Christian Blauvelt

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.

A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Menu does do one thing exceptionally well: it holds your attention and makes you think for a time that any outcome is possible. That alone is something to salivate over.

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.

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

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