Ben Kenigsberg

The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio — especially the sights of Earth’s last city, shot in Cape Town — mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.

If this documentary celebrates a crackpot, Mr. Friedkin is his match. The director’s blabbermouth tendencies and wry manner make him an enjoyable M.C.

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.

Depending on your POV, it's either the ne plus ultra of Hollywood calculation or a comedy simply intent on pushing its crassness to the point of surrealism.

The subject matter makes The Tainted Veil much more visually interesting than many issue-oriented documentaries, though the thriller-like score goes too far in trying to counter dryness.

These fond recollections of derring-do hail from a different era, and the movie’s one-sided view of history is bound to start arguments. The film is best appreciated as a straightforward testimonial: old war buddies’ hurrah against anti-Semitism.

In Uncle Frank, the writer-director Alan Ball (“True Blood”) combines several overworked genres — the coming-of-age picture, the road-trip odyssey, the angst-filled family-reunion movie — and mostly steers clear of the obvious pitfalls.

The film is generous with action and twists, even if some don’t track. For January, a month Hollywood reserves for dogs, this is an admirably weird movie.

Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.

The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.

From a dramatic standpoint, the movie can be unconvincing... From a formal standpoint, though, the movie impresses, maintaining a sense of anxiety through tight shots and a sound design that favors overlapping voices and constant clatter.

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.

In its first half-hour, the documentary The Jump brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident.

If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material.

The thesis of On the President’s Orders isn’t terribly original, but in a needlessly roundabout way, it makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top-down culture that stems from Duterte's assent.

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

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.

The first two-thirds are an extraordinary slow burn that provides ample time to admire Mr. Zvyagintsev’s talent with the wide frame. The movie is marred by an unsatisfying resolution, which has a coyness better suited to literature.

The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story

“Scenes” has its moments, as any film that sits Ryan and Corrigan opposite each other in a confessional would. But even special effects near the end play more like the response to a challenge than a spark of inspiration.

For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché.

As Shimu’s efforts ramp up and appear increasingly futile, Made in Bangladesh acquires a quiet power.

Viewers unencumbered by nostalgia will probably see this zippy, occasionally funny movie as no more frantic or pop-culture-addled than the average multiplex fodder.

The surfeit of subplots muddles the message.

The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.

Although the documentary makes clear how some accusations proved false or overblown, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it’s too eager to hand-wave any actual mistakes that Acorn made.

The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.