Chris Packham

Writer-director Stephen Belber's inspiriting, generous Match is so good that it's like some kind of trick.

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.

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

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.

This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.

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.

The film's sweetness, its story line, and the script's cartoony characters recall Raising Arizona, though Gone Doggy Gone isn't as tightly structured. But, being looser, it has a little more room to breathe.

The film is wallpapered with beatings, shootings and bloodshed, so its genuine sensitivity to trans issues is welcome and surprising.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The film quietly reveals these four small stories as epically heroic and timeless journeys.

Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.

Rackstraw Downes: A Painter is glacial and mesmerizing, the documentary equivalent of droning Tibetan singing bowls, a work crafted to induce its audience into the same contemplative state as its subject at work.

Martemucci intertwines these stories gracefully, and with the charm and charisma of her cast, makes clever banter and script contrivances seem completely natural and unaffected.

Burton scales his finale down to the size of a tourist boardwalk for an unexpectedly gripping crowd-pleaser of an action scene.

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

[A] small, gentle coming-of-age story, exceedingly well-cast.

The film is also faithful to the smartassery of the Spider-Man of the comics, and Garfield's spindly physicality evokes the Marvel illustrations of the 1960s.

Sincere and unexpectedly good.

Though visually expansive, however, the film feels emotionally intimate.

[A] quiet, somber film.

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.

The narrative hinges at every turn on moments of human connection, scary confrontations other films would resolve with violence finding unexpected (and probably unlikely) detours into humor and empathy.

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.

Writer-director Josh Boone populates Stuck in Love with smart characters breaking from emotional holding patterns of varying contours.

Though not as funny as Moore's earliest work, Jon Whelan's Stink! is way more emotionally affecting.

Wilson is a charismatic and underused actor, perfect here as a guy with a talent for convincing others of his virtue. Headey, as Sam's wife, creates a surprisingly complex portrait of a woman shattered by her husband but hungry for higher social position.

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

Love Hunter probably counts as a musical, the film's a sad, gentle valediction for a young artist’s dream.

At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.

The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter's documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel.

Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.

Co-director and narrator Ben Knight interviews activists, officials, social jammers, and scientists, approaching the subject not with outrage, but with humor and optimism.

Mannered and often very funny.

Sometimes academically clinical, and including infomercial-like narration by Jane Seymour, the film has a bright core of real emotion.

Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe.

Director Jason Naumann treats the characters with genuine affection and a portrayal of faith that actually has integrity.

Altered States of Plaine, like indies Pi and Primer, harbors ambition that towers over its super-saver discount budget.

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

The Art of the Steal doesn't advance the nerdy intertextuality that has distinguished ironic crime films since Guy Ritchie, but writer-director Jonathan Sobol knows the ropes.

Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s gorgeous film is informed by that same charm and intelligence the way a sailboat is informed by 7 knots of westerly breeze.

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

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

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

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

There's nothing new in the friction between these characters, but it's fun to watch a couple of pros showboating on the field, even when the stakes aren't high.

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

Sometimes, Extinction is a zombie apocalypse story; mostly, it's a meditation on isolation, redemption, and family that could, in its basic outline, be satisfyingly told outside of its genre.

With its fun script and cheap visuals, Escape Plan evokes the halfwit cheesiness of 1980s-era Cannon films, but it also recalls the deft pacing and legibility of their action sequences.

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.

The music is incredible, and through interviews with Rosey Grier, Afrika Bambaataa, Questlove, and a squadron of old-school studio musicians, director Dan Forrer unearths some of the hidden history of American pop.

Despite the psychological extremes, writer-director Francesca Gregorini presents her characters as recognizably human balls of complexity, nudging but never forcing them toward a sad, beautiful conclusion.

Strangely Bechdel Test-failing and as far removed from real life as Middle Earth, Lucky Them nonetheless hits familiar beats in welcome and unexpected ways, and does it by the book.

The frank honesty of these accounts testifies to the trust Junger and Hetherington cultivated among the Second Platoon in 2008.

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.

The episodic story and minimal budget result in a small canvas over which these two huge characters dominate.

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.

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.

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

Berkeley includes some of the writer's unpleasant moments on the tour. But what Harmon wants, as any Community fan knows, is real connection with other human beings.

It’s clear where all of this is going, but McCaw surprises with his mental rigor (he excelled academically) and total commitment to his sport (he plays with a stress fracture in his foot).

What's remarkable is that despite the sweaty overdetermination of the film's dude-bro interactions and the whole prefabricated concept of performance air sex, the love story has actual depth and sadness.

The film’s hidden asset is the luminous Mary Steenburgen, funny and gorgeous as an empty-nest mom turned lounge chanteuse who beguiles the dudes with age-appropriate flirting and arch humor.

Most of The Search for General Tso is a breezy survey of the history of Chinese-American cuisine.

The film’s breezy drive and bursts of comic energy largely divert attention from the flatness of its world and characters.

Toller's film is narrated entirely by Fields via a series of lengthy recorded interviews that unwind jerkily, like a misshapen bolt of yarn over hundreds of still photos, Super-8 footage, and hand-drawn animations.

Chinese and Italian cuisines in America recall the traditions of homelands to which their practitioners can return. Not so with the Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe that inform delicatessens; those communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. This is one of the themes of Deli Man.

Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.

The man who might be Robertson is both the point and the best part of the film. He comes across as sincere, his childlike vulnerability and the depiction of his life in Vietnam demanding sympathy.

Khalfoun makes the audience privy to Frank's memories, migraines, and jarring hallucinations of his mother's recalled abuses.

And this is the film's buried lede: Hakeem busts her ass for the candidate while Barr conducts her entire campaign from her house via Skype.

The comic plot of Fonzy is outrageous, but to writer-director Isabelle Doval, it's just an armature that supports its gently funny characters and its themes of emotional and filial connections.

Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.

The script is only lightly didactic and well-paced, and it nods toward the adults in the audience mainly by not insulting their intelligence.

Stylishly filmed and often scary, Out of the Dark unspools a conclusion as conventional and button-down as a wide tie knot and a pair of wingtips.

The script veers from comic, narrated episodes to surprising violence, planting early narrative seeds that yield some effective surprises later, a dynamic range that's pretty comfortable to old hands Travolta and Travolta's Chili Palmer wig after all these years.

There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. But when they talk about their alienated childhoods, broken families, and absent fathers, it's pretty clear why their cinematic role model was so meaningful.

Posehn, flaunting his insulin-resistant physique and middle-aged dong, is the perfect counterpoint to the wretched American Beauty, providing a way more accurate portrayal of midlife creepiness.

It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.

Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty and a genuine talent for communicating humanity’s scale against immense natural forces and the absolute howling vastness of time.

It's often funny, and the writers are smart, but the film is like an arcless, extended episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.

The film shoehorns Potts's life story into a familiar underdog template, populating the world with near-mythological threshold guardians who exist to assure the hero that he isn't good enough.

Akinnagbe's embodiment of Jack is the most wholly realized accomplishment in the film. His speech, hesitant and stammering, is matched by defensive body language, his walk and posture as guarded and wary as a bird's. It's a truly physical performance in a film that didn't demand it.

A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.

Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.

Director Kiley is mostly successful at keeping Hallmark banalities at bay, relating Cora's crime in a series of tense flashbacks, and populating the film with funny characters played by a top-notch cast.

It looks like the recruitment appeal that it is; it will probably be pretty effective on campuses.

It’s strongly anti-prohibition, and the film’s structure favors that bias.

The film works marginally well as the story of a broken family trying to heal itself, but the third act is a whole different movie.

The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.

Director Finn Taylor’s Unleashed is an inoffensive Hallmark card of an indie comedy, as indifferently intended by the sender as it is regarded by the recipient.

Automata has moments of tremendous visual and storytelling elegance which are punctuated with ham-fisted characterization and thunderingly terrible acting.