Daphne Howland

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.

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.

Ree makes things easy for people who don't play chess, deftly pacing Carlsen's triumphs and failures and milking the suspense as "the Mozart of chess" employs his intuition to win, in an age when many players depend on computers to hone their skills.

This well-researched investigation is loaded with credible facts and has a workaday, broadcast-newsmagazine feel.

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

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

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

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.

This is a sober look at how seaboards are vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels, made worse by storms and massively worse by massive storms.

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.

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.

There are many reasons to see this very difficult film, not least to face the grim realities in Liberia, and to wonder what more could be done to save lives and preserve the human spirit when it is so clearly yearning to burn bright given any small small chance.

The documentary All You Need Is Love does a nice job of showing how, when it comes to children's lives, the ordinary is inescapable, even in extraordinary circumstances.

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

Shah Bob may be languid, interrupted by Rockford-style freeze-frames, but it's also intimate and captivating, and it calls to mind indie films from before Sundance made them mostly another Hollywood commodity.

Despite the complexities, though, it's enjoyable, thanks to the crew's substantial expertise.

These are stories crafted with care, with glimpses of the filmmaking process — a chance to see the camera operators and director themselves at times in awe of the fortitude they're witnessing.

It's a wonder of photography, animation, and sound, and it's a testament to its editors that the many interviews with activists and scientists are compelling and informative, sometimes even poetic.

It's the closest most of us will get to spending time with fellow humans who have extraordinary perspectives on ordinary things — and ordinary perspectives, too.

Unlike in so many films, here the actors’ portrayals of psychiatric patients’ conditions — and their humanity — ring true.

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

Boston, Jon Dunham’s film about that city’s marathon, is a contender — an emotional comeback story, interspersed with thrilling moments in its history, without gloss, cliche or even nostalgia.

Take My Nose…Please! rescues plastic surgery from Hollywood’s “did they or didn’t they?” gossip and reality television’s odious voyeurism with a nuanced, empathetic (and often funny) introduction to a few women, mostly comedians, who’ve had work done or are considering it.

Cristina Herrera Borquez’s elegant documentary No Dresscode Required is a masterful, layered story of commissar-crossed lovers.

Denison keeps up the pace — those television skills coming in handy — and unpacks a lot. But he also allows in some light. There are plenty of Las Vegas police officers who want things to change, and Denison gives them, and the victims’ families, a voice.

It’s a painfully familiar story in the era of #MeToo and the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, with the added agony that parents, teachers, and school officials were, to varying degrees, complicit.