Daphne Howland

Joe Berlinger's Hank: 5 Years From the Brink is more workaday and less transfixing than projects of his like "Brother's Keeper" or "Paradise Lost."

What the film does accomplish is making you think, especially about how universities are spending their ever-increasing tuition on top-notch campus amenities and their own disastrous loans, and how state governments and federal agencies are similarly passing off their education cuts onto the young people who they expect to one day run the economy and society.

All Governments Lie is worthy testimony that many journalists are in it for the truth.

Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.

Much of the film is beautiful — hot springs, the ocean’s depths, and deep space are photogenic — although Cheney preserves a few too many mundane “hello, how do you do”s, and the science isn’t deeply explained.

The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.

While the film also captures many private, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, it takes a lot of time to make its simple point.

Kempner's film, which has an eat-your-vegetables quality, runs long and suffers from a lack of focus.... Still, it's inspiring how Rosenwald, who took full advantage of capitalism's potential, also shared, passionately and generously, his windfall.

Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.

The Kaufmans are amateurs, in the sense that this is a labor of love but also in that the film lacks the technical and storytelling caliber of more professional work. Many cuts are awkward and the sound is terrible. Still, it’s another full box revealing how people narrowly escaped brutalities, and how some didn’t.

The short-subject treatment serves as a challenge that, in eighty minutes, writer-director Matthew Weiss doesn’t meet.

Creadon unveils his story in a haphazard, backwards-unfolding way.

The doc never goes much deeper than the information and arguments on AI that can currently be found in the Sunday papers.

Shen overplays his hand.

Sometimes a filmmaker is so taken with a subject that a documentary fizzles into hagiography, a problem of Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor From India, a film about Vasant Lad, who brought the ancient Indian healing practice of Ayurveda to the U.S. in the late 1970s.

This film shows what was clearly a profound set of experiences for both Ndibalema and Kenney, but it is not much more than a well-made vacation slideshow or an extended Facebook post, complete with exclamation points.

The film is a jumble, with no sense of meaningful interaction.

Morin's idea of wedging a political thriller into this historical moment is brilliant, but he undermines his story with broad caricatures and a phlegmatic pace.

Celebrity testimonials drown out the scientists, and Galinsky’s haphazard exploration of his own back pain is a major distraction.

The possible hereditary nature of suicide in general and of the seven known Hemingway suicides in particular is lazily poked at; decades of research go unmentioned and unexplored.

The film doesn't quite trust its audience, though, and, rather than get in and out with its points, belabors its jokes and its punches, to the point of tedium.

John Griesser’s film about Srila Prabhupada, founder of the Krishna movement, is not so much a documentary as it is a hagiography.

Demonstrating an egregious contempt for science, Biebert and his subjects attack the call for research into the effects of electronic cigarettes as nothing more than shilling for tax collectors and Big Pharma.

It's almost unbelievable how much people talk, in Slovick's two hours, without saying very much at all.

Despite the film's hyper but insubstantial presentation of its information, there likely is a story here.

Pilgrimages have potential: Geoffrey Chaucer gave us 24 good yarns in his Canterbury Tales. But there isn’t even one in the otherwise gorgeous documentary Strangers on the Earth.