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.