Chris Willman

If you’re a big Ozzy fan, you probably already love him for being brave enough to go out and meet his public one last time, against what we can now see from this film were nearly all odds. But the greater bravery might have been going on camera repeatedly for this doc, and allowing himself to convey that old age is not for the faint-hearted, even as it renders you fainter of heart.

“Because I Believe” is as lovely to listen to as it is to look at.

Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.

Bombach’s movie finds its real flavor in exploring the differences in the duo’s two very distinct personalities, which up till now might have seemed like a fuzzy, singular unit by all but the most hardcore fans.

For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.

In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.

For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.

Jazz and animation make for strong bedfellows in They Shot the Piano Player, a film from Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all sorts of ways.

Watching this film satisfying tie up Case’s loose ends, you can still lament the lost promise of the Plimsouls, or wonder what might’ve happened with a more copacetic label/artist relationship.

Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.

In a sense, Kiss the Future is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out.

When the movie — co-directed and produced by Emmy winner Sophie Robinson (“My Beautiful Broken Brain”) — relaxes into a more traditional doc approach, it’s on surer, if less dramatic, footing.

It’s far from the first music doc to reveal that it can be lonely at the top, but it is among the few to convey that there are no easy answers for that when mental illness is at the root. Of all the portrayals of pop superstars that have been produced in-house in recent years, “My Mind & Me” is probably the one with the least celebratory third act … which is something to celebrate.

There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.

[Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.

The clichéd word that’s most bandied about by vinyl enthusiasts really does apply to the movie that’s been made about it: “warmth.”

Don Argott and Demian Fenton’s film belongs more to the realm of fan service than crossover pic, but it’ll attract curious souls from other corners of the rock world who don’t mind the devil being in two hours’ worth of details.

It’s a documentary that merits a place in classrooms as well as theaters, as a preventative against the virus of cynicism.

Coming away from “Just a Girl,” it’s impossible not to be convinced that Moreno is the rare screen legend who found a way to stick the Hollywood landing.

If the film falls short as a possible tale of heroic enlightenment, it’s still pretty absorbing, in the in-between moments, as a study of a dude still working out the intersections between wild public success and neurotic torments. To the extent that its middle and best section is really a story of politics driving someone already prone to depression deeper into it, that’s when The Boy From Medellín feels most timely.

Fortunately, “I Got a Story to Tell” bears a life force that looms even larger than Wallace’s — that of his Jamaican-born “moms,” Voletta, who has so much star presence that even Angela Bassett couldn’t quite do justice to it when she played her in the 2009 movie.

Underplayed is too gentle a probe to risk targeting industry leaders or fandom for more than a moment here or there.

In the end, Alone Together is a love story — about the love between Charli and her fans.

A highly satisfying HBO documentary ... that wisely places roughly equal emphasis on how the sausage was made and how the culture was changed.

Singer does find a slight bit of drama to seize on at about the two-thirds point of the film, which, for understandable purposes of having anything at all happen in the movie, he trumps up to the point it becomes nearly comical.

There’s some fan value here, all spiritual quests aside, in seeing how accepting the individual Beatles could be of someone they could have taken as an interloper in their lofty midst. Maybe that’s the revelation, then: Sweet, the Beatles.

The rocker, while never downplaying the danger of the fire he’s played with throughout his life, has to chuckle as he admits he’s led a largely charmed life. We end up charmed, too, if never really riveted.

Despite its probably modest budget, “Street Survivors” is actually first-class as convincingly harrowing aeronautical disaster movies go, if you’re a follower of the genre that has Peter Weir’s 1993 “Fearless” to live up to.

In some sense, Quatro was Jett before Jett was really Jett — laying down the leather law when no female rocker had yet managed the combination of sex appeal and pure machisma.

Woodhead’s movie is at its best in how neatly it delineates the different musical phases of Fitzgerald’s career.

It’s about as sweet to see friendship survive success as it is to see Lin-Manuel Miranda as the world’s most adorkable Beastie Boy.

If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.

Even filmgoers with little taste for these arcane sounds may enjoy the doc, if only for the chance to spend an hour and a half in the company of so many prodigies who’ve put down their phones in the service of taking up catgut.

I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.

The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.

The film picks up more general interest once it moves past the early nobility of the outfit as a band of brothers into the things that cripple the least greatest of groups ... Robertson [is] an articulate and ingratiating tour guide through all this glorious and eventually tortured history.

Paz’s story is obviously a feel-good one, which somewhat hamstrings a writer-director who you can feel chafing against the constraints of fidelity to sheer uplift.

If only Carey Mulligan had been inspired to protest for the right to a better script for Suffragette, an overly schematic look at the struggle for women’s voting rights in 1910s Britain that almost gets by on the strength of a great slow burn of a lead performance.

Films about this particular divide don’t get any kinder or gentler, but there’s a knowing sweetness to Dancing Arabs that doesn’t come off as particularly naïve or divorced from reality, at least taking some of the false hopes of the period into account.

Wisely, Broomfield doesn’t harp on alleged police incompetence, beyond letting a handful of activists and locals repeatedly raise it as an issue; Tales is far from overbearing as far as agitprop goes, letting the outrage quietly seep in.

Whatever fascination the film holds belongs solely to Del Toro and his vanity-free impression of Escobar as a titan whose potbelly and gym shorts do not put the slightest dent in a charisma that hypnotizes a nation.

For better or worse, torture-themed films don’t get too much easier to take than this one.

Johannson turns out to be perfectly cast, being able to shift from blank alien mode to kittenish seduction without ever letting you see the switch being turned on or off.

[Fiennes] has rarely been better than he is as the 19th century’s most celebrated novelist, with his chops on screen just about matched by what he’s done behind.