Christian Blauvelt

Sorelle has said that she created “Mountains” as a movie where “between plots lie moments.” How refreshing. Especially since those moments really feel like they exist, more than just “being captured.”

Pacifiction is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

Bringing this 1,000-page novel to animated life in this way isn’t just an adaptation, it’s an illumination. It makes real the heightened reality that exists in your mind when reading a particularly captivating book.

Lane set out to make a documentary about the nature of taste, and she’s accomplished that with panache.

There are many times in Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya, an anxiety-filled potboiler of a documentary about the fight to rescue enslaved girls from ISIS, where one might wonder how they pulled it off. That feeling is quickly followed by relief that they did.

The result is an extremely multi-dimensional portrait of a First Lady, one who, you can’t help but think, was the most significant at that point since Eleanor Roosevelt in her accomplishments and her influence on policy.

This is a filmmaker capable of glimpsing both an instant — and the eternal.

Equal parts ’70s-style paranoia thriller, Polanski-infused apartment horror, “Eyes Wide Shut” homage, and empathetic critical commentary on the conspiracy theories craze, this hallucinatory pastiche is even more than the sum of its cinematically riveting parts.

This is a film that should make us all more sensitive, more attuned, more questioning of our biases. The fact that it’s such a riveting experience makes it all the more powerful in that regard.

In the wave of documentaries about the Ukraine War that have come out over the past two years, there hasn’t been one that’s offered what David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin does — and certainly not with such wit, verve, and insight: The view inside Russia.

Macdonald has crafted one of the most riveting rise-fall-redemption story arcs in documentary format in recent memory, with Galliano himself as his unreliable — but never less than compelling — guide.

It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes.

Watching At the Ready, a rich piece of journalism as well as an expertly assembled documentary, you think you’re watching what could have a riveting feature story in print. Instead, it’s a Pulitzer-worthy cover story in cinematic form.

Watching Errol Morris‘s urgent reminder of a documentary — possibly the most enraging film yet made by a director who’s certainly known how to illuminate infuriating topics over the past 45 years — will raise your blood pressure considerably.

2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a grueling watch that can’t possibly capture the full extent of the traumatic day-to-day of waging this war. But even capturing a slice of it is a triumph of empathetic identification.

Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is then both an unvarnished portrait and a slightly incomplete one. Very subtly it does show how, as a woman operating in very much a man’s world, she opened the doors for others while not necessarily doing a whole lot to change the system and its paradigms and its power structures, full-stop.

All of this is about connecting the dots in the case and raising awareness of something that was forgotten all too quickly in the Republicans’ haste to get him confirmed.

At the very least, Nowhere Special is one of the great father-son movies.

The ending has often been maligned. But if it’s not especially well-executed, it’s a tantalizing wellspring of ideas that reframes the entire movie that came before it and makes us realize the difficulty all of us face in piecing together our reality.

Much of what we see is what the Taliban wants us to see, but as that’s what’s really important to them, it’s also what we — anyone who’s a non-fundamentalist — need to see to understand them.

Parker and Stone joked that they’ll have to make a lot more TV shows to pay off their ill-fated investment, but it’s entirely possible that Casa Bonita will be a bigger piece of their legacy than anything in their filmography.

The documentary builds to an almost euphoric ending.

There’s a candor and a rawness here that’s inherently compelling.

It makes you recognize, through the force of its telling, why the story of Poitier’s life matters. And will matter forever.

This is one of the most hopeful movies you’re likely to see anytime soon.

Clocking under two hours, The Real Charlie Chaplin is less concerned with being an exhaustive biography than trying to pinpoint what Chaplin’s life means to film history and how we might think of him today. It’s an approach that, while not entirely successful here, could help introduce newcomers to classic film rather than preach to the already converted.

It’s a star part, and Grillo commands it. Most importantly, he gets you to invest in Roy enough that, even without a controller in your hands, you never feel like you’re simply watching someone else play a videogame. With no pixels in sight, Grillo gives “Boss Level” the thing most videogame movie riffs lack: a pulse.

Veiel and Maischberger build a compelling case that she was in fact a Nazi, right up until the end of her life.