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.