Chris Barsanti

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A tragic romance of identity embedded in a voluptuous atmosphere, Moonlight flirts with visual and thematic excess. But the emotional integrity of its characters, seamlessly maintained from one set of actors to the next, who so desperately want to love, pulls it back from the brink.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This is a riveting, important story in which the personal can’t help but be political.

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.

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.

An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.

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

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.