Chris Barsanti

If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.

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.

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.

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.

Shrouded in an elegiac reverie, The Midnight Sky is a frequently beautiful movie, from the mechanical ballet of the bird-like Aether to the brief glimpses of K-23, where Jupiter looms in a purplish night sky. But its inability to make a strong connection between the separated stories, and a tone that slips sometimes from poetic quietude to sentimentality, keep the movie from taking a long and honest look at the devastation its reticent mood only suggests.

At its best, John Lewis: Good Trouble is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present.

Unlike its subject, Radical Wolfe would rather be liked than start something.

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

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.

The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.

Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.

Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.

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

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.

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

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

The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.

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

The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.

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

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

Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.

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.

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.

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.

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