Chris Barsanti

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.