Ben Kenigsberg

The movie, directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, has just enough wit and visual invention to get by. (The “Bad Santa” team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are among those credited with the story.) But for all the hints of darkness around its edges, the film is ultimately like its heroes: cuddly, cute and harmless.

Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.

The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.

The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.

An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.

The movie finally punts on grappling with its ambiguities. The finale feels functional rather than haunting.

The frat house atmosphere eventually gives way to tedious bloodletting. In that regard, The Predator hasn’t evolved at all.

It’s less interested in rendering a verdict on the morality of abortion than it is in tracing the increasing politicization of the issue.

Kusama — Infinity, while conventionally structured, provides ample, illuminating access to an artist’s way of thinking and working.

The film is perhaps overly repetitive in emphasizing Shula’s inability to escape exploitation, but the story is put across with formal confidence and real originality.

The franchise has proved to be a reliable if variably elegant “boo” machine; the same applies here. Specters and hallucinations appear without consistent narrative logic. Characters veer off separately when teamwork might reduce brushes with demons or death.

In short, Pick of the Litter makes for unexpectedly suspenseful (and perhaps not entirely reputable) viewing.

Even those inclined to sympathize with that premise politically may feel insulted by the plot hole-a-palooza offered here to support it.

To ponder the colonial implications of a French director exoticizing a Congolese man whose family eats rats for meals is to realize that a movie can be heartwarming and heartless at once.

While the movie makes a winning case for the passion of its subjects, it bears hints of smoothed-over complexities.

A testosterone cocktail of reactionary sound bites and incoherent action that even Michael Bay might have rejected as too amped, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 makes for an appalling referendum on the state of commercial cinema in 2018

If Mr. D’Ambrose doesn’t quite earn his pretensions, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.

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.

Ms. McAlpine’s purple musings in voice-over (“the stars tell me to go on a journey in this desert”), and the decision not to identify subjects formally until the closing credits, give the film an unnecessary fuzziness.

Mr. Gutierrez keeps the viewer in the same state of confusion as Elizabeth, but each surprise, paradoxically, makes the movie less and less surprising as a whole.

The contemporary in-jokes are kept to a minimum (O.K., Tigger says “let’s bounce”), and the movie as a whole feels pleasingly old-fashioned.

The director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Kung Fu Panda 3”), keeps the pace fast and the exposition flowing; the movie is almost comfortingly watchable. In her first live-action feature, she shows a flair for natural light and doesn’t lean too heavily on effects.

A tad overdetermined in its studied, snowballing ambiguities, No Date, No Signature is dramatized with an acute sense of the role of class in Iranian society, and is unfussily well directed, creating visual parallels between the two men.

While Mr. Burns hasn’t fully digested his influences, he has learned from them. Our House distinguishes itself with its purposeful pacing — the first real jump scare arrives more than a third of the way through — its use of sound and crosscutting, and its wit with household objects, from a turntable to a mechanical calendar.

It’s the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character. The action often unfolds in long shot, with crowded compositions in which the principals are obscured by door frames. Over time, the withholding of conventional editing patterns and the sensitization to subtle changes in camera placement become an analogue for Emanuel’s entrapment.

Without denying that these women face discrimination in reaching their goal, the movie shows how its subjects are able to find ways to combine strict observance and progress.

At an hour and a half, the often-inspiring documentary Far From the Tree plays like a companion piece to or a preview for Andrew Solomon’s best-selling 2012 book, which, with notes, runs more than 1,000 pages.

Watching Path of Blood is frequently a queasy experience, and given the bewildering array of names and complications, not always an illuminating one. But it commands attention as an object lesson in the banality of evil.

At a time when the current president routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting, Shock and Awe feels more timely than it might have. It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.

Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.

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.

The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.

There is much to admire here, but the sheer scope of the subject matter might be even better served by the capaciousness of a mini-series.

Hover is reasonably resourceful for its first hour, during which it appears to have turned budget restrictions into an asset, keeping the focus on ideas instead of effects. The last act, though, is a total whiff — too rushed, too riddled with plot holes and too incongruously hopeful to take seriously.

Mr. Palmason’s showy technique, magnetic on its own, ultimately seems like a way of adding mystery to a story that, like Emil, is content with having no place to go.

Spiral is best in smaller-bore moments, showing how everyday lives are affected by prejudice.

Watching Izzy’s frenzied pratfalls often feels like watching a documentary of Ms. Davis — always great — running a hamster wheel that powers uninspired comic material.

This upsetting documentary offers plenty to chew on.

"Five Seasons” is least dull when capturing the artist at his most spontaneous, showing his joy, for instance, at seeing Texas wildflowers. But the director Thomas Piper, whose credits include another documentary that deals with the High Line and a film about the artist Sol LeWitt, never finds a way to convey the excitement of his subject’s innovations.

“En el Séptimo Día” pulls off the tricky feat of feeling utterly natural as it ratchets with the mechanics of drama and suspense.

As an awareness tool, The Valley feels simple-minded. As a drama, it feels exploitative.

True, Johnny Knoxville gets power-hosed down a slide and catapulted into a barn for our amusement, but the inventive, stake-raising, borderline surrealist gags of the old “Jackass” are gone.

Signs of life are few. A desaturated palette makes Rodin as monotonous to look at as it is to endure.

The sensations that Strangers on the Earth means to evoke are not well suited to the cinematic medium, at least not to a documentary that barely runs more than an hour and a half.

A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.

The Son of Bigfoot, an English-language production from Belgium, more or less does what it sets out to do, which is to offer enough visual activity and bromides to keep the very young interested. To all others: There is no Bigfoot; there’s nothing to see here.

Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.

A pastiche of western tropes too tongue-in-cheek to sell its dramatic intentions, but just sincere enough to smother any intimations of parody, The Escape of Prisoner 614 never commits to a consistent tone. Or even a consistent setting, really.

Whether In the Last Days of the City ultimately comes together as a feature is open to debate, but this is a film of beauty and skill.

If this earnest and forgettable road movie represents a meaningful tribute to taking pictures, we ought to go back to cave drawing.

If this documentary celebrates a crackpot, Mr. Friedkin is his match. The director’s blabbermouth tendencies and wry manner make him an enjoyable M.C.

This creature feature from the director Fritz Böhm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I-was-a-teenage-monster movies.

While Marcus Hinchey’s screenplay is occasionally too blunt, Come Sunday accords sympathetic moments to all its characters — a strategy that gives this chronicle of religious convictions a conviction of its own.

The director, Richard Lanni, whose biography also cites work as a battlefield tour guide, manages a fair amount of wit, particularly with a postcard montage of Stubby’s first trip to Paris.

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

Although the documentary makes clear how some accusations proved false or overblown, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it’s too eager to hand-wave any actual mistakes that Acorn made.

Both halves feature breathtaking camera work.

That The Miracle Season is based on a true story makes it tough to endure and to review, because it’s no pleasure to report that filmmakers have turned real-life tragedy and tenacity into a manipulative weepie.

It can be tough to say whether the movie is productively or arbitrarily baffling, but it is never boring, and it achieves a balance between natural flow and purposefulness that suits its subject matter.

Ms. Henson does what she can with a role that keeps her anger at a low simmer until requiring her to go full banshee within basically one scene. You can’t accuse her or Acrimony of being boring, but the film falls short of a design for living.

The director Adam Rifkin wrote this showcase for Mr. Reynolds, who, like Vic, was a college football player. The Last Movie Star effectively allows the ever-assured actor to score a touchdown on an empty field.

In the case of The China Hustle, a documentary may simply be the wrong delivery mechanism for a byzantine exposé that cries out for detailed news reporting.

Sherlock Gnomes offers more variety than its predecessor. Although still laced with glib pop culture references (wow, a skinny latte) and scored with Elton John tunes in a way that plays like a concession to adults, it has occasional fun ideas, such as rendering the inner workings of Holmes’s mind in hand-drawn black and white.

Mr. Klapisch lingers his camera lovingly over shots of grapes being harvested and stomped, all the while employing story mechanics and flashbacks indelicate enough to suggest the churn of a factory juicer.

What We Started appears to have been conceived with contradictory audiences in mind. On one hand, it tries to present an accessible history of electronic music, starting with its outgrowth from disco, house and techno and continuing through its commercialization and fusion with pop. On the other hand, a subcultural cliquishness creeps into the movie.

The film is limited by its central metaphor, but it is never less than absorbing or original.

Early screen depictions of World War I, like “The Big Parade” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” show more passion and visual invention. A rattling sound design and the cinematographer Laurie Rose’s excellent use of low light aren’t enough to make the experience immediate.

Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy’s sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them.... The surprise of Leaning Into the Wind is that it’s just as concerned with how time has changed Mr. Goldsworthy.

It’s hard to imagine other performers bringing so much to this setup. They give a true impression of two people who have spent their lives together and know how to talk each other.

They Remain, directed, edited and scripted by Philip Gelatt, from a short story by Laird Barron, shows that it’s possible to a make an engrossing genre piece on limited resources.

The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.

Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.

How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.

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.

Perhaps recognizing their biggest asset, the directors, Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, allow Ms. Hall’s numbers to play out at length... If the screenplay perhaps backs itself into a corner, its irresolution feels true to life.

If unwise remarks at a dinner can cast a pall over a longstanding relationship, then a great ending can redeem and even force reconsideration of an otherwise middling film.

The Cage Fighter is not riveting from moment to moment, but Mr. Unay allows the movie’s themes to click into place beautifully toward the end.

To its credit, The Opera House, directed by Susan Froemke, only sometimes plays like a fund-raising tool.

Through interviews with Israeli politicians, and Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, West of the Jordan River gives voice to peace-seeking residents on both sides of the conflict.

The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio — especially the sights of Earth’s last city, shot in Cape Town — mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.

The first two-thirds are an extraordinary slow burn that provides ample time to admire Mr. Zvyagintsev’s talent with the wide frame. The movie is marred by an unsatisfying resolution, which has a coyness better suited to literature.

Like many biographical documentaries, it resembles a lengthy highlight reel of crucial events from its subject’s life, without much in the way of style or perspective.

The film is generous with action and twists, even if some don’t track. For January, a month Hollywood reserves for dogs, this is an admirably weird movie.

Is “What Lies Upstream” persuasive in all respects? No. Will it make you think twice about what’s gone unnoticed in your tap water? Absolutely.

My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.

It’s not clear that the director quite found what he was looking for.

The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.

Chases, shootouts and showy camera moves are executed deftly enough, but given the frugal trappings, they play as overambitious — an attempt to make a storage tank of lemonade from one lemon.

The finale enlivens an otherwise staid biopic, but whether the film has earned a moment of uplift is unclear.

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.

Distinguished mainly by its overqualified cast and lack of inspiration, Father Figures can’t decide whether it’s a gross-out comedy or an uplifting tale of brotherly love; it embraces the worst of both worlds.

A German Life is likely to be the last new movie of its kind: a documentary that presents contemporary testimony from someone who witnessed the inner workings of the Nazi high command.

Hangman is riddled with holes — blank spaces, if you will.

Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger’s sprawling documentary probably dives into the weeds too quickly and could have used a tighter edit. Still, drawing on a wealth of courtroom video, the film lays out a persuasive argument for reasonable doubt.

Ferdinand, the new computer-animated adaptation from Carlos Saldanha (the “Ice Age” movies), speaks to its own time in a different way, dutifully adhering to the template for contemporary children’s films while avoiding much personality or distinction

As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.

Is Bullet Head good? In truth, it’s drab, derivative and more than slightly silly, but it’s tough to dislike like a movie that proceeds as if the 1990s cycle of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs never ended and that uses the prospect of gory canine violence in service of loud and persistent pro-dog cheerleading.

No doubt subtleties have been lost in translation, but the film is best viewed as an overripe, noir-tinged tragedy.

The more Hope’s own obsession grows, the more involving the movie gets, even as it raises ethical questions about its making — and about those who continue to watch.

However worthy or political its intent, Al Di Qua is too overwrought to seem anything but trivializing.

It seems less a full-fledged movie than a trailer for a book.

The film, accompanied by a percussive score from Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer (both wrote the music for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which Mr. Zeitlin directed), has a wandering attention span and grows monotonous even at barely more than one hour.

Brightly lit and anchored by Mr. Stevens’s infectious, live-wire performance, the film, directed by Bharat Nalluri (“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”), nevertheless proceeds like a television holiday special, designed to distract children while winking at their parents.

The movie tries to do for amateur cooking contests what “Best in Show” did for dog competitions, but the strained folksiness and tired stereotypes couldn’t be further from the snap and wit of prime Christopher Guest.

It offers tonal whiplash for viewers, with several potentially great ideas that don’t settle into a coherent whole.

Mr. Collins doesn’t shed light on what makes his subject tick, and the arty shards never cohere.

If “Daddy’s Home” (2015) played like a distant, wayward cousin of “Step Brothers,” Daddy’s Home 2, again directed by Sean Anders, is the sort of relative you might disown.

There’s a morbid fascination inherent to documentaries like A Gray State, which is engrossing for the reasons it’s also unsatisfying: As Adam Shambour, a friend of Mr. Crowley’s, says, it’s a mystery that answers all the major questions except “Why?”

Absorbing and finely wrought, 1945 is not perfect.

The Divine Order effectively illustrates how peer pressure can influence the political process. Collective silence, whether it’s from women unwilling to publicly press for their rights or men afraid to voice agreement with their wives for fear of looking weak around co-workers, proves more of an obstacle than any opponent. That message gives Ms. Volpe’s lark a timely edge.

If, like its characters, Thank You for Your Service sometimes struggles to balance staying strong with wearing its heart on its sleeve, it makes an emotional plea in a direct, effective way.

Jane will delight those familiar with Ms. Goodall and provide a vibrant introduction for newcomers.

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

The Paris Opera feels at once sprawling and insufficiently patient.

While Mr. Laaksonen devoted his life (1920-91) to challenging conventions, the film is committed to honoring them.

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.

While the film ends at a logical stopping point, it feels incomplete. It probably could have used a few more years of filming.

Paradise is a strikingly shot Holocaust drama that ultimately seems confused about whose story it’s telling or to what end.

The documentary stirs up most of its sporadic excitement in the surfing footage, of which there is plenty. The imagery, especially the aerial shots, gives a sense of Mr. Hamilton’s precision and how close he comes to wiping out.

Those looking to learn the basic outlines of the life of the singer Chavela Vargas could do worse than watch Chavela, but this plodding documentary from Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi rarely transcends simple biography

Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.

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.

It’s more of a document than a documentary; calling it cinema seems like an error of categorization.

The King’s Choice maintains a sense of intrigue when it sticks to the king’s dealings with the government, but the movie drags when it moves outside of back rooms and deviates from setting up the Bräuer-Haakon showdown.

More of a poem or a city symphony than a documentary, it drifts freely, sometimes frustratingly between captured and fictionalized moments.

Although the internet and cellphones exist in the movie, there’s a dated quality to the premise.

It is gorgeous and suspenseful, and it rushes heedlessly into dangerous terrain.

The diffuse filmmaking style muffles the story’s power.

The documentary Company Town, by Natalie Kottke-Masocco and Erica Sardarian, feels fueled by pure desperation; even the rudimentary qualities of the filmmaking (cheap-looking camera work, poorly punctuated title cards) somehow add to its urgency, as if the movie needed to get its message out by any means necessary.

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.

Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice appears to have something to say about the hubris of the modern business tycoon, but it never coalesces into more than a self-amused goof.

It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.

It’s neither a secret masterpiece nor a laughable disaster.

The film carries a trace of the sweep of a great screen epic along with the straightforward, explanatory qualities of mass-audience TV, and is never less than absorbing.

The movie’s notion of fun comes to involve an unclean rest stop, slipped pills and an eminently foreseeable conclusion.

Ms. Maurery has great fun with the character, a tricky part because Maria nearly always maintains a kindhearted veneer, even at her most venal.

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 film isn’t perfect — Mr. Chon’s wild camera motions seem more undisciplined than electric — but it does find an angle on the riots that hasn’t been seen much onscreen.

Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.

A surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait of Whitney Houston’s rise and struggles with fame and drugs before her death at 48.

Shot Caller effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob’s options, but that doesn’t make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.

With a barrage of title-card identifications, 6 Days can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it’s perhaps gratuitously jingoistic.

The question of whether the couple will consummate their relationship isn’t a sufficient source of tension.

Tidiness isn’t crucial, but watching Planetarium often feels like making contact with fragments of a great three-hour movie.

Ingrid Goes West comes close to saying something sharp about how social media promotes envy and the illusion of connectivity, but when a comedy chooses such an obvious target, it should have the courtesy to aim from an oblique angle.

The ideological charge leveled for decades at this strain of filmmaking is that such eye-catching tableaus romanticize poverty, but prettified squalor has become sadly familiar in global documentary filmmaking. In Machines, even at barely more than an hour, the style leads to diminishing returns.

The existence of a debut as confident and allusive as Columbus is almost as improbable as the existence of Columbus, Ind., where the movie is set.

Ms. Cotillard can be magnetic even when playing an unplayable character, but when Gabrielle falls for a veteran (Louis Garrel, who has perfected the facial expression of someone looking for another conversation), the chasm between her abilities and her co-star’s is mountainous.

In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.

Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.

A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.

Although produced independently, this documentary, directed by Kirk Simon, plays as if the Pulitzers were presenting an award to themselves.

Even seasoned defenders of cryptic formalism may find it amorphous. The characters are never named, the camera work is static, and little that’s conceptually interesting materializes.

The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.

Swim Team mostly aims to educate and inspire; on those counts, it succeeds.

It’s a pleasure to spend 80 minutes in Mr. Berry’s company.

The Skyjacker’s Tale could stand to lose its gimmicky re-enactments. Why supplement a story this crazy?

Just because Nobody Speak has a timely message doesn’t make it an ideal messenger.

Here’s a summer movie that is about — and offers — escape.

Lost in Paris grows a bit tiresome at feature length, but it’s a winning divertissement.

Absent fathers and mothers, building bridges with children — Moscow Never Sleeps could easily have unfolded in a much darker register. That it doesn’t is both refreshing and deflating.

While Sami Blood can sometimes seem didactic, Ms. Kernell, who has Sami heritage, richly conveys a sense of the time and place, with elegant shots that glide through the Nordic wilderness.

Past Life is a page-turner that transforms into a clarion call: always compelling, but slightly stifled by noble intentions.

Both leads are excellent together, and the movie is good at showing how Anna and Ben push each other’s buttons.

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

How The Last Shaman came to be isn’t discussed in the film, but this documentary might be less disquieting if it had been.

In a complicated role, the excellent Ms. Koler exudes a kind of flighty confidence: For all her nuptial-related anxieties, Michal is completely comfortable with who she is.

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?

Incorporating his typically arduous, slow-paced style, Mr. Wang doesn’t make things easy for viewers.

Dagg’s thriller is slow to get going and hampered by an inexpressive leading man.

This sentimental film takes things one step at a time.

Boone is slightly monotonous, and familiarity may be one cause.

[A] taut and commanding primer.

At its most enjoyable, Valerio Ruiz’s rambling profile cedes the floor to Ms. Wertmüller, who recalls her creative partnership with her husband, the production designer Enrico Job, and her cultural importance in representing Italy’s south onscreen.

By the Time It Gets Dark has clearly been thought through, but it’s so cryptic that it cries out for, if not perfect explanations, perhaps footnotes. It’s so conceptual that it offers little for those not in sync.

For all its visual and sonic pleasures — see it in a theater with a good subwoofer — All These Sleepless Nights feels simple-minded in its commitment to drift above all else.

While the recordings are wall-to-wall, this somewhat busy documentary rarely accords time for simply listening.

Bell is embodied, in a commanding and versatile performance, by Nicole Kidman, who supplies a gravitas and emotional complexity worthy of the woman she plays.

Mostly, the documentary is a fond portrait of how one man nurtured his artistic temperament and risked being misunderstood — sometimes by his own family.

In 2015, Bel Powley stole Sundance with her performance in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Carrie Pilby poses a tougher test. Might she single-handedly redeem 90 minutes of contrived nonsense?

The vividness of the realization — with a sound design that emphasizes every chew and tick of the clock — makes the movie continually engrossing.

A study in denial, American Anarchist may be illuminating for being unilluminating.

As the astronauts contend with airlocks, busted equipment and escape pods, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that this isn’t territory where more inventive screenwriters...and stronger visual stylists have gone before.

An exemplar of how to make the personal political.

Even without an upbeat ending, though, Betting on Zero would be persuasive advocacy.

The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.

Junction 48 is more than a mere crowd-pleaser, and it refuses easy catharsis, ending with a cliffhanger. But since this is a movie about deciding to act, maybe that’s the perfect note.

A strong nonprofessional cast and a use of long takes enhance the sense of immersion in a truly organic production.

[Roberto Sneider's] movie is erratic, jumpy (thanks to a needlessly affected editing style) and not entirely in control of its message.

The movie doesn’t credit any source material, but it plays like a poorly dramatized magazine exposé.

Arguments over whether the documentary’s existence honors Mr. Vishner’s wishes and spirit — and whether continuing to film was appropriate — lead in circles.

A Good American gets bogged down in details and personnel talk, but its subjects have an urgent narrative to tell.

Oklahoma City suggests that conspiracy theories today have consequences for tomorrow — a message with terrifying implications in an age of fake news.

The movie is consistently tougher to resist than it might seem.

Some tragedies defy conventional representation. Unlike the play it documents, this documentary shows few signs of thinking outside the box.

Behemoth proceeds placidly, making it easy to become lulled. Its haunting power grows in retrospect — as if you’ve returned from a journey and can’t believe what you’ve seen.

If Starless Dreams inspires conflicted feelings in viewers, it may be by design. It’s hard not to want to flee, and it’s hard to look away.

They Call Us Monsters doesn’t shy from the consequences of the violence the prisoners were accused of (we meet a paralyzed victim of a shooting), even as it suggests that the system...proceeds almost mechanically.

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.

This film is so heavy with exposition that you would think that the director, Anna Foerster, and the screenwriter, Cory Goodman, had set out to complete a dissertation instead of a sequel.

Slick production values can’t disguise the lack of imagination.

As goosed as the drama gets...the uplift feels earned, or at least tough to resist.

The climax quickens the film’s pulse but doesn’t exactly grow organically from what’s proceeded it.

The Wasted Times plays like a movie carved out of a much larger mini-series, whose segments are then shown out of order.

For a movie about proud outcasts, Slash is a little square.

Hogtown plays like a find from a forgotten archive.

While “Videofilia” is tough to absorb in one viewing, it is hard to escape the sense that Mr. Molero has employed his relentless formal invention in service of some fairly banal moralizing about the dangers of strangers and the internet — a warning that seems late for the here and now.

It’s a brisk and energetic primer for those who don’t know his movies or are ready to watch them again. And it doubles as a history of the chanbara (sword fighting) genre, providing an opportunity to sample clips from seldom-seen or partially lost silent films.

This British thriller is a high-concept tease that slogs its way through a morass of barely differentiated characters and visuals before reaching an unsatisfying conclusion.

Even the profanity has lost its zing in this cut-rate retread, which mostly prompts admiration for how far Mr. Zwigoff ran with one joke.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Baxter often tends toward needless force-feeding.

In what probably qualifies as both an accomplishment and a shortcoming, the movie makes you want to read Babel’s writing instead.

The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.

As the suspense slackens and blood starts spilling nearly to the point of self-parody, it almost seems designed as a test of mettle — for both the filmmakers and the audience.

If Mr. Fields’s contributions to pop music deserve more fame, the movie plays like an overcorrection, a spirited but repetitive testament to one man’s excellent taste.

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

It’s made watchable by an appealing cast.

"Southwest of Salem” proceeds with what have become sobering tropes for true-crime documentaries: a defendant saying she didn’t realize she needed a lawyer; outsiders explaining how they grew convinced of a miscarriage of justice.

It’s less a social history than a commercial for alternative healing.

If Happy Hour doesn’t quite deliver all it promises, that may only be because it promises quite a lot.

The Tenth Man, a modest charmer from Argentina, breathes considerable life into the rather trite scenario of a man discovering his religious roots, in part because it seems genuinely curious about the community in which it’s set.

As if to personify the movie’s whiplash-inducing split between gloss and grit, the singer Erykah Badu appears as a prostitute — and also contributes a duet with Nas, one of the executive producers, to the soundtrack.

For the Plasma is a film with no shortage of ambition, taste (Maine looks great in 16-millimeter) or ideas. It’s a shame those ideas are so incoherent.

Lucha Mexico often plays less like a character study than like a simple promotional effort, with repetitive platitudes.

It is a summer sequel worth its salt, a brisk exercise in suspense and high-gloss mayhem.

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.

This overlong (nearly four hours) but sporadically extraordinary portrait of a forgotten corner of society may be tough going even for fans of forbidding cinema.

The Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (“A Moment of Innocence,” “Kandahar”) is not known for his kineticism, but The President — which he has suggested is his comment on the Arab Spring — has surprising urgency and sweep.

If Approaching the Unknown isn’t entirely satisfying, Mr. Strong reaches high with his portrayal of the unraveling of a man who believes survival is a matter of engineering.

Those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes.

A good example of how a charismatic figure doesn’t automatically generate a deep or compelling documentary.

The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.

If the self-consciousness can be charming, it also prevents The American Side from becoming fully its own film.

Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.

An environmental documentary that consists of roughly one-third doom-and-gloom to two-thirds wide-eyed optimism, and that is more potent in individual scenes than it is as a sprawling whole.

Tourism is what it has to sell.

Professionally comfortable with improvising, the D.J.s make for affable company, and it’s amusing to watch radio from behind the scenes. But a tinge of melancholy also hovers over the movie.

This proudly derivative genre exercise will not be to every taste (or stomach), but the director, Can Evrenol, shows a certain knack for tension and for framing viscera in wide screen, even if his cutting is sometimes too quick.

[Farhadi and cowriter Mani Haghighi] prove to be stronger on atmosphere than on structure, aided by crisp, unnerving camerawork.

A contemplative tone, a zigzagging narrative, superb widescreen black-and-white cinematography and an infusion of dry humor make it feel genuinely fresh.

A swift primer that favors breadth over depth, the movie saves some hopeful notes for the end.

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.

As ever, the paradox of Mr. Verhoeven’s style is that it seems to wallow in tastelessness and transgression even as he remains one of the most classical movie craftsmen.

The prickly tone is a difficult balancing act, and Diamond Tongues may settle for being a softer-hearted film than its most cynical scenes portend. But it has a palpable affection for Toronto’s cultural scene and for Ms. Goldstein.

If, at barely more than an hour, the movie initially seems slight, its inconsequentiality might be better viewed as polemical.

The movie’s occasional stabs at political commentary never quite pay off. Nor can the writer-directors, brothers Yoav and Doron Paz, fully sustain the film’s novelty into the second half, when the script reverts to timeless, tired monster-movie tropes.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.

It finds a few moments of sweep and suspense in between grand speeches and reprises of a swollen score.

The immersive style is always fascinating. But it also seems uneasily suited to the material.

The subject matter makes The Tainted Veil much more visually interesting than many issue-oriented documentaries, though the thriller-like score goes too far in trying to counter dryness.

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

McCullin is not a groundbreaking documentary, but it wears its conventional format well, taking its cues (and its power) from the photographs themselves.

This debut feature from the Spanish-born director Miguel Llansó can’t claim a coherent mythology, but it has a lo-fi charm and humor.

Flashbacks and fantasy sequences undercut the claustrophobic atmosphere. What’s left is amateurish play acting — pointless for anyone who hasn’t seen “Portrait of Jason” and redundant for those who have.

Loushy skillfully and briskly excerpts the material, although the film falls somewhere on the line between formal documentary and assemblage.

While Peace Officer could offer more information, what is here is disturbing and sometimes eye-opening.

The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.

The Transporter Refueled is crass and nonsensical, but it is hard to hate a movie in which a medical anesthetic is administered with a nightclub fog machine, the weapons include a ringed life preserver, an escape from a moving plane continues by car onto a jetway and the touch-screen banking software appears expressly designed for double-crossing.

The chemistry makes the movie’s pleasures easy to surrender to, albeit fleetingly.

The Second Mother goes soft toward the end, defusing its conflicts too easily and inconsequentially.

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

With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.

Rapid editing leaves little time to absorb vocabulary (such as “deadstock,” a new shoe that has never been worn) or intricacies of design.

The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.

The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.

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

A generous and briskly entertaining doc.

Casting Cassel as a ruthless villain might seem like a cliche, but Kleiman uses him counterintuitively, locating an avuncular, calming quality in the actor.