Chris Packham

Small details and incidents accrete into a pointillist rendering of despair.

Schiffli and Dastmalchian deliver a sweet, elegiac concluding moment that offers a measure of hope without making a lot of unbelievable promises.

But the directors elevate the picture to a level of emotional genius by filming the children's play as a full-on cinematic adaptation, shot and edited with seriousness and polish.

This film is unusually slow-paced for its genre, but Zahler’s screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight.

With its interrogations of gender, feminism, and marriage, Shakespeare's comedy is an apt vehicle for Whedon's own storytelling agenda.

Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films.

Potrykus and Burge make this transformation — from funny, oddball character study to darker portrayal of desperation — more naturally than it seems should be possible.

Director Nabil Ayouch depicts the sprawling, ramshackle Sidi Moumen slums with fluid camera movements... He finds the humanity and the hopelessness in its narrow streets, its fields of rubble, monstrous trash dumps, and grim marketplaces.

The director's native warmth and sympathy are extended here to the store and the personalities that made it a billion-dollar, globe-bestriding colossus.

Though Wajda admires this struggle, the artist’s final pursuit never seems redemptive in the depths of Strzemiński’s isolation and misery.

Famous for his war photography, McCullin's gift is his sensitivity, a capacity to feel the pain of other people that informs both the images he produced and the ones he refused to take.

Through photos and family lore, but mostly through Dayton's own eloquence, Mitchell assembles a biographical portrait that's inspiring in the best possible way.

Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.

Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.

Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.

Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they’re about to die.

Bone Tomahawk is an odd duck, a bowlegged western with slasher influences, a penchant for lengthy conversational meanderings, and a genuine interest in character.

Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz connects the dots of Swartz's past, assembling a vivid portrait of a sensitive genius with a strong moral sense.

Fed Up is a workmanlike documentary, as undistinguished in style as a PowerPoint slide show. It nonetheless finds traction in its depiction of the food industry's Montgomery Burns–like practices.

Maxine Peake is a revelation in Run & Jump, communicating vitality and extraordinary optimism that practically bleeds out and infects the visuals.

The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.

Allie and Harper are basically unlikable, but played with a light touch and just enough distance from their own unthinking cruelty to remain funny.

In this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work, and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews.

As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance.

A wide-ranging, if shallow, exploration of intrusive government surveillance practices.

Unstudied to the point of utilitarianism, the film nonetheless has wide scope, and Doyle effectively gets his arms around this huge, nebulous, weird job.

Sincere and unexpectedly good.

Jones presents a stark picture of a bifurcated economic system: the real one, in which ordinary citizens struggle; and the financial economy, in which the livelihoods of citizens are leveraged by the wealthy for speculative bets.