Ben Kenigsberg

If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]

While the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake.

In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.

Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.

The plot twists are so spot on that a screenwriter might have rejected them.

This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.

The Wife pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense.

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.

An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, The Eternal Memory doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands.

To judge Greene’s experiment, not least because of its visible salutary effects, feels like intruding on private breakthroughs. But the discomfiting power of Procession comes from its ability to show and, to all appearances, facilitate them.

For all the ways in which it might give short shrift to the politics or policy of the fund, Worth is uncommonly moving by the standards of biopics and certainly by the standards of movies that risk addressing 9/11 so overtly.

"Miller’s Point” is a Christmas movie more invested in atmosphere, and the qualities of wintry light, than in holiday cheer — and that somehow makes it all the more warm.

A generous and briskly entertaining doc.

To make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.

Even moviegoers who know “Psycho” backward and forward...are bound to learn something new from the movie, which addresses the shower scene from critical, historical, theoretical and technical angles, down to the blinding white of the bathroom tiles.

As a documentary, One of Us is a small act of portraiture, but each portrait captures the pain of having a life upended.

Some of what Mandelup captures is the result of sharp observation, and some of it is incredible chance.

While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments.

Hello Dankness belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.

Bugs, an entertaining and eye-opening documentary from Andreas Johnsen, will send moviegoers out with a feeling of culinary adventurousness, eager to sample well-prepared escamoles (ant larvae) or termite queen with mango.

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.

It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.

Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.

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.

The entire film unfolds in a recognizable register of ominous hesitation; the results are a bit schematic but nevertheless hit on something real.

The North Korea scenes are often very funny, with many of the jokes coming at the expense of the fish-out-of-water visitors.

As philosophy, Mr. Nobody seems sillier than it is profound. But in a parallel reality, more movies would have this degree of insane ambition.

Those who want to see Armstrong sweat may leave disappointed. Calm and seemingly well rehearsed in interviews, Armstrong shrugs off years of public statements without ever seeming truly remorseful.