Daniel Fienberg

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.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film. That it achieves those goals while relying tediously on almost all of the genre’s most overused formal devices, offering shockingly little variation from countless other docs you’ve seen on similar subjects, makes it a so-so film.

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

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, the exhaustive repetition of the most familiar parts of her narrative — plus an over-reliance on poorly utilized footage from an ethically compromised earlier documentary project — left me more irritated than moved by Stormy, however persuasive I found its main character.

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

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.

It all results in a documentary I found consistently interesting and never revelatory. I learned things, but given the opportunity allegedly presented to the production, not close to as much as I might have wanted to learn.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.

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.

Schaeffer fails to develop the relationship beyond clichéd signpost events.

It's animated cockfighting for children.

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

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

Visually sumptuous but intellectually stultifying.

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.

At only 80 minutes, Beanie Mania offers only limited depth and it’s hard to imagine any viewer not being left with serious questions throughout, but as a superficial, hastily glossed nostalgic oddity, it’s a tidy way to wrap your 2021 viewing.

Despite participation from many bigwigs within the Biden team, Year One fails completely as any sort of chronological overview, which is how the documentary presents itself. And the argument that it seems to actually be making is far too complicated to be made by people still embroiled in the middle of it all with no space for introspection.

Even if you’re not necessarily a fan and Perry’s control feels suffocating at times, that doesn’t stop Maxine’s Baby from being a frequently fascinating look at a unique figure.

There’s just a lot of media landscape stuff that Rather either can’t or doesn’t want to do justice — which returns me to my initial point that if you come from a perspective of youth this will be illuminating, but if you lived through it you’ll hardly get anything fresh at all.

TWST is set up like a concert film, but instead it’s a combination of two nonfiction categories — the tone poem and the city symphony — that are used as fallback catch-all classifications for critics and scholars. Ujica blends them with archival rigor and effective whimsy to create a movie that’s dreamy and clear-eyed at once.

It may not be as sensational and buzzy as bringing down a major university or a sitting congressman, but since Surviving Ohio State won’t do either thing, it’s worth praising the potency of what it does well.

Few documentary subgenres have been more burgeoning in the past couple of years than the sports doc, with Yogi Berra and Willie Mays getting very solid standalone films. If you’re a devotee, you can add Clemente to the ranks of the good ones.

Where Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-vérité glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic — a distinction I certainly appreciated.

The New Yorker at 100 is a commercial for The New Yorker and it isn’t masquerading as anything else. But at that point, it should at least be a commercial for the magazine that befits the voice, aesthetic and ethos of the magazine in a meaningful way.