Ben Kenigsberg

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

The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.

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.

The Aristocrats is a veritable talent show itself, albeit one that feels inescapably slight. To rejigger another ancient joke: The food at this place isn't terrible. But the portions are really small.

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

Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.

The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.

The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist . . . But Society of the Snow is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.

The omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.

Arctic has the courage to avoid obvious payoffs.

However worthy or political its intent, Al Di Qua is too overwrought to seem anything but trivializing.

“The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.

This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.

The movie is to Callas what last year’s “Jane” was to Jane Goodall: A documentary that revitalizes history through primary sources, to illuminating, at times enthralling effect.

The Raid 2 takes a substantially different tack from that of its 2011 predecessor, adding a convoluted plot and only intermittently attending to the sort of acrobatic ass-kicking for which the original became a global smash.

Documentaries about innovative figures don’t always offer correspondingly innovative filmmaking. But even coloring within the lines of conventional biographical storytelling, Jim Allison: Breakthrough provides an accessible introduction to James P. Allison.

While the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.

Ms. McAlpine’s purple musings in voice-over (“the stars tell me to go on a journey in this desert”), and the decision not to identify subjects formally until the closing credits, give the film an unnecessary fuzziness.

It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.

Those looking for a refresher course on the workings of the food chain should be in heaven. All others may yearn for a sushi break.

Olive weaves these stories together with fluidity and purpose, but the ideas of Always in Season sometimes crowd one another out.

The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.

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.

The film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.

As a work of cinema, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch can seem a bit torn in its approach, caught between a desire to spread a message to mainstream viewers and more cryptic, artistic aims. At times, more information would be preferable; in other scenes, images speak volumes without words. But as advocacy, the movie is potent and frequently terrifying.

Like democracy itself, the movie assumes such a broad mandate and has such noble intentions that indicating its shortcomings seems almost beside the point.

The Cage Fighter is not riveting from moment to moment, but Mr. Unay allows the movie’s themes to click into place beautifully toward the end.

If you’ve spent any time with these characters, it’s hard not to get swept up in the saga, and it’s easy to be moved by the bond between Hiccup and Toothless, who is, in effect, a very loyal dog who can fly and harness the power of lightning bolts.

A tad overdetermined in its studied, snowballing ambiguities, No Date, No Signature is dramatized with an acute sense of the role of class in Iranian society, and is unfussily well directed, creating visual parallels between the two men.

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.

Even seasoned defenders of cryptic formalism may find it amorphous. The characters are never named, the camera work is static, and little that’s conceptually interesting materializes.

Ingrid Goes West comes close to saying something sharp about how social media promotes envy and the illusion of connectivity, but when a comedy chooses such an obvious target, it should have the courtesy to aim from an oblique angle.

While Levinson is not working from his own history as in “Diner” or “Avalon,” The Survivor, partly because of its subject matter and postwar milieu, feels of a piece with those overtly personal films. Whatever its flaws, it’s powerful.

Kusama — Infinity, while conventionally structured, provides ample, illuminating access to an artist’s way of thinking and working.

To ponder the colonial implications of a French director exoticizing a Congolese man whose family eats rats for meals is to realize that a movie can be heartwarming and heartless at once.

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

The entire film unfolds in a recognizable register of ominous hesitation; the results are a bit schematic but nevertheless hit on something real.

Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.

La Bare takes its title from the club it chronicles, a male strip joint in Dallas. The name proves unfortunately apt for a rambling, superficial documentary that straddles the line between exposé and infomercial.

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

This overlong (nearly four hours) but sporadically extraordinary portrait of a forgotten corner of society may be tough going even for fans of forbidding cinema.

This upsetting documentary offers plenty to chew on.

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.

For all its visual and sonic pleasures — see it in a theater with a good subwoofer — All These Sleepless Nights feels simple-minded in its commitment to drift above all else.

This is his third overall feature with Huppert, who adds drollery and an air of mystery. And there is just enough intrigue this time — one motif involves the difficulty of translating a work by Yoon Dong-ju, a Korean poet who died in 1945 after being imprisoned in Japan — to suggest hidden depths.

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 strong nonprofessional cast and a use of long takes enhance the sense of immersion in a truly organic production.

A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, The Justice of Bunny King has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.

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.

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.

Bugs, an entertaining and eye-opening documentary from Andreas Johnsen, will send moviegoers out with a feeling of culinary adventurousness, eager to sample well-prepared escamoles (ant larvae) or termite queen with mango.

Of Fathers and Sons is ultimately more impressive for its access than it is revealing of drives or beliefs. If Derki’s goal was to capture what causes ideology to spread, he and his camera look without seeing.

You might devour less after watching Food, Inc. 2, and what you eat will probably be healthier.

At an hour and a half, the often-inspiring documentary Far From the Tree plays like a companion piece to or a preview for Andrew Solomon’s best-selling 2012 book, which, with notes, runs more than 1,000 pages.

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

While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, The Nightmare declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.

Mortensen’s ambitions may be old-fashioned, but they’re grand ambitions, and he has realized them in a handsome passion project.

Director Kirby Dick (Derrida) shapes the movie in such a way as to leave everyone flummoxed.

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

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

This isn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings.

The film, accompanied by a percussive score from Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer (both wrote the music for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which Mr. Zeitlin directed), has a wandering attention span and grows monotonous even at barely more than one hour.

the connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.

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 filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.

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.

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

It’s less interested in rendering a verdict on the morality of abortion than it is in tracing the increasing politicization of the issue.

It’s the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character. The action often unfolds in long shot, with crowded compositions in which the principals are obscured by door frames. Over time, the withholding of conventional editing patterns and the sensitization to subtle changes in camera placement become an analogue for Emanuel’s entrapment.

Tigerland falls into a common trap of advocacy documentaries, which is to inform on an urgent issue — preserving a species — without a particularly urgent cinematic narrative to match it.

Ironically for a movie about the ratings value of shock, Évocateur suffers from its own lack of red meat.

This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.

Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.

"Five Seasons” is least dull when capturing the artist at his most spontaneous, showing his joy, for instance, at seeing Texas wildflowers. But the director Thomas Piper, whose credits include another documentary that deals with the High Line and a film about the artist Sol LeWitt, never finds a way to convey the excitement of his subject’s innovations.

Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.

Old Henry makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.

While the recordings are wall-to-wall, this somewhat busy documentary rarely accords time for simply listening.

Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and Kubrick by Kubrick doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom.

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.

This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.

It seems best to view Serendipity as one component of a much bigger project (a book on Nourry’s work with the same title was published in 2017) — a body of work in which life and art are inseparable.

Weather seems to exert an only intermittent influence in this insipid holiday love story, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini and set in the run-up to Christmas — at least in theory.

Develops into a lively but simpleminded valentine to liberal tolerance.

The film isn’t perfect — Mr. Chon’s wild camera motions seem more undisciplined than electric — but it does find an angle on the riots that hasn’t been seen much onscreen.

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.

Arguments over whether the documentary’s existence honors Mr. Vishner’s wishes and spirit — and whether continuing to film was appropriate — lead in circles.

A study in denial, American Anarchist may be illuminating for being unilluminating.

In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.

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.

The movie favors an unflashy presentation that allows its themes to emerge organically. But the interlocking structure, which owes more to the early work of Alejandro González Iñárritu than “Rashomon,” undermines sustained tension, and the dramatic architecture is slightly wobbly.

It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.

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.

Narcissister’s background in stagecraft, movement and rhythm serves her well as a filmmaker: Far from a conventional autobiography, Narcissister Organ Player always offers something to catch your eye or ear.

Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.

The insights the movie has aren’t exceptional; this stranger-than-fiction series of events is enough.

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.

Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, Whirlybird is an editing feat.

It’s less a social history than a commercial for alternative healing.