Ben Kenigsberg

Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.

If the bigger picture of In the Earth doesn’t appear fully realized — this is a movie not just of the moment, but perhaps rushed to meet it — it would be difficult, this year, for at least some of its atmosphere of isolation-induced madness not to inspire a chill.

As enjoyable as their writing can be, the filmmaking around them — aerial shots, time lapse photography, cuts to the couple looking engrossed — is less inspired than their project.

Nothing concrete emerges from this haze of oblique editing and barely written scenes, acted by cast members who are not up to making the dialogue sound convincing or filling the voids left in place of their characters.

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