Ben Kenigsberg

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

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

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.

The movie unfolds impressionistically. To call it a portrait of collective resilience is accurate, but that description shortchanges its richness on both human and historical scales.

The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.

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.

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.

The Rules of the Game is among the most perfectly balanced of films: a movie about discretion that is in every way a model of it.

Mr. Zürcher has concocted something intimate yet otherworldly with this highly original debut.

In its graceful superimpositions and its use of water to evoke a more idyllic time (particularly in a rainy flashback set to Neil Young), Inherent Vice is very much a companion piece to "The Master."

Above all, Frances Ha is a wry and moving portrait of friendship, highlighting the way that two people who know everything about each other can nevertheless grow apart as their needs change.

Like its narrative, this gripping film rarely veers in the expected directions — and is never easy to pin down.

The Last Of The Unjust is demanding but fascinating, both as history and as an intellectual volley on the lure of power, the ambiguities of perspective, and the difficulty of claiming moral high ground in a context where matters of life and death are so precarious.

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.

Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.

The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.

The back-and-forths of the character’s decisions feel real, and Mr. Dickinson’s laconic blankness (you would never guess the actor was British) helps to give the character’s existential crisis a charge. Ms. Hittman is also assured enough to know it can’t be easily resolved.

“Turn Every Page” is one step away from turning into a Herzogian monument to obsession or plunging into crazed psychodrama. Instead, it is merely a great profile, filled with wit, affection and detailed stories of how the books came to be.

The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.

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.

Die-hard Elvis fans will no doubt call some of the characterization in Priscilla slander, but part of the achievement here is that Elvis is not simply a monster. Fame has merely given him the superpower of not having to pay attention to anyone else.

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.

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.

This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.

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.

“Last Flight” is at once a memorial to Eli, the last of that generation of the family to die, and — almost incidentally — a philosophical argument about how death can be faced well.

Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.

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

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

The director favors absurdist tableaus . . . placid camera moves counterpointed by brutality and shots held so long that it almost seems as if the filmmaker is the one being cruel. It’s a grimly effective strategy for a harsh but powerful movie.

In a complicated role, the excellent Ms. Koler exudes a kind of flighty confidence: For all her nuptial-related anxieties, Michal is completely comfortable with who she is.

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.

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.

As Wechsler allows rehearsal scenes to play out at length, the perfectionism of dancer-to-dancer lessons becomes improbably poignant.

The emerging film is not simply a persuasive augmentation of Katz’s argument, but also a disturbing portrait of how very human impulses — passivity, rationalization, social pressures — can shape the writing of history.

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

Schimberg’s film is odd, darkly funny and — when it means to be — a little frightening.

If, at barely more than an hour, the movie initially seems slight, its inconsequentiality might be better viewed as polemical.

It is to the great credit of “Geographies of Solitude” that it never feels expository: It turns an ecology lesson, and an account of a noble, steadfast, single-minded pursuit, into art.

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

It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.

Classical Period is often very funny, but it’s also poignant, imagining a milieu — part heaven, part purgatory — in which daily lives can be devoted to pondering the aggregated wisdom of the past.

Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.

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.

It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.

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

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 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.

With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.

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.

The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.

Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.

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.

The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.

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.

It’s a striking, mature debut.

Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.

A “Grey Gardens” for Generation Z, Jawline underscores the contrast between Austyn’s optimism and his drab surroundings.

To say that it unfolds like a play is both accurate and undersells how gorgeously it has been rendered for the screen.

Unlikely as it may seem, though, Blue Jasmine finds Allen charting bona fide new territory.

The Final Member boasts a stranger-than-fiction subject so odd and funny it almost couldn’t miss. But Bekhor and Math make the film much more than a limp gag.

Not as radically stylized as Polanki’s violent Macbeth, Tess is literature rendered in consummately classical terms.

While it’s heartbreaking that the movie never got made (son Brontis Jodorowsky, who would have played Paul Atreides, is particularly poignant imagining his alternate life as a superstar), Jodorowsky’s Dune posits that the raw materials nevertheless left an enduring mark on cinematic sci-fi, providing the basis for famous aspects of "Alien," "Star Wars," and "Contact."

The movie captures a moment when the lines separating anonymity, fame, and notoriety are finer than ever. And as Watson’s social climber prattles on to reporters about what a great “learning lesson” her criminal experience has been, it’s easy to see another star in the making.

But if Meeting Gorbachev finds its subject mostly staying on a pro-peace, antinuclear message — and it’s a script that’s hard to argue with — Herzog shapes the film into a study in how world events often come down to quirks of character and circumstance.

Junction 48 is more than a mere crowd-pleaser, and it refuses easy catharsis, ending with a cliffhanger. But since this is a movie about deciding to act, maybe that’s the perfect note.

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

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.

Hogtown plays like a find from a forgotten archive.

The jarring switch to documentary gives Bushman its added charge.

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.

In its feel for nocturnal light, this is one of the most refreshing New York independent features since Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart.” Both acoustically and dramatically, Mr. Mumin is a winning performer.

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

Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.

Subtlety and aesthetic elegance — the jerky animation complements the blunt tone — are not among the film’s virtues. Tehran Taboo aims to expose systemic hypocrisy; in that respect, it is brisk and bracing.

In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.

While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.

Mr. Schwarz falters with his ending, which feels overly tidy. Still, it’s not the destination; it’s the journey.

By the end of Good Night Oppy, Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.

Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy’s sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them.... The surprise of Leaning Into the Wind is that it’s just as concerned with how time has changed Mr. Goldsworthy.

[A] low-key, engaging comedy.

While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes Friends and Strangers so singular.

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.

Potently, Incitement depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe.

Both halves feature breathtaking camera work.

If the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction, much of the movie feels utterly credible.

Lacorazza’s deftness with actors, feel for the setting and aesthetic decisions — shooting in the snapshot-like 1.66-to-1 aspect ratio, or leaving the characters’ Spanish without subtitles — help the drama ring true.

While the pieces more or less fall into place, trying to solve the mysteries of Isabella may be missing the point.

Despite its surface-level placidity, the Israeli feature Working Woman unfolds like a psychological thriller — a procedural that, as it tightens its grip, captures how workplace sexual harassment slowly takes over one woman’s life.

Despite flashes of droll humor, the film builds up an undercurrent of suspense, with the prospect of violence always near. Kolirin (the movie version of “The Band’s Visit”) orchestrates the proceedings with confidence and significant subtlety, never letting political diagnoses overwhelm character.

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

The combination of “Streetwise” and “Tiny” belongs on a short list with “Boyhood,” the “Up” documentaries and “Hoop Dreams” as exemplars of time-capsule filmmaking.

An exemplar of how to make the personal political.

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

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

Even at 63 minutes, A Couple is not an easy sit. It took me three viewings before I was able to become absorbed in it — to settle into the rhythms of Boutefeu’s performance, to find the monologues less monotonous, to admire the beauty of the garden that Wiseman uses so calmingly to counterpoint the anger of Sophia’s words.