Ben Kenigsberg

There is much to be said for [Sehiri's] unsensationalistic approach, and for its specificity of detail, even if splitting the narrative three ways means that each of these stories feels shortchanged.

One need look no further than “Marty Supreme” to see how Mexico 86 might have complicated the audience’s sympathies, but this straightforward crowd-pleaser doesn’t wish to see beyond Martín’s charm.

While there is value in any documentary evidence of this time and place, Aljafari’s allusive approach seems ill-matched with the urgency of his subject matter.

While not everything that Bock does is equally fascinating — a director’s personal connection to a subject can be both an advantage and a hindrance — a fair amount of it is endearing, even inspiring.

While being cynical about a wise-octopus movie is probably unfair, being bored by it isn’t great, either.

Looking for rational behavior, especially in a crucial flashback, is pointless. To the extent that Two Pianos coheres, it is in a way that might be described as musical.

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.

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.

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.

The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is the latest product off the crime documentary assembly line to raise the question of why it exists and what it ever hoped to achieve.

A case in which a production designer and prosthetics team showed up for work but the screenwriters might as well have crowdsourced their ideas from fanboys.

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

It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.

He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.

Like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.

It’s a striking, mature debut.

Directed by Brad Anderson, Worldbreaker is committed above all to shortchanging its themes, along with excitement and visual interest, a showy Steadicam shot notwithstanding.

Give Bhala Lough credit: His film simultaneously illustrates the deficiencies of generative A.I. and the dangers of investing in it emotionally, while remaining annoying and self-amused in a distinctly human way.

When Dead Man’s Wire ends with footage of the real Kiritsis and Hall, it is hard not to conclude that a much crazier, livelier film could have been made.

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

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.

We don’t need to hear about Herbert’s party years after his first marriage faltered. But he still had a cool idea, and his explanations of printing technology and color chemistry are almost enough to carry the film.

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.

This crowd-pleasing documentary, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State” and “Girls State”), caters to multiple niches of moviegoer who enjoy rooting for the underdog. Even archivally minded cinephiles — the kind who get nostalgia pangs from watching long-shelved VHS tapes played anew — will find an itch scratched.

Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.

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.

Some of what Mandelup captures is the result of sharp observation, and some of it is incredible chance.

Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.