Chris Vognar

All That Breathes is the kind of immersive documentary experience other filmmakers, and film lovers, would do well to study. It never feels the need to explain what it’s doing. It’s as calm and patient as the Samaritans at its core.

Street Gang is a worthy celebration of a one-of-a-kind program. If you’re not careful, it might leave you humming your ABC’s.

Schrader’s characters are haunted (please see “First Reformed” if you haven’t). They’re also deeply moral, not in a dime-store virtue kind of way but in the sense that they struggle mightily to do the right thing. In the end they’re painfully human, which is why they keep resonating after the lights go up.

Ailey weds forthright interviews and archival footage of abstract beauty with those sweeping dance sequences to conjure a haunting portrait of what it means to be an artist — from the triumphs to the empty, lonely feeling that you’re never as good as you’re supposed to be.

Sly Lives! may not provide definitive answers, but the fact that it even asks those questions puts it a cut above most films in its genre.

The Stroll is a vital work of recent urban history. Even if you wouldn’t want to have lived there, you won’t regret visiting.

Plan B is ultimately a gross-out sex comedy that has more than sex on its mind. It seems odd to consider a film with such familiar beats radical, but the word fits here, in the best sense.

The film’s effect comes from the access, the editing, and the disconnect between how the Taliban think they come across, as righteous liberators, and what we see, a gang of insecure bullies who scoff at the idea of their wives working and compare a woman with an uncovered face to a piece of chocolate that has been dropped on the ground.

It’s a juicy subject, and it might be too big for this particular storytelling approach.

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by husband-and-wife team Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, paints a picture of naked opportunism that shattered Ross’ legacy. It’s the story of how a man became an industry, and how his family was gradually, systematically left out in the cold.

Working from a script by Will Tracy, Lanthimos creates a realistic ridiculousness, and trusts his leads to walk the tightrope with him.

This is a time travel fable that feeds the heart as much as the brain, tipping its hat to sci-fi favorites as well as masters of animation from Walt Disney to Hayao Miyazaki. It’s an imaginative treat.

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

The Boy Who Lived lacks the complexity and frisson that might have set it apart in an increasingly crowded documentary field, or pushed it beyond its feel-good parameters.

It’s actually exciting to watch a star whose stock-in-trade has been arrested development flourish in a mature midlife period. Now he seems to be setting up future Sandler generations for success. Bat Mitzvah is about a girl growing up. But her dad seems to be doing some of that as well.

Last Stop Larrimah is ultimately a pitch-black comedy — a digressive slice of cultural anthropology that chuckles into the abyss.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.

The line between suspense and manipulation can be mighty fine. But The Deepest Breath walks it well. The filmmakers know they have a good story on their hands, and they shape it with sensitivity to the star-crossed divers and to the viewer. In the end it is well worth the plunge.

There’s a sweetness at the film’s core that never gets too sickly. The international angle feels right for a league that has never been more worldly. Most of all, there’s Sandler, who finds something very real in Stanley, something beaten down but still hopeful. The actor has reached a point in his career where he can summon gravitas without it feeling like a hustle.

Coup de Chance is a pretty slight and minor film, but for an 87-year-old American working in a second language, it can’t help but seem impressive; it’s certainly as good as anything Allen has made since 2013’s Blue Jasmine.

The Anthrax Attacks conjures the terror and paranoia afresh and, with the hindsight of 21 years, asks the viewer to consider how effectively the crisis was handled.

With the hospital and its primary representative in the case, Dr. Sally Smith, refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers, Take Care of Maya is necessarily one-sided. That side is rendered with sympathy and sensitivity, and a lingering, frustratingly unanswered question: How exactly does something like this happen?

The new documentary, Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell was made in the spirit of the earlier work and the younger man, the hungry hustler hanging out on Brooklyn street corners with his friends.

Produced by the New York Times and featuring the three reporters who broke the news (Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor), the film resonates by telling the story behind the story, about how the victims of sexual harassment and misconduct are often blamed, especially when their harasser is famous, popular and very funny.

Port Authority is never in a hurry. It often feels like it’s being lived as you watch. That won’t satisfy viewers who need a tight narrative with recognizable beats, but if you’re looking for an immersive love story that takes you places you might not know, that challenges your conception of what romance looks and feels like, Port Authority is a great place to stop.

The Manor establishes itself as a solid piece of paranoia horror.

“Stories of Surrender” makes no pretense of telling the full Bono story. But it picks its spots with artful precision and with keen cinematic instincts.