Chris Barsanti

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.

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

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

The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs.

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.

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.

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

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

The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.

Like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, the film never finds the right groove.

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.

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

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.

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.

The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.

By setting up such a potentially cataclysmic scenario and not convincingly illustrating how it could be resolved or stopped from occurring in the first place, War Game undercuts the very reason it was made.

In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.

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

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

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