Christian Blauvelt

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

Like “Pather Panchali” in the age of AirBnb and TikTok, Fire in the Mountains empathetically dramatizes the struggles that locals face in a place where tourists come to play.

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.

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.

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.

Any expectation that Salomon’s profound story might be depicted in grown-up, searching animation that’s still all too rare, is quickly dashed. Instead of being brought to a place of soulful contemplation, Charlotte merely becomes cinematic Ambien. What a tragedy.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.