Chris Barsanti

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

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.

The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.

The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.

Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.

Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.

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

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

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.

Despite hanging back at times too much for its own good, Mayor remains a fascinating portrait of what city politics look like under extreme conditions.

The film is affectingly poignant in its frequently uncomfortable presentation of Shane MacGowan’s physical ruination.

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

Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.

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.

The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.

This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.

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 is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.

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

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.

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

As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.

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

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

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

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.

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

It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.