Daniel Fienberg

This documentary presents a persuasive argument for the aspirations of both MAAFA and IMAN without feeling like a commercial for either. It’s the approach, the compassion and the thoughtful mentorship that All These Sons advocates for. It’s hard to watch without feeling deeply and immediately invested.

The documentary isn’t as thorough or enlightening on border issues as something like Netflix’s Immigration Nation, but the young heroes make At the Ready a good vehicle through which many viewers will be able to process their own preconceptions and opinions.

I’m much more comfortable with Roadrunner as a portrait of an evolving, complicated, tragic TV personality, and as one of the best behind-the-scenes glimpses of a TV show (or shows) I’ve ever seen, than I am with it as an attempt to make sense of a man who, for whatever reason, no longer wanted to continue living.

At only 67 minutes, Bradley&Pablo's doc is aspiring much more to the former. Less brevity and more depth could possibly have yielded a superior movie, but Alone Together may be an example of a documentary better served by leaving fans wanting more than making casually curious viewers want less.

There's a richer documentary to be made, one you might crave even more after 90 minutes of being inspired and impressed by Lily Hevesh.

There's enough good, previously unseen stuff in Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell to make it an easy recommendation, though seeing and hearing stuff you haven't seen before isn't the same as learning a lot of things you didn't know before. It's captivating because Biggie was captivating, without being enlightening.

Misha's actual story is fascinating in its own way, but within the relative levity of Hobkinson's framework, her truth and trauma get lost in a detective yarn. The film lacks the heft to adequately explain the nuance of Misha's truth

If 107 minutes is maybe insufficient for something as important and layered as Sesame Street, that likely won't keep viewers from being satisfied.

Structurally, the documentary is a mess and I'm not convinced it quite lands on the story it wants to tell, but it's engaging and enraging nonetheless.

What Dower is interested in here isn't the hijacking itself or even how it has gone unresolved for decades, but rather the nature of the D.B. Cooper obsession.

I spent the first hour of Happy Happy Joy Joy guiltily feeling like I needed a rewatch of Ren & Stimpy — it's an important series and there's no pretending otherwise — and the next 35 minutes feeling dirty about the whole thing and the last 10 minutes getting actively angry about how the entire story had been framed and reduced to "difficult genius" cliches.

Buying Pepe as misunderstood and buying Pepe as a character destined for redemption are two different things, and it's the argument after the buildup where Feels Good Man stopped feeling persuasive for me. Your hopefulness may vary.

Without being revelatory, the documentary shows the events that made her, points to the things that inspire her and leaves viewers hanging as to where we're likely to see Michelle Obama next — or if that's even the question we're supposed to ask.

Not surprisingly, it's a love letter, far more polished and smoothed-out than the genre-defying trio might have deserved in their anarchic heyday, but as warm and reflective as you might expect from the middle-aged men they are now.

What's most remarkable is how the primitive video footage balances the aspects of Jened that were unique — you've never seen a baseball game or swimming instruction like this — with moments that are hilarious and universal.

El Camino is a high-quality piece of suspense and action filmmaking carried by Paul's still-tremendous performance as Jesse Pinkman. It looks great, sounds great and if you're a fan, it's full of cameos and references that are sure to amuse.

The Great Hack uses a decent rehash of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as the starting point for an interesting two-pronged character study, an instigation for provocative ideas about data crime and what is ultimately a really, really, really conflicted look at when it's terrifying having corporations learning things about our online habits and when it's cool.

It's an engaging, amusing and occasionally jaw-dropping portrait of a world that could hardly be more foreign to most documentary fans. But it's just those fans who are likely to wish it peeled back a few more layers.

That nobody becomes a realized character with an emotional arc is just a place American Factory falls a little flat.

Although it runs out of creativity well before the end of its 100-minute running time, it still coaxes ample good will out of the remarkable life and boundless energy of its 4-foot-7 heroine.

It's definitely Brugger's most satisfyingly unsatisfying effort. A conspiracy-fueled murder mystery with some hilarious meta-commentary on the genre, Cold Case Hammarskjold is either a stunning piece of investigative reporting that builds to a revelatory climax or a wily trickster's dark critique of the audience's desperate need for answers.

I don't think Apollo 11 should be anybody's first or only exposure to the moon landing and its greatest strength is in recognizing that. Its perspective and immediacy are impressive on their own and the documentary takes a worthwhile and distinctive place within the wider storytelling of this important event.

306 Hollywood is a personal essay! It's a tone poem! It's a biographical collage! It's an embrace of the banal kitschy! It's magic realism! It's such a little story you may wonder why it's being told at all, except that it's a story likely to touch anybody who has ever lost a loved one, which makes it a very big story.

Minding the Gap starts out as one story, suggesting one set of character arcs, and then flows in unexpected directions and underlines new sets of themes, without ever feeling haphazard or ill-considered.

As a movie it's OK, with very little worth raving about. As a story and message, though, it feels important and worth getting out there in as swift and mainstream a way as possible. Better to inspire some institutional change and maybe save a few lives than to be hailed as art.

There's more to Fred Rogers than any 93-minute documentary can contain, and it was easy for me not to lament what Neville wasn't doing and just to embrace what Rogers was.

Utterly and passionately hagiographic, the documentary Seeing Allred presents 96 minutes of reasons to stand and cheer for celebrated feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. That means, of course, that for ultra-conservative lovers of Netflix documentaries, it's doubtful that Seeing Allred is going to dramatically change any opinions about her.

Easily the most ambitious film of the director's career, but also the most infuriating for all of the sociological and psychological points that it tries to make in ways that are too often unearned or poorly defended.

What Gideon's Army does is make a respectful case on the behalf of a profession that too often gets maligned.

Clement is the reason that Will is tolerable, because if you look at the character's on-the-page actions, he's not an especially well-developed man-child.

Even though The Amina Profile works as a cyber-thriller of sorts, I think it's much more wide-reaching than that, a story about online identity, but also about the danger of media-constructed narratives, one that manages to salute both citizen journalists, but also establishment outlets like NPR.

Kailash ends on the right notes of hope, without abusing sentiment.

The Sentence is so committed to its concentration on emotion and heart that it's difficult not to get carried away, and it feels almost churlish to quibble with the intellectual responses it barely aspires to.

Zombie wants his film to be gleefully demented, but he fails to grasp that loud, inbred evil people torturing stupid, grating benign people isn’t disturbing as much as tedious.

The Master of Disguise represents Adam Sandler's latest attempt to dumb down the universe.

Kids will probably enjoy the sight of huge, bumbling teddy bears -- Parents will exit wondering why this piece of unnecessary cross-promotion wasn't released straight to video.

de Ayala is required to supply too much of the energy in a film that is, overall, far too staid for its subject matter.

Visually sumptuous but intellectually stultifying.

The Australian actor taps into something miraculous here -- LaPaglia's ability to convey grief and hope works with Weaver's sensitive reactions to make this a two-actor master class.

Black cats, ill-timed power outages and children in peril are just a few of the hoary scare tactics ineffectively rendered in the style of so many films buried in the dark recesses of January.

Schaeffer fails to develop the relationship beyond clichéd signpost events.

While the film frequently concentrates on the wrong story, the humanity of the musicians comes through in their own words and actions.

Cuba Gooding Jr.'s unrelenting energy can be galvanic in good films, but in lesser efforts it reeks of frenzied futility.

Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.

Taut and well-acted, faltering only when the filmmaker loses faith in the power of his story.

The two encounters with the beast WXIII -- first in a darkened factory, and later in an empty stadium, to the strains of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G Minor (Pathétique) -- elevate the disappointingly flat animation into a vivid fable of monster and morality.

His veiled misogyny and totally unguarded homophobia are unconvincing, and when he resorts to chestnuts like comparing how black and white people walk, he comes off as a Pryor caricature, rather than as a devotee.