Ben Kenigsberg

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 illustrates that being self-baring is different from being self-revealing. It inspires a vexing but welcome question: What did I just watch?

The combination of “Streetwise” and “Tiny” belongs on a short list with “Boyhood,” the “Up” documentaries and “Hoop Dreams” as exemplars of time-capsule filmmaking.

An exemplar of how to make the personal political.

[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.

Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.

Even at 63 minutes, A Couple is not an easy sit. It took me three viewings before I was able to become absorbed in it — to settle into the rhythms of Boutefeu’s performance, to find the monologues less monotonous, to admire the beauty of the garden that Wiseman uses so calmingly to counterpoint the anger of Sophia’s words.

At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries.

Wry and illuminating.

You might devour less after watching Food, Inc. 2, and what you eat will probably be healthier.

This crowd-pleasing documentary, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State” and “Girls State”), caters to multiple niches of moviegoer who enjoy rooting for the underdog. Even archivally minded cinephiles — the kind who get nostalgia pangs from watching long-shelved VHS tapes played anew — will find an itch scratched.

This absorbing account of the first recorded summit of the world’s highest mountain is a rare documentary for which re-enactments make complete sense.

New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.

The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains.

It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.

Lost River ponders people and places left behind in the name of progress. Slyly political, it observes the mortgage crisis through a warped looking glass. The cinematographer, Benoît Debie, finds a perverse beauty in the decline.

He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.

The Son of Joseph can be trying in its whimsy, yet it builds to a lovely finale that evokes the Bible, the French Resistance and the surreal.

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

Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.

The insights the movie has aren’t exceptional; this stranger-than-fiction series of events is enough.

The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.

The familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.

The bitterly funny, multistrand Involuntary, from 2008, is a step forward in the director’s ambition.

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

There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.