Chris Barsanti

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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