from a conflict mired in confusion.

Its primary interest lies in the tension between candid moments and shots that appear artfully composed.

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.

A surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait of Whitney Houston’s rise and struggles with fame and drugs before her death at 48.

While Extra Ordinary overextends its ghosts-are-blasé conceit, Higgins and Ward are appealing leads, and the movie has plenty of charming moments, such as Rose watching an episode of her dad for guidance.

Framed by scenes of weeping, the narrative does not entirely pull itself into a satisfying arc, but the film nevertheless unfolds with dexterity and suspense.

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.

More than the informational nuggets the movie flashes onscreen, these scenes of personal interaction help make “Unsettled” distinctive.

This is not a perfect film, and features maybe one wild night too many. But its outlook — optimistic about human nature yet cynical about the times — lingers.

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

The real star of this Kiwi western is the setting. The lush forests and stark, black sand beaches, shot in locations near those used in “The Piano,” help make The Convert more than a message movie.

This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but The League recounts it movingly.

Provocative as the film is, it doesn’t fully reconcile Tsemel’s contradictions, if such a thing were even possible or desirable.

The families’ stories help turn The Place That Makes Us into more than a policy proposal in motion.

A swift primer that favors breadth over depth, the movie saves some hopeful notes for the end.

Your Monster, while falling short of the Critic’s Pick status that Jacob vociferously covets for his show, has its charms, namely the backstage intrigue, onstage songs by the Lazours (of the current Off Broadway musical “We Live in Cairo”), and a disarming lead in Barrera.

If anything, Moynihan leaves you wanting to watch more of the man. Perhaps too immersed in numbers for politics and too much of a dabbler for academia, he was also a showman — and therefore a natural movie subject.

The prickly tone is a difficult balancing act, and Diamond Tongues may settle for being a softer-hearted film than its most cynical scenes portend. But it has a palpable affection for Toronto’s cultural scene and for Ms. Goldstein.

The documentary Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is an official portrait that nevertheless offers some insights into how one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and irreplaceable star personas evolved.

The film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.

A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.

This is the kind of sleek, precisely constructed genre work that’s gone missing from American summer movies.

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.

At the time of a fervent national debate on race and justice, part of what is impressive about 3 ½ Minutes is the cool temperature at which it is often served.

The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.

If Separated is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity.

Mr. Chan’s skill with actors — particularly with Ms. Mei and Mr. Pang’s persuasive, easygoing banter — compensates for the story’s limitations.

They Call Us Monsters doesn’t shy from the consequences of the violence the prisoners were accused of (we meet a paralyzed victim of a shooting), even as it suggests that the system...proceeds almost mechanically.