Ben Kenigsberg

The notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.

In what probably qualifies as both an accomplishment and a shortcoming, the movie makes you want to read Babel’s writing instead.

Teetering somewhere between audacious and offensive, the stylistically voracious Filmistaan only intermittently reveals any sense of danger in its comedy.

If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Baxter often tends toward needless force-feeding.

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

The immersive style is always fascinating. But it also seems uneasily suited to the material.

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

Sometimes wearying, sometimes pointlessly cryptic, Happer’s Comet nevertheless has a distinct way of viewing the world.

It’s a tense, sharply assembled debut feature from Ben Young. Its main problem, though, is that it never answers a basic question: Why are we watching this?

The hand-wringing and revelations are familiar from many wedding movies, but May in the Summer gains added potency from its cross-cultural tensions and the drama the characters face in reconciling tradition with modern life.

The Skyjacker’s Tale could stand to lose its gimmicky re-enactments. Why supplement a story this crazy?

Like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.

Whether it is the star power of the cast or the seductiveness of the period recreation, Three Christs has an appealing professionalism — an odd fit for a film about challenging a profession.

Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery is a case in which a great documentary topic hasn’t yielded a great documentary.

Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.

Space: The Longest Goodbye leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.

If Approaching the Unknown isn’t entirely satisfying, Mr. Strong reaches high with his portrayal of the unraveling of a man who believes survival is a matter of engineering.

The documentary stirs up most of its sporadic excitement in the surfing footage, of which there is plenty. The imagery, especially the aerial shots, gives a sense of Mr. Hamilton’s precision and how close he comes to wiping out.

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.

Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

While All the Old Knives keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.

Those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes.

Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.

InHospitable is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen.

Ingrid Goes West comes close to saying something sharp about how social media promotes envy and the illusion of connectivity, but when a comedy chooses such an obvious target, it should have the courtesy to aim from an oblique angle.

The frustration of Hollywoodgate is that it could only ever feel incomplete.

Because one of this Netflix documentary’s producers is Avant’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, and both she and her husband, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, appear as talking heads, this overlong love-in sometimes plays like an illustrated conflict of interest. But the anecdotes are gold.