Ben Kenigsberg

The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.

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.

It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash. The bigger problem is that its slickness cheapens the most harrowing recollections.

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.

Informative, if not always as specific as it might have been.

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.

Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.

The director, Richard Lanni, whose biography also cites work as a battlefield tour guide, manages a fair amount of wit, particularly with a postcard montage of Stubby’s first trip to Paris.

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

The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.

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

The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.

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.

Those looking to learn the basic outlines of the life of the singer Chavela Vargas could do worse than watch Chavela, but this plodding documentary from Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi rarely transcends simple biography

[An] inert, exasperatingly proportioned phantasmagoria from Roland Joffé.

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.

It’s a striking, mature debut.

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.

[Farhadi and cowriter Mani Haghighi] prove to be stronger on atmosphere than on structure, aided by crisp, unnerving camerawork.

This is a love story for the time, not for the ages.

Laugh Killer Laugh is a tired parody that seems to have been constructed from received notions of noir and mob movies. Even the jazzy score sounds like an affectation.

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.

The movie finally punts on grappling with its ambiguities. The finale feels functional rather than haunting.

As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.

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

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

There are times when you wish Belkin wouldn’t cut away so quickly and would allow answers to tough questions (or Wallace’s own words) to play in full.

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 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.

Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.

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.

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.

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.

The Hand That Feeds is an effective portrayal of the intricacies of activism — and of a situation in which victories seem all too brief.

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.

The Second Mother goes soft toward the end, defusing its conflicts too easily and inconsequentially.

To make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.

Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.

A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.

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.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.

This documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit.

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

As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.

What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.

An exhilarating, four-hour immersion in life at the University Of California campus.

I Am Everything is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.

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.

“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.

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."

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.

in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.

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

It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.

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

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

As a drama, Mountains, whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.

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

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.

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.

Is Banana Split an empty indulgence or a comfortingly familiar confection? Probably both.

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

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 notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.

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.

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.

The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.

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

Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.

Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.

First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under-excite the crowds she performs for.

A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.

A generous and briskly entertaining doc.

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

The film is perhaps overly repetitive in emphasizing Shula’s inability to escape exploitation, but the story is put across with formal confidence and real originality.

By addressing strife in Africa in a roundabout way, Liyana breaks free of the heaviness that can weigh down an issue-based documentary.