Daniel Fienberg

It’s much closer to the work of its main subject: a bit hurried, inoffensive and ultimately unsubstantial. It’s loosely informative, rarely revelatory and, despite what the title might lead you to expect, never provocative.

Some of its mockery and many of its nerd-friendly celebrity talking heads — Seth Green! Kevin Smith! Paul Scheer! — are predictable, but when it isn’t poking fun at moments of iconic trash, it offers an insightful exploration of the production and context of the special.

Overall, though, Lost in the Jungle is a solid telling of a story that’s hard to make anything other than compelling.

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.

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.

The documentary is generally engaging, and putting Spiegelman in a spotlight will always be worthwhile. But Disaster Is My Muse is in the shadow of Crumb, in the shadow of Maus and just a little bit behind the times, in various disappointing ways.

Maybe Korem’s primary objective is simply to make you think more about Milli Vanilli than you ever have before. In that, it’s a total success. It’s more of a failure when it comes to trying to answer some of those big questions and engage in direct accountability, and I don’t know if I buy most of its cultural conclusions

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 filmmaking choices all too frequently muddle any potential insight, yet the documentary contains so much good stuff that fans of the subject might be powerless to resist.

Wanting more is a criticism, but it’s a luxury criticism. This documentary builds a world you want to explore further.

A Compassionate Spy borrows the look and feel of a historical espionage thriller and builds some momentum and moral complexity along the way, but it finds its real potency as a generational family drama.

I had quibbles about the consistency of the documentary’s narrative approach — but not its bracing message about the challenges of political idealism and the wide-ranging consequences of democracy in peril.

By the time the mainstream world came to embrace MoviePass, we all already knew it was doomed, and I wish the documentary had illustrated what the alternative might have been.

While it’s occasionally stuck in very rote biographical details and frequently limited by a race to theaters and TV that doesn’t necessarily align with any real ending to the documentary’s story, Fauci has an actual structural focus that’s smartly considered and interesting, even if it left me with myriad questions.

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

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

I don’t think Meeropol’s formal choices always match the story she wants to capture, and After the Bite runs out of energy well before the end of its 90-minute running time. But I mostly enjoyed the idea of a more muted version of Jaws that suggests that if we have a contemporary shark attack problem, the solution is going to require more than a bigger boat.

If Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is nourishing only to a certain point, there’s plenty of Leonard Cohen scholarship out there.

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.

It’s surely not without emotionally satisfying moments and it does a persuasive job of emphasizing the importance of Reading Rainbow and of star LeVar Burton, but the documentary is slight in its artistic and thematic ambition.

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.

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.

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.

So it’s a good opportunity to fall in love with Maria Bamford if you’re unfamiliar. And even if you know the story, the way Bamford tells it remains refreshing and fully involving.

Even though the doc’s storytelling has an approach to twistiness that I’m finding increasingly irritating every time it’s used, the sheer volume of visceral responses produced by The Deepest Breath is hard to deny.

In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject.

Jim Henson Idea Man is a very conventional movie that dedicates its time to proving how unconventional Jim Henson was.

The documentary that it chooses to be instead has appeal but, in the rush to get it onto screens before the next time somebody dares underestimate Curry, perhaps it lacks sufficient refinement.