Ben Kenigsberg

In Land and Shade, the setting holds more interest than the plot: a fable-like, elemental story that sketches its characters too faintly to develop much power.

After Parkland is not easy to watch, and certain choices (of images, of music) could be construed as calculated. But the movie succeeds where it counts: showing the reverberations of violence long after most cameras left.

Subtlety and aesthetic elegance — the jerky animation complements the blunt tone — are not among the film’s virtues. Tehran Taboo aims to expose systemic hypocrisy; in that respect, it is brisk and bracing.

Decade of Fire is at its best when showing how the fires affected individuals effectively left to fend for themselves.

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

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

Absorbing and finely wrought, 1945 is not perfect.

It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.

If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.

As potentially valuable as Robin’s Wish is for illuminating Williams’s death — initial reports noted his past struggles with addiction and depression — it is more affecting and appealing as a tribute. Stories of Williams as a matchless improviser, an unpretentious neighbor and a man who had a gift for consoling others suggest the world lost not just an uproarious presence but a kind one.

It’s a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.

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?

Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.

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

Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.

School Life is a loving portrait, primarily, of the inspirational educator couple, who command the respect of their students and always seem to know what a particular child needs to hear.

Free Chol Soo Lee is somewhat dry and, as criminal-justice documentaries go, sadly familiar when it strays from Lee’s unique and grim perspective, which includes details of his struggles with prison life and depression.

More than the informational nuggets the movie flashes onscreen, these scenes of personal interaction help make “Unsettled” distinctive.

“Last Flight” is at once a memorial to Eli, the last of that generation of the family to die, and — almost incidentally — a philosophical argument about how death can be faced well.

The end of Le Week-End reveals it to be the thoroughly ordinary melodrama a description suggests — a portrait of former ’60s fire-starters who are perfectly happy to settle for embers.

Most egregiously, Gabrielle Union plays a TV news reporter determined to portray the protest as a hostage situation. At the film’s nadir, Stuart, on the phone with her during a broadcast, stops making his case and begins quoting from “The Grapes of Wrath.”

The thesis of On the President’s Orders isn’t terribly original, but in a needlessly roundabout way, it makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top-down culture that stems from Duterte's assent.

Beyond the videos, the movie takes a thorough, methodical approach to laying out the case against Netanyahu, even if few of its arguments are new.

Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.

Audrie & Daisy is strongest when it investigates what it regards as shortcomings of justice, for reasons technical and implied.

Covino and Marvin continue to forge a distinct comic sensibility — and, what’s rarer these days, they know how to make the camera work for the humor. Their knack for sight gags and staging in depth would shame the makers of the recent “Naked

Slay the Dragon is not short on outrage, and just because some of this material is not new doesn’t mean it’s not worth repeating.

Known for his genre pastiches, the director, Álex de la Iglesia (“El Crimen Perfecto”), rarely lets the pace flag, and the buddy comedy, gross-out humor and horror elements make for a harmonious mix.