Devika Girish

The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.

Postema’s interlocutors respond with candid critiques, but the director’s self-flagellation feels increasingly empty — less a reckoning with neocolonialism than a toothless display of white guilt. His critical insights are thin, too.

White squanders the opportunity for true satire, speeding past the many topical issues kicked up by the script — police corruption, mental health, gun crime — into a feel-good conclusion that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

There’s much to unpack here, from the preponderance of Latino agents in ICE to the mental health effects of immigration, evident in Luis’s panic attacks. But the film, frustratingly, stays on the surface, settling for easy emotional moments.

Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.

A film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.

Sooryavanshi is both overstuffed and paper-thin.

The most stirring parts of “Beijing Spring” showcase the power of the cinematic arts. The film weaves in long-unseen footage of the artists’ demonstrations that thrums with both history and stunning aesthetic beauty.

It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.

The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.

If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.

It’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies.

Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, Anthem ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.

El Agua succeeds as a portrait of the village’s traditions, both manual and cultural, brought to life by a largely nonprofessional cast (including Pamies, a striking discovery).

Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition.

As the film leans into melodrama, it loses both its friction and frisson, and a steaming-hot premise turns into something cold to the touch.