Christian Blauvelt

"Black & Blues” is a doc that will make you appreciate Armstrong, the man. Someone far too complex to reduce to any one thing.

Setting the Taylors’ footage in such a quotidian structure is like setting the world’s most beautiful diamond in a ring pulled from a Cracker Jack box

A movie that isn’t quite sure what it’s saying, even as it mesmerizes you with Javier Bardem’s performance.

The problem is that, after that early peak of a first act, The Accidental Getaway Driver doesn’t have much tension.

Bienvenu comes up with a stirring ending, one so emotional it almost paves over the bumps in the narrative road that got us there.

If Silent Night ultimately aces its peculiar tone, it struggles with having anything to say.

June Zero is a film as a conversation piece. It may not be especially articulate at moments, it may not be as focused as it could be. But some of that is by design: This is a film with questions, not answers. Its tangents are like those of any meaty conversation. And it’s a conversation worth having.

Fundamentally, Shenk and Cohen are trying to argue for a particular solution here, and it might be promising indeed, but it’s also presented as a little too much of a silver-bullet for the issues they’ve identified.

What Corbijn lacks in filmmaking panache here he makes up with strong journalistic chops: These interviews are great.

This sloppy, scattered documentary, very much lacking the refinement of Merchant Ivory’s own films, is a missed opportunity to explore why their films are great, what exactly is it that makes viewers return to them time and time again.

Truth to Power is a promotional film, not a work of journalism.

The result is an aggravating missed opportunity to tell a story that absolutely needs to be told to an audience that needs to hear it.

Coup! isn’t objectionable for its politics, it’s objectionable for trying to deny them. Unless its politics are just that muddled, and then Stark and Schuman have no idea at all how to express whatever it is they’re trying to say.

You’re not likely to find a more jarring — and ultimately exhausting — collision of high pretension and low execution at Sundance this year than the crowdsourced YouTube doc Life in a Day 2020.