Ben Kenigsberg

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.

While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.

As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.

It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.

A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.

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.

Unlikely as it may seem, though, Blue Jasmine finds Allen charting bona fide new territory.

Dr. Lewis is an engaging interview subject whose clarity and upbeat demeanor contrast strikingly with the macabre material. Her writings are read as voice-overs by Laura Dern. Dr. Lewis has also kept an excellent archive.

Short of walking with Green, a film is an ideal way to share in his knowledge. And after watching The World Before Your Feet, it’s difficult to look at the city the same way.

Watching the band in the Plaza Hotel and fans in the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols, you can’t help but get swept up in a 60-year-old fervor.

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

On limited terms — capturing the physicality of mountain climbing within the ethereal medium of animation — The Summit of the Gods is distinctive.

The much-in-vogue hybrid mode proves more cryptic than edifying this time around.

By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.

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

Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic.

The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.

Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.

The movie operates on two basic levels. One is philosophical, as the camera watches two men who are themselves looking through viewfinders experience the sensations of a place where humans rarely disrupt the natural order.

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]

The back-and-forths of the character’s decisions feel real, and Mr. Dickinson’s laconic blankness (you would never guess the actor was British) helps to give the character’s existential crisis a charge. Ms. Hittman is also assured enough to know it can’t be easily resolved.

The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.

Those Who Remained leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.

The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.

The most charged implication of Hitler’s Hollywood is that artistry enabled the Third Reich.

Close observation can illuminate contradictions, and Lombroso, semi-edifyingly, catches his subjects in moments of opportunism or hypocrisy, even if those aren’t much of a trade for spending 90 minutes in this company.

This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.

Powerful material doesn’t automatically yield a timeless or artistic documentary, and for better or worse, Trapped is an op-ed aimed squarely at the present moment in an enduring national conversation.