Chris Barsanti

Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.

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

This is a movie that ripples with sublimated fury well before the bloody and shocking long take that ends everything without much of an answer. But it is also a movie that leaves too much unsaid and takes too long to end up nowhere.

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.

The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.

A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.

A stirring testament to the necessity of empathy for surviving with any kind of dignity in a particularly undignified time.

Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.

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.

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.

Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.

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.

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.

The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.

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

The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.

While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.

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.

The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.