Daphne Howland

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.

Medalia, as an Israeli, knows this bumpy territory well and serves up her story sensitively, but with its difficulties unvarnished and unsolved. She focuses on a few children whom we get to know well enough to care very much about their progress.

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.

This film is one of our best documents of the civil rights era, but it is also a portrait of someone with a singular perspective, a big mind, and a joyous aptitude for conversation.

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.

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.

There’s still charm in Charm City, despite it all.

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.

It’s quite a story, one that, like all good stories, turns out to have meaning for anyone.

Footage of the now-wealthy Smiths being deposed is damning, the brothers' legal jiujitsu is appalling, and the stories of deaths are heartbreaking.

It helps that Earle and her oceanographer colleague at the Smithsonian Institute, Jeremy Jackson, are both scientists with unusual abilities to speak not just in understandable terms but also in eloquent ones. And it helps, too, that the music, images, storytelling, and editing are all so tight, and so enjoyable.

The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.

Desert flowers can be hard to spot, but are often distinctly beautiful, and The Bad Kids has them in focus.

It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.

Directors Harris and Sanin provide clear historical and present-day context and furnish alarming proof of Vladimir Putin’s multilayered deceptions.

James Demo’s The Peacemaker is an intense, intimate portrait of a visionary capable of sophisticated analysis, abrupt anger, self-deprecating wit, and profound insights — all while existing at considerable remove from his fellow man.

The gutting of America's public universities is, as Steve Mims says in his documentary Starving the Beast, "one of the nation's most important and least understood fights." His film goes far in correcting that, thanks not just to his thorough research, but also a strong narrative and compelling cinematography.

The Judge is packed tight; it’s enlightening and suspenseful and paced for maximum enjoyment. In the end, it’s not just about Kholoud Al-Faqih, but you’ll be very glad to have met her.

While Dougherty clearly had an almost eerie sense of how a particular actor might inhabit a part, this film also shows that she may have single-handedly created a filmmaking craft and then made it indispensable.

This film is like another work in the canon of baseball poetry.

The film is a riveting feat of editing considering the material, the legalistic conundrums, and the profusion of detail.

It’s a brutal takedown of a practice now warping K-12 education and should embarrass every school that still requires them.

The film's editing is masterful, though, and with ample footage from the time and up-to-date storytelling from many key players from the African, Cuban, and U.S. governments, among others, Plot for Peace proves enthralling.

The Incomparable Rose Hartman is a gorgeously shot, sharply edited portrait of photographer Hartman.

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.

Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia is a superbly balanced picture of Cambodia then and now, a nation in a sort of stupor of post traumatic stress syndrome, denial and survivor's' guilt.

It’s a compelling look at a valuable contraption that’s slipping through our grasp, and will send many viewers to flea markets and eBay for one of their own.

Vargas lingers for long stretches over his personal story and his complicated relationship with his mother, still in the Philippines -- a place he dare not visit for fear of being unable to return. But his story is a vivid illustration of the pickle we're in.