Chris Barsanti

Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend.

This is a finely observed and good-natured piece of work that carries some of the creative angst of Bradley Cooper’s other films but without the need to convince us of its main character’s genius.

Smith brings a tone of melancholy to the closing stretches of “Devo,” acknowledging in some way that all revolutions fade and mass cultural subversion will only ever work up to a point. But there is also a lack of sentimentality or resume-burning here, which feels of a piece with the band’s spiky posture and protest mentality.

The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.

Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.

If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.

The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.

Sly Lives! pays appropriate credit to its subject’s greatness by not devolving into pity even after depicting Stone at his lowest points.

The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.

Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.

At one point, she connects the beliefs of these conservative evangelicals with the post-colonial idealism of Brasilia’s builders, whose faith was “not in God but in the equally abstract ideas of progress and democracy.” That sense of inquiry and curiosity stops Apocalypse in the Tropics from veering into hyperbole without ever losing its harrowing urgency.

The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.

By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.

The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.

Though Sadoff’s chilling documentary sometimes resembles less a film than a briefing (albeit one narrated by Peter Coyote), the warning here is dire; simplicity may be the best tactic to get the message across.

The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.

The film’s humor is a clenched-fist assault on runaway greed and systemic corruption.

The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance.

It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.

The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.

Unlike its subject, Radical Wolfe would rather be liked than start something.

It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.

At its most engrossing, the film vibrantly sketches out the historical roots of the Negro baseball leagues.

Foster tackles this material in the high-velocity fashion common to many stranger-than-fiction documentaries about people gleefully living outside the law. There is a lot for him to work with, one vivid and outlandish anecdote spilling into another.

A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling.

Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.

While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.

Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.

While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.

By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.

Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.

The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.

Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.

An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.

The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.

Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.

By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.

The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.

Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.

The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.

The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.

The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.

The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.

While Donbass is far from perfect, hiding too much of its story and message in at-times dull and layered absurdity, it nevertheless presents a harrowing picture of how war and nationalism corrupt and degrade places nowhere near the battlefield.

The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.

Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.

Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.

Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.

The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.

Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.

The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.

Where “Becoming Cousteau” frustrates at times is its thin treatment of Cousteau’s work. The films and shows are represented with plentiful footage but not truly discussed or differentiated. It’s an odd choice, given Cousteau’s cinematic obsession.

The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.

John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.

The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.

Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.

Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.

Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.

The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services.

A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.

Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.

Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.

Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.

Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.

The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.

The film approximates the dislocation of its main character’s mind with a frighteningly slippery ease.

Shrouded in an elegiac reverie, The Midnight Sky is a frequently beautiful movie, from the mechanical ballet of the bird-like Aether to the brief glimpses of K-23, where Jupiter looms in a purplish night sky. But its inability to make a strong connection between the separated stories, and a tone that slips sometimes from poetic quietude to sentimentality, keep the movie from taking a long and honest look at the devastation its reticent mood only suggests.

Despite hanging back at times too much for its own good, Mayor remains a fascinating portrait of what city politics look like under extreme conditions.

The film is affectingly poignant in its frequently uncomfortable presentation of Shane MacGowan’s physical ruination.

Clear-eyed and clinical without being detached from the human cost, this is a riveting drama of catastrophic amorality told with a cold fury.

With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.

The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.

Lombroso delivers close, often uncomfortable intimacy. He catches his subjects in the heat of the alt-right’s coming-out period in 2016 and 2017, when the mainstream press was just starting to turn over some rocks and write about what oozed out.

The movie does not stint on Belushi’s destructive, self-sabotaging, and cruel habits.

Focusing primarily on the pandemic’s opening act in the first half of 2020, Totally Under Control feels fresh off the editing table. It is so timely, in fact, that an on-screen note at the end informs viewers that one day after it was completed, Trump tested positive for COVID-19. It reads like a punchline to the least funny joke ever told.

It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.

A stirring testament to the necessity of empathy for surviving with any kind of dignity in a particularly undignified time.

By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface.

Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.

It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.

The film uses endangered press freedom in the Philippines to illustrate the threat posed to liberal democracy by weaponized social media.

The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.

These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.

At its best, John Lewis: Good Trouble is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present.

The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.

It incorporates addiction, age-inappropriate romance, mental illness, and terminal disease into its plot without collapsing into a movie-of-the-week black hole.

Given his story’s curlicues and lack of overt judgment, Ree does not appear to be interested in a clear morality story about forgiveness or opposites coming together. However, The Painter and the Thief does leave room for a kind of redemption at its conclusion.

While it nods to everything from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Patterson’s movie is more a tribute to the romance of a breeze-whispered sprawling night and the shivery thrill of not knowing what nameless threats it hides.

As Odysseus returned home after his troubled journey to find yet more strife, Coogan and Brydon go back to their familiar schtick—long drives and touristy rambles punctuated by expensively minimalist dinners, all of it borne on a tide of joshing, snarky banter—only to discover more discomfort.

Spaceship Earth is a highly watchable document from a curious cultural convergence in which avant-garde “Star Trek” utopianism met the glare of the mainstream.

The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.

Without Margo Martindale, the film would be a sharp and tightly constructed nautical noir. With her, it becomes a memorable one.

The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.

By the time that the sun is up and Peggy Lee is singing “Is That All There Is?”, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets has proven to be an impressively affecting and even slightly tragic piece about the homes away from home that provide comfort, as well as just how fleeting that comfort can feel in the bright light of day.

The film serves as both caustic update to Victor Hugo’s monolithic novel and cautionary tale about the future.

While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and “63 Up” in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.