Ben Kenigsberg

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.

Gravel, in his appearances, comes across as avuncular, eager to share ideas but even more eager to encourage young acolytes.

Trying to get a read on the film — while admiring its palette and off-kilter character details (Lubicchi has an odd vampire overbite) — keeps “Poupelle” fun for a while. But the film ultimately shies away from its most disturbing ideas, falling back on a comforting sentimentality.

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.

“Into the Abyss,” which mixes material from Juice WRLD’s tour stops with interviews and hangout and recording vignettes, isn’t particularly focused.

To a degree, Womack’s audacious career path has been shoehorned into a conventional profile format.

Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.

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

While the ethical issues of the property situation add complexity, the film’s efforts to balance the arguments on both sides aren’t convincing.

To judge Greene’s experiment, not least because of its visible salutary effects, feels like intruding on private breakthroughs. But the discomfiting power of Procession comes from its ability to show and, to all appearances, facilitate them.

The lack of labeling only raises questions, slightly marring what otherwise plays like a thorough, outraged exposé.

Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.

Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, A Cop Movie has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate.

Absent formal rigor, the “Paranormal Activity” concept doesn’t offer much else.

There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.

As family entertainment, it’s fine.

Hodge is not always on Shkreli’s side, but he appears convinced he’s made a well-rounded portrait, as opposed to a dubious, bottom-feeding, bro-to-bro testimonial.

Old Henry makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.

The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.

Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.

The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative.

Formally lively, The Nowhere Inn is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point.

A winning cast helps sell that familiar premise — not just Reale and Young-White, who have definite chemistry and an easy-flowing banter, but also the brassy, scene-stealing Catherine Cohen.

The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy.

The omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.