Ben Kenigsberg

The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.

In Maryam Touzani’s Adam, certain stylistic choices — a muted palette, the absence of a melodramatic score, hand-held camerawork — help temper sentimentality with verisimilitude.

The movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.

The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.

For better or worse, Grou has a knack for staging brutality, and for having his movie rock out to a Joy Division track or two.

An austere, demanding sit, Sin — a Russian-Italian coproduction with Italian dialogue — nevertheless has a stubborn integrity in exploring the competing forces of patronage and creative inspiration that Michelangelo confronted in the 16th century.

Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.

Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.

Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.

Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.

Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.

Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars

Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers — but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.

Spoor is sensationally atmospheric. . . . The structure, though, seems counterproductively, even confusingly, elliptical, and the timing of flashbacks muddles the point of view. This is a whodunit that plays tricks with the “who.”

The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.

Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.

[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.

The portraits are moving and informative. . . . As an aesthetic endeavor, though, The Reason I Jump is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach.

While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.

Happy Face dares to be distinctive, and that’s something, even if the behavior — particularly Stan’s — isn’t always convincing.

Its main virtues are a wild story and a stealth sense of outrage. It argues that these so-called assassins became political pawns and had to face the courts without witnesses who might have aided their defense.

Mehta’s elaborate long takes contribute to the general sense of tumult, but the film never fully shakes the sense of stating the obvious.

The movie clearly intends to send a serious message about how draconian immigration policies tear families apart. But a hard-hitting drama would be preferable to this strenuously wacky bromance.

A disarming subject, Hadid comes across as a cleareyed, forthright leader. But Mayor also stands out because Osit has thought it through in cinematic terms: He knows when to dwell on a striking image (such as Hadid examining a painting of Jerusalem on his global travels) and when to let a counterintuitive soundtrack selection play through.

Instant death lurks around every corner, and the movie doesn’t shy from killing off major characters. But it does play like an odd match of form and content: a story of single-minded humanitarianism framed as a relentless action spectacular.

In Uncle Frank, the writer-director Alan Ball (“True Blood”) combines several overworked genres — the coming-of-age picture, the road-trip odyssey, the angst-filled family-reunion movie — and mostly steers clear of the obvious pitfalls.

Paradoxically, the movie’s energy ebbs as the proceedings turn more antic.

When it’s showing its sensitive side, the film, scripted by David McKenna (“American History X”) and directed by Nick Sarkisov, unexpectedly shines.

Even as hagiography, Soros is unfocused.

Dr. Lewis is an engaging interview subject whose clarity and upbeat demeanor contrast strikingly with the macabre material. Her writings are read as voice-overs by Laura Dern. Dr. Lewis has also kept an excellent archive.

The ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. Monsoon finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.

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.

Mortal isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel.

Melding “Saw” with “The Hunger Games,” Triggered wins no points for originality or distinctiveness, not least of its cookie-cutter characters. But its relentlessness, and the gusto with which it embraces its mandate to make a mess, is tough to resist.

The movie has a surfeit of the sudden reversals and interlocking loyalties that can make for an absorbing time killer.

No one could accuse these adventures of being conventional.

Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.

Laden with references to race, class and the legacy of slavery, Spell, directed by Mark Tonderai from a script by Kurt Wimmer (a pen on the “Point Break” and “Total Recall” remakes), is stronger on maintaining suspense and a macabre atmosphere than it is at following through on its ideas, which give it a thin veneer of topicality.

A week is too short a time frame. A longer view might have left a deeper impression.

It’s sweet, personal and tedious.

Close observation can illuminate contradictions, and Lombroso, semi-edifyingly, catches his subjects in moments of opportunism or hypocrisy, even if those aren’t much of a trade for spending 90 minutes in this company.

Clearly well-intentioned, The Devil Has a Name means to deliver an inspirational lesson about the depravity of big industry and the power of the little guy. But it’s mostly a muddle.

Raiff deserves credit for an unexpectedly elliptical coda, but much of the chatter between the leads has the emo-tedium of dorm room blather.

It elevates voices who sounded early alarms about the virus and whose warnings were lost in a din of complacency, incompetence and political calculation. Not all of these interviewees or their messages have broken through to the public consciousness.

Occasionally, the nostalgic back-patting makes way for a few good jokes.

Pity, or prayer, couldn’t change the fact that Faith Ba$ed is abysmally unfunny.

However great Gund’s influence on other collectors and philanthropists has been, and however progressive and righteous her advocacy for racial justice, Aggie doesn’t match her originality with an accordingly innovative approach.

It’s hard to argue with Bettis’s frazzled underplaying or Farnworth’s stellar airhead routine, an impressively sustained study in quick-witted dimwittedness.

This is a huge subject, and the film, which favors anecdotes over a macro treatment, doesn’t have much structure to speak of. It consists of one brief profile after another — a strategy that is efficient for delivering information, but that leaves Myth of a Colorblind France dry and disarrayed as filmmaking.

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

Mostly the movie is a drizzle of platitudes.

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

An exploitation film that proceeds as if it were a solemn memorial, The Secrets We Keep doesn’t do right by the Holocaust history it invokes — or much else.

Uribe directs for sensory effect rather than context, which is minimal and parceled out as needed, and deals with the politics of the construction project glancingly, an approach that registers as alternately poetic and coy.

In a sense, it’s less a documentary for posterity than an urgent broadcast. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth hearing.

At its best, the movie is a vertiginous, head-slapping examination of the tangible, unpredictable consequences of making art.

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.

As Shimu’s efforts ramp up and appear increasingly futile, Made in Bangladesh acquires a quiet power.

While the film may speak to viewers with a spiritual investment in these events, it does little to bring them alive for others.

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

Mostly The One and Only Ivan consists of fairly standard Disney lessons, about the hardships of losing parents (real and surrogate) and how difficult it is to embrace change.

Is Coup 53 trustworthy in every respect? Perhaps not. Both as a detective story and as a deep dive into a world event whose consequences linger, it is bracing, absorbing filmmaking.

The competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and Storm Over Brooklyn never settles on a satisfying point of view.

There is less to The Bay of Silence than meets the eye.

If Red Penguins doesn’t always strike a satisfying balance between the glib and the grim, the broader topic — the commercialization of hockey — affords it a novel lens on Russia’s economic transition.

Though it might seem generic in some respects, Rebuilding Paradise resonates with the moment.

If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.

Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.

Despite stodgy trappings, Dateline-Saigon captures a swirl of personalities and conveys the excitement of reporting in a fast-moving, confusing and dangerous atmosphere.

While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.

Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.

At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.

The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.

Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.

Although the film uses a conventional format, it makes an urgent argument: that a new wave of voter suppression has threatened the rights that Lewis labored to secure.

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

It proceeds dryly and largely chronologically through her life, sometimes with an awkward sense of proportion.

This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.

Not all the misdirection is elegant, but the film’s tenderness flowers in a lovely, unexpected final shot.

Long stretches are not a personal reckoning but an overview; many details overlap with “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from last year, although the clips here are at least as good. It is also more sympathetic to Cohn than either Cohn’s reputation or the familial animosity would suggest.

My Father the Spy doesn’t have a tidy point to make, but it succeeds at bringing a turbulent reminiscence to life.

"Seahorse” is the sort of documentary that gains its interest less from its technique than from its subject, and from the fact that the filmmaker was present at the right time. Articulate, reflective and unhesitant about getting personal, McConnell makes for a complicated character study.

If not revelatory, You Don’t Nomi is likely to persuade viewers that “Showgirls” is more than a “bare-butted bore,” as Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times 25 years ago.

The film illustrates that being self-baring is different from being self-revealing. It inspires a vexing but welcome question: What did I just watch?

Although the odds of implementing all these ideas might seem steep, “2040” is a rare climate documentary with an optimistic message.

Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.

It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.

The overall vibe is scarily close to what happened when “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” on “The Simpsons” added Poochie, except this time the pandering is not a joke.

The fantasy sequences are duller than the campy images from the present action.

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.

Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.

The film has a powerful sense of place, with details that feel authentic and, in some cases, lived through. Yet Rapman’s civic-minded lyrics (“There really ain’t no winners when you’re playing with them guns”) have a habit of reducing the drama to tidy morals.

If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile.

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.

It’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on (and as Frank’s face grows taut with cosmetic surgery), who ultimately owns Bad Education. It’s a plum part, sure, but also a deeply unsympathetic one — a chance for the actor to channel his charisma toward dark, mischievous ends.

The film plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.

While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor, the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.