Ben Kenigsberg

The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.

Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, directed by James Jones, does not extensively explore the history of its components. It’s less concerned with the tapes themselves than with the act of bearing witness.

Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.

Working with a shrewdly limited setting, Mouaness skillfully gives the film a near-real-time feel, conveying a sense that the war is approaching through small-scale details like radio broadcasts, Wissam’s observation that pigeons have flown unusually close to the school and the volume and frequency of aerial noise.

Framed by scenes of weeping, the narrative does not entirely pull itself into a satisfying arc, but the film nevertheless unfolds with dexterity and suspense.

It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely.

The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.

Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.

While Levinson is not working from his own history as in “Diner” or “Avalon,” The Survivor, partly because of its subject matter and postwar milieu, feels of a piece with those overtly personal films. Whatever its flaws, it’s powerful.

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.

While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.

If any creativity went into Choose or Die, a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.

The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.

While All the Old Knives keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.

Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).

Somewhat gratingly, King Otto treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head.

There are no real answers for anyone in The Last Mountain. If Terrill never finds a clear narrative or emotional through line for this account, it’s not entirely a surprise. The material resists attempts at uplift.

The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.

In its first half-hour, the documentary The Jump brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident.

While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes Friends and Strangers so singular.

It is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit.

The closing titles say Nelson “would not agree to be interviewed.” While others try to explain her perspective, her nonparticipation leaves an unavoidable hole. And the testaments to Hampshire’s distinctive academic culture aren’t especially germane.

A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.

This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.

As filmmaking, The Conductor takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself.

Salt in My Soul is extremely painful to watch, especially as it shows the roller coaster of Smith’s recurring hospitalizations. But it does paint a vivid portrait of who she was and what she believed.

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