Daniel M. Gold

In this time of mass displacement across the globe, it is a stark reminder of how traumatic the refugee experience often is.

[A] rich and fascinating biography.

The film’s primary mission is to destigmatize dyslexia, and it achieves that admirably, presenting technical material with a light touch and compassion.

All the film’s segments are smartly assembled and gracefully paced.

This vivid and haunting essay steps away from the debate about illegal immigration.

Less of a solemn pilgrimage than a folksy visit, this film is a chance to set a spell, watch longtime musicians play and boast and reflect about their lives on and off the road.

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird skillfully introduces this pleasant man with the demented visions and delves into how he got them.

It’s surprising there has never really been an extended cinematic exploration of the band. Long Strange Trip, ambitiously assembled and elegantly directed by Amir Bar-Lev, fills that void.

As an overview of the issues, the history and the players, Starving the Beast makes a powerful survey course, a prerequisite for further studies.

A fascinating account of off-the-books diplomacy in the 1980s, “Plot for Peace” is that rare documentary that both augments the historical record and is paced like a thriller.

At slightly more than an hour, the film may not be definitive, and its chronology is a little fuzzy. Even so, Rubble Kings is a fascinating, valuable work of social, music and New York history, a celebration of a peaceful revolution by those who helped birth it.

Only a few scenes fail to draw laughs in a movie that’s unexpectedly smart and consistently amusing.

I was just at the right place at the right time,” Mr. Petrov says, a simple truth that becomes shocking when considering the alternative. For that alone, this account of a Cold War near miss deserves a wide audience.

The movie’s grittiness — the director, Jim Taihuttu (“Rabat”), shoots Wolf in black and white — its intrigues, its graphic violence and Mr. Kenzari’s performance make for a worthy addition to the annals of gangster films, Interpol edition.

What Class Divide does exceptionally well is capture the sense of change at warp speed.

With its evocative landscapes and its non-narrative, cinéma vérité style, Western is a layered, atmospheric chronicle of living traditions like bullfights and rodeos, mariachi bands and Texas two-steps. Yet the film also records the tremors of change.

Paced by Eddie Palmieri’s up-tempo, percussive score, “Doin’ It” bounces like a crossover dribble, gliding swiftly and surely through interviews, videos and history lessons, then transitioning to today’s dedicated ballers and playground culture.

The Ataxian has moments of inspiration, beauty, even euphoria. But its lasting contribution is in making the world a little more familiar with this disease, and a little less lonely for the families struggling against it.

Ms. Vreeland has paced her documentary well, a chapter to each era, with hundreds of beautiful images spanning decades of artists, galleries, parties, scenes. She also makes good use of interviews Guggenheim gave to a biographer a couple of years before her death in 1979.

It powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference.

An achingly poignant documentary.

While affirming the dignity of its subjects, Mala Mala shows there’s little glamour attached to the pursuit of selfhood.

The Rooftop is frenzied, funny and knowing, drenched in lavish, often surreal, imagery.

What elevates the film beyond a video scrapbook, though, are the glimpses of the routines and slow rhythms of the nursing home before and after this adventure.

The director Emilio Aragón wisely trains the camera on Mr. Duvall. A Night in Old Mexico is his baby, and he rocks it.

The vistas are spectacular, the waves fearsome, the filming often amazing.

Hôtel Normandy is a confection spun differently from the typical Hollywood rom-com.

As the film makes abundantly clear, if left untreated, contagions — of ignorance, fear and conflict — will spread wherever they can.