Chris Barsanti

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.

Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.

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.

This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.

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 film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.

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.

The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.

As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.

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.

The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.

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.

Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.

Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.

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.

Clumsy and erratic, though possessed of an undeniable bounding and puppy-like energy, How to Build a Girl is a star vehicle for Feldstein that, while it often does not do its star justice, also knows when to just stay out of her way.

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.

In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.

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

Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.

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.

Adding to the fraught complexities of economic insecurity and environmental devastation, When Lambs Become Lions wraps its story in a sweep of broodingly gorgeous imagery.

Maybe Marcos imagined this documentary would humanize her. Greenfield did. But not in the way that her subject would have preferred.

This sharp, to-the-point portrait of the crook, fixer, and right-wing pitbull resists the urge to darkly glamorize him.

Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.

Try as the filmmakers do to conjure a restorative kind of magic in its searching, yearning storyline of renewal, they are not able to come up with much more than a limping comedy about a woman with all-too-easily-explained mental issues.

It’s a sign of how quickly it feels like the world is being torn apart around us that even a ripped-from-the-headlines documentary, such as Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s The Great Hack, can feel almost dated.

Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows, which bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger, uses the potential extinction of one little-known species of whale to symbolize a far larger and potentially globe-spanning problem.

Once the flood of heavily redacted documents starts flowing in, Boundaoui’s measured but righteous indignation bends toward what she calls the gray “dangerous place” between paranoia and the truth.

In its refusal to bend to unrealistic notions of escape, Joy is a bravely dark movie.

Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn’t occur.

The action choreography is as brutal as you expect, though the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.

The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.

A thin but heartfelt piece of work ... But with Ferrara content to let his subject mostly drive the show and not impose more of an authorial vision and context that could have created a grander narrative about the history of moviegoing in New York, the passion is missing.

Werner Herzog’s documentary is a rare example of the arch ironist’s capacity to be awed not by nature but by man.

Even though The Public ultimately doesn’t come together as a dramatic piece, particularly in the hammy climax, it does take some impressive chances. Just making a story about the invisible homeless is a brave move to start—audiences tend not to like stories about intractable issues, after all.

Alison Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall documentary cuts Trump’s Rasputin down to size but doesn’t completely dismiss his power.

Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.

The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.

Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely.

The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.

The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.

Chris Smith’s documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival implosion resists the urge to revel in cheap social media schadenfreude.

A tragic romance of identity embedded in a voluptuous atmosphere, Moonlight flirts with visual and thematic excess. But the emotional integrity of its characters, seamlessly maintained from one set of actors to the next, who so desperately want to love, pulls it back from the brink.

Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.

It’s only when River Runs Red gets to about the hour mark that a story begins to cohere. Up until that point, it had taken the most perfunctory of stabs at being a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about police shootings.

This is a movie that ripples with sublimated fury well before the bloody and shocking long take that ends everything without much of an answer. But it is also a movie that leaves too much unsaid and takes too long to end up nowhere.

Anyone happening to come across Silencio should just as well move on: There’s nothing to see here.

This is a riveting, important story in which the personal can’t help but be political.

The direction by Ruben Fleischer (Zomebieland, Gangster Squad) is oddly slapdash, and hardly does justice to the skills of his cast or his own chops as a comedic filmmaker. Hardy squeezes some baffled comedy out of his schizoid shtick, but there just isn’t much here for him to work with.

Dramatically constructed and studded with sharp, thoughtful points of view,The Oslo Diaries nevertheless falls down on one point. The movie doesn’t get as much sunlight into the PLO viewpoint on the process, focusing almost exclusively on Israeli domestic politics.

With its star-studded cast of experts, from Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk to automated warfare experts like Peter Singer, and a brief that is nothing short of the survival of humanity, Do You Trust This Computer? is a more sprawling and diffuse piece of work. It has a larger frame of reference than Paine’s battery-car docs but never hammers it into shape.

Sharply argued, indignantly one-sided and stylistically monotonous The Bleeding Edge sometimes seems closer to angry PSA than documentary. But that may not be a distinction that matters.

Blisteringly caustic as ever, John Lydon nevertheless reveals himself as an occasionally sentimental sort in Tabbert Fiiller’s fitfully revelatory and charming documentary.

Unfortunately, the tendency of Voyeur to tilt towards comedy undermines the weight of its story.

By the time Jarecki is done with Elvis, the lanky, and projects-raised, rockabilly kid just one generation removed from sharecroppers has been cast as everything from an opportunist and grasping capitalist to addled addict to just plain sucker. If he ever was the King, the movie suggests, it’s long past time to retire the crown.

It’s strange that The Equalizer 2 is such a sluggish ride. Fuqua and Washington have developed a body of work over the years that is, if nothing else, reliably kinetic. But with Wenk’s pedestrian writing, there just isn’t much for Washington to work with here.

The story of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which opened the spigots of campaign cash, has been told before. But Reed weaves it into a larger narrative in which it is simply one of the steps in the unraveling of modern campaign-finance laws.

Path of Blood is more an immediate experience, and as such succeeds in unexpected ways. The human normality of what it shows is nearly more sickening than the carnage itself.

Deliberately paced but shot with a quiet magnetism and close-in immediacy,The Citizen benefits in comparison to other immigrant dramas because even though this is a story suffused with empathy, it doesn’t center on either a good deed being done by a white Westerner for a helpless dark-skinned foreigner or that foreigner’s two-dimensional pluck.

McCabe stands apart not just for the impressive technical virtuosity of his filmmaking or his unblinking focus on the tragedy of the Congo, but for his refusal to chalk it up to generalized Third World chaos. Things happen for a reason, this devoutly humane but studious documentary argues, and until those reasons are dealt with, they will continue.

There is only so much a director can do to bring surprise to certain stock elements—it would be refreshing to just once see a convoy survive a movie without being ambushed—but Sollima knits together big, sweeping aerial shots and tight-in, juddering angles that work each nerve not already done to pieces by all the automatic weapons fire and exploding vehicles.

By refusing to illuminate the detainees’ stories or the humanitarian crisis—not widely reported enough for Brady to take the audience’s familiarity as a given—they are trapped inside, The Island of Hungry Ghosts relegates itself to being little more than a pretty but wispy curiosity that fails its beleaguered subjects.

For Driver’s movie, Basquiat is a ghostly presence, popping up in snapshots or scraps of footage.

Doueiri wrestles with the complexities of history and morality without ignoring the humanity of the individuals caught in this frightening maelstrom of a story.

Gibney’s movie points fingers not just at the people it argues carried out the killing, but the highly-placed figures who covered up for them.

This is cinematic intimacy in the best manner for the worst of all reasons.

This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.

Satirically tart throughout, The Reagan Show is still a schizoid experience. It mostly wants to dissect the Reaganites’ bread and circuses tactics, but also to present a thumbnail history of his presidency. Both are credibly delivered, but they don’t always necessarily mesh.

Excepting a strangely off-key final scene, A Gray State is a compelling, highly dramatic piece of documentary filmmaking.

The broad-spectrum approach of LA 92 resists easy answers while still holding a strong editorial viewpoint about the overlapping institutional defects that led to the riots.

By the Time It Gets Dark jumps at first into an examination of Thailand’s repressed history of political violence and dictatorial control. But that initial pencil sketch of a thesis is soon shuffled away in favor of several other less-interesting story threads which add up to much less than the sum of their parts.

There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence, from the first moment he’s on screen, he radiates such a brash Fenian cockiness you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him. It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance.

Once Taghi Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Walter Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form.