Ben Kenigsberg

On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should.

The families’ stories help turn The Place That Makes Us into more than a policy proposal in motion.

Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.

Judged strictly as a movie, Francesco comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.

The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story

Like “Our House” (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, Come True is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease.

The lessons — for stutterers and non-stutterers — still hold.

The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.

In Maryam Touzani’s Adam, certain stylistic choices — a muted palette, the absence of a melodramatic score, hand-held camerawork — help temper sentimentality with verisimilitude.

The movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.

The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.

For better or worse, Grou has a knack for staging brutality, and for having his movie rock out to a Joy Division track or two.

An austere, demanding sit, Sin — a Russian-Italian coproduction with Italian dialogue — nevertheless has a stubborn integrity in exploring the competing forces of patronage and creative inspiration that Michelangelo confronted in the 16th century.

Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.

Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.

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.

Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.

Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.

Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars

Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers — but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.

Spoor is sensationally atmospheric. . . . The structure, though, seems counterproductively, even confusingly, elliptical, and the timing of flashbacks muddles the point of view. This is a whodunit that plays tricks with the “who.”

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.

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

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

The portraits are moving and informative. . . . As an aesthetic endeavor, though, The Reason I Jump is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach.

While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.

Happy Face dares to be distinctive, and that’s something, even if the behavior — particularly Stan’s — isn’t always convincing.