Chris Barsanti

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.

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

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

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

Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend.

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

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

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.

The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.

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.

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.

For a musical so dedicated to celebrating and critiquing the transformative potential of cinematic fantasy, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman brings relatively little of the kind of overwhelming star power that can truly transport audiences.

By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.

The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.

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.

It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.

Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

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

Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

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

Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.

Elton John: Never Too Late comes across as a safe and well-tooled piece of a carefully managed relationship with Disney.

Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.