Ben Kenigsberg

The movie is primarily an act of bearing witness that does not ask to be judged on conventional filmmaking terms.

While it is generally engaging to learn about the influences of the screenwriter Dan O’Bannon or the artistic process of H.R. Giger (who designed the alien), the documentary is at its least fawning when it focuses on technique.

Akin may deserve credit for not flinching from the grotesque; other serial-killer-adjacent entertainments, like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Zodiac” or “Mindhunter,” tend to concentrate on the cerebral mechanics of crime solving. But sordid details, undermined by snickers, aren’t in themselves illuminating.

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.

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.

Olive weaves these stories together with fluidity and purpose, but the ideas of Always in Season sometimes crowd one another out.

It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.

If evacuating cinema means engaging with the medium’s properties in only the silliest ways — mismatching subtitles with images and voices with speakers — Price certainly does that.

It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.

Schimberg’s film is odd, darkly funny and — when it means to be — a little frightening.

A close-range film about distance, the short, poignant documentary “I’m Leaving Now” unfolds like a character study.

The movie looks and sounds great, but greatness and depth elude it.

"Heading Home” is not a movie with much interest in geopolitics. It roots, roots, roots for its home team — and does little more.

More of a raspberry than a reboot, The Banana Splits Movie, available to buy (and later to rent) on multiple digital platforms, is far less crazy than it wants to be and far more soporific than a synopsis would suggest.

A computer-animated feature of bright hues, hectic action and only occasional charm.

The Miracle of the Little Prince seems to have been made from the supposition that too many discussions of grammar or syntax might bore viewers. Even so, the platitudes are worse. A stronger movie might have dug more deeply into the languages it wishes to save.

A “Grey Gardens” for Generation Z, Jawline underscores the contrast between Austyn’s optimism and his drab surroundings.

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.

"The Fugitive,” to which “Angel” owes perhaps even its rooftop finale, is a template against which this movie inevitably falls short.

Cold Case Hammarskjold is finally poised unsatisfyingly between an explosive exposé and a self-conscious put-on. Even a full acceptance of its assertions doesn’t do much to illuminate Hammarskjold’s death.

The movie unfolds impressionistically. To call it a portrait of collective resilience is accurate, but that description shortchanges its richness on both human and historical scales.

The film acquits itself honorably, even if its ultimate message is disquieting.

Despite its focus on as fluid and mysterious a subject as art, Vision Portraits addresses blindness in concrete, comprehensible terms.

This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.

Whether it’s the scene-setting blast of Donovan (“Zodiac”), the low-height Steadicam work (“The Shining”), the red-suffused hallways (David Lynch) or “Night of the Living Dead” playing at a drive-in, the movie takes from the best.

To say that it unfolds like a play is both accurate and undersells how gorgeously it has been rendered for the screen.

The Operative, directed by Yuval Adler, doesn’t offer much distinctive, but it does deliver a few suspenseful sequences, some interesting nuts-and-bolts details of espionage work and a good lead performance en route to an unsatisfying ending.

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.