Ben Kenigsberg

Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, Whirlybird is an editing feat.

The harms conversion therapy causes, and the tactics it uses, aren’t news at this point, and Pray Away is more interesting when it focuses on how most of its subjects eventually embraced gay and bisexual identities despite having formerly been so public in their homophobia. Some shifts weren’t long ago.

Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.

If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.

The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality.

It is a good primer, well illustrated.

Muckraking documentaries often conclude with declined-to-comment disclaimers, but David Keene, a former N.R.A. president, is here. Toward the end, he chillingly cautions anyone who thinks the N.R.A. might disappear.

“Scenes” has its moments, as any film that sits Ryan and Corrigan opposite each other in a confessional would. But even special effects near the end play more like the response to a challenge than a spark of inspiration.

A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.

Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic.

The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when Lansky turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.

Mitte, who played the son in “Breaking Bad” and himself has cerebral palsy, sells Mike’s tenacity, but the contrivances around him let him down.

12 Mighty Orphans is a plodding football drama in which the characters talk to one another like folksy social workers.

in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.

the connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.

If it’s annoying to watch a follow-up snark at itself while implicitly snarking at viewers for buying tickets to a crass-ified Peter Rabbit, the conceit offers evidence that things might have been worse. At least Gluck doesn’t send Peter into space.

Rogue Hostage is shoddy work.

Riegel has said that Ruth’s story was inspired by her own challenges leaving the area. Even the medium — Super 16-millimeter film, in the era of digital — adds to the ambience of rusting, abandoned machinery.

Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; Under the Stadium Lights treats platitudes as the main event.

The nuances of Ali’s relationship with Louisville — where Ali faced discrimination as a Black American and controversy for his refusal to be drafted — tend to get lost in the celebration of civic pride.

It’s possible that Baggio: The Divine Ponytail will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.

While the plot is absorbing, the movie continually has characters voice their motivations, leaving little to subtext.

To make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.

New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.

A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.

Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.

If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse.

As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.