Ben Kenigsberg

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

Mostly The One and Only Ivan consists of fairly standard Disney lessons, about the hardships of losing parents (real and surrogate) and how difficult it is to embrace change.

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 competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and Storm Over Brooklyn never settles on a satisfying point of view.

There is less to The Bay of Silence than meets the eye.

If Red Penguins doesn’t always strike a satisfying balance between the glib and the grim, the broader topic — the commercialization of hockey — affords it a novel lens on Russia’s economic transition.

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

If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.

Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.

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

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

Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.

At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.

The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.

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

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.

More than the informational nuggets the movie flashes onscreen, these scenes of personal interaction help make “Unsettled” distinctive.

It proceeds dryly and largely chronologically through her life, sometimes with an awkward sense of proportion.

This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.

Not all the misdirection is elegant, but the film’s tenderness flowers in a lovely, unexpected final shot.

Long stretches are not a personal reckoning but an overview; many details overlap with “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from last year, although the clips here are at least as good. It is also more sympathetic to Cohn than either Cohn’s reputation or the familial animosity would suggest.

My Father the Spy doesn’t have a tidy point to make, but it succeeds at bringing a turbulent reminiscence to life.

"Seahorse” is the sort of documentary that gains its interest less from its technique than from its subject, and from the fact that the filmmaker was present at the right time. Articulate, reflective and unhesitant about getting personal, McConnell makes for a complicated character study.

If not revelatory, You Don’t Nomi is likely to persuade viewers that “Showgirls” is more than a “bare-butted bore,” as Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times 25 years ago.

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?

Although the odds of implementing all these ideas might seem steep, “2040” is a rare climate documentary with an optimistic message.

Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.

It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.