Ben Kenigsberg

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.

Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.

The film has a powerful sense of place, with details that feel authentic and, in some cases, lived through. Yet Rapman’s civic-minded lyrics (“There really ain’t no winners when you’re playing with them guns”) have a habit of reducing the drama to tidy morals.

If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile.

The film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.

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 plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.

While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor, the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.

Way too much of LA Originals has that overly chummy vibe, but the shambling, yearbook quality of the film is also its reason for being.

Slay the Dragon is not short on outrage, and just because some of this material is not new doesn’t mean it’s not worth repeating.

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

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 shot-calling undermines the movie’s pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does Dosed do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.

Despite some tedious passages, Heimat Is a Space in Time takes an intriguing approach to history that remains refreshingly rooted in primary sources.

Bloodshot runs out of meta tricks before it is over, and David S.F. Wilson, who borrows his visual vocabulary from Tony Scott and Michael Bay, delivers action sequences with such choppy continuity that viewers may be as confused as Ray. He deserves bonus points, however, for embracing silliness.

While Extra Ordinary overextends its ghosts-are-blasé conceit, Higgins and Ward are appealing leads, and the movie has plenty of charming moments, such as Rose watching an episode of her dad for guidance.

The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.

The film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.

The movie withholds a crucial bit of back story in early scenes only to drop it like an anvil later on. Since the revelation is known to the characters the whole time, the decision to deploy it as a surprise is cheap and shameless — a blatant foul in a movie otherwise filled with smoothly executed plays.

A satire of overamped gamer culture that is itself too overamped to be much fun, Guns Akimbo takes a while before it stops showing off its virtuosity — shots that turn cartwheels, frantic cutting, an onslaught of graphics — and finds a groove.

You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.

This “Call of the Wild,” however defanged and updated, doesn’t lack for exciting canine brawls or tense rescues from frozen waters. It also doesn’t lack for an almost soothing corniness.

You can’t beat the access or the clips, although the absence of Hudson (whom Roher apparently filmed) from the present-day interviews is peculiar. His voice might have provided a valuable counterpoint to Robertson’s recollections.

The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that Corpus Christi portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.

Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.

Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.

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

It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.