Ben Kenigsberg

A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.

Above all, Frances Ha is a wry and moving portrait of friendship, highlighting the way that two people who know everything about each other can nevertheless grow apart as their needs change.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.

This documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit.

Not as radically stylized as Polanki’s violent Macbeth, Tess is literature rendered in consummately classical terms.

As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.

What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.

An exhilarating, four-hour immersion in life at the University Of California campus.

I Am Everything is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.

The thesis of the movie — that art can be restorative and help overcome cyclical, systemic failures — might seem trite. But Morton’s devotion to his painting and his loved ones makes it difficult not to be moved.

“Turn Every Page” is one step away from turning into a Herzogian monument to obsession or plunging into crazed psychodrama. Instead, it is merely a great profile, filled with wit, affection and detailed stories of how the books came to be.

In its graceful superimpositions and its use of water to evoke a more idyllic time (particularly in a rainy flashback set to Neil Young), Inherent Vice is very much a companion piece to "The Master."

Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but The Things You Kill has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.

in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.

It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.

It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.

Paradoxically, the movie’s energy ebbs as the proceedings turn more antic.

Its primary interest lies in the tension between candid moments and shots that appear artfully composed.

As a drama, Mountains, whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.

If Durkin’s writing doesn’t always match his formal flair, The Nest has a bracing economy, cramming a lot into tight quarters.

As wrenching as The Voice of Hind Rajab is, there is something uneasy-making about turning a child’s harrowing cries for help into a pretext for metacinematic flourishes. Hind’s story does not need that kind of intellectualized gimmickry, in which recordings of authentic terror serve as proof of the staging’s verisimilitude.

The emerging film is not simply a persuasive augmentation of Katz’s argument, but also a disturbing portrait of how very human impulses — passivity, rationalization, social pressures — can shape the writing of history.

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

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

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 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.

With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.

It elevates voices who sounded early alarms about the virus and whose warnings were lost in a din of complacency, incompetence and political calculation. Not all of these interviewees or their messages have broken through to the public consciousness.