Diana Clarke

There's never enough information.

The sloping plot of the film is all happenstance, loosely connected scenes strung together, a life taking shape.... It's hard to keep watching. Don't stop.

López is a singularly tender, compelling, and articulate campaigner in this high-stakes struggle for justice, filmed with the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller.

Directors Stephen Apkon and Andrew Young reverse the usual act of border-crossing, and they do not differentiate between Arabic and Hebrew, allowing their subjects to switch between the two and subtitling both in English, signaling that the film is a space for listening, for trying to understand.

Pervert Park reveals a linked chain of incidents; we are all connected whether we admit it or not. What if we all lived in communities where the people around us agreed to help us get better, rather than blaming and shaming us for our transgressions?

Admittedly, it's an awfully low bar that makes a film about the Middle East radical simply for taking into account the opinions and experiences of people of color. But it's really, wonderfully refreshing to find one that centers on storytelling like this.

For a film encompassing generations of fraught history, Germans & Jews is awfully short, but hardly superficial.

Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.

Lipper does an excellent job of using her film as a vehicle for the voices and concerns of Nigerians, and especially of Nigerian women, who are traditionally expected to stay at home while men operate in the public sphere. But Lipper does not limit her camera to political struggles.

[A] fascinating, unnerving documentary.

Wang's film allows the public activist to be privately human, showing Ye at home with her lively daughter, sharing moments of friendship with other women activists or clearing brush and describing the hard rural lives of her family.

What Dotan has to say — in arresting new footage — about today’s Hilltop Youth, a right-wing Jewish Israeli settler organization that unites and mobilizes young people to occupy territory in the West Bank, is crucial and, in the American context, frighteningly familiar.

It's a fault of feminism, of artistry, of generosity, for the older woman to envy one younger. And yet. How do we escape the myths into which we are born? We tell them, and show the hard work of telling.

This film does not pander. Rather, it demands that the viewer rise to the occasion.

The chemistry between the siblings carries the film; they share a rich banter and subtle physical affection that feels real, built on years of shared intimacy — and this new experience of ignorance.

[A] compelling and cogent documentary.

This intimate film's creators presume that the audience is familiar with the facts and wants a human story about what it's like to get your dad back.

In his singular dedication to brilliant work, Benson was rarely home, even on holidays, but he expresses scorn for people more concerned with others' feelings than their images.

What a relief to watch this small, expert film — a pane of glass in a concrete wall — that whispers, that dares to stand still and witness ordinary human pain.

Each person’s actions here are not theirs alone, but part of a network of complicated needs and conflicting ideologies that make up contemporary Pakistan. Some of the stories are difficult to hear, but they must be listened to.

Dukhtar is an issues film with the twisted, heart-pounding feel of a road-trip thriller, but Nathaniel based her script on a true story, and there's a low-key quality to the conversations that feels real, intimate, and all the more urgent for it.

What Yeger stirs up is profoundly unsettling and deeply moving.

This film is a wakeup call in the best sense: urgent, clear, understated.

The film is undeniably compelling, and the fury and protest with which women across India responded to Singh's murder was explosive.... Yet there's something worrisome in the sensationalist tone.

Oz is the best-known novelist in Israel, notorious for supporting a two-state solution. If you don't yet understand why he does, watch this film. If you're already on Oz's side, keeping the wound open might be worth it.

Grounded in the art of listening, The Ruins of Lifta builds a powerful, personal, political conversation between Palestinians and Israelis looking to live differently.

Shot like a photo album, gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, it continually suggests that crisis and struggle can be beautiful when viewed from the right angle.

Cutting between present, childhood, and recent past, Bispuri constructs a subtle, richly emotional collage.

The filmmakers assume, rightly for the most part, that viewers will be invested in the origin story and power struggles at the start-up MakerBot, one of the first companies to make and sell 3-D printers to the public.

The documentary briefly veers into tired territory when Rabin’s voice disappears and triumphal singers fill the screen, but Rabin’s consistent, thoughtful self-criticism and colorful storytelling animate what might otherwise be a pat, or at least familiar, history of Israel in the 20th century.

Despite a melodramatic title, the film is keen and measured. Drama builds in the small moments.

Deraspe returns specificity, intimacy, and human weirdness to this international scandal.

Though sometimes clumsy or nostalgic, the film is an engaging oral history of Leary and Dass's friendship.

Do Not Resist is an order to the viewer: watch.

Even when it's ruining lives, bureaucracy is boring. And Indian Point, Ivy Meeropol's new documentary about a nuclear power plant of that name, is riddled with tiresome bureaucratic wrangling at local and national levels.

Because the battle for legalization is still being fought in most other states, the lack of an up-to-date perspective is frustrating.

On treks through the city, camera in hand, Weber's expertise, tenderness, and taste for the absurd become clear. Wechsler runs with it, interspersing decades of Weber's often gritty photographs with expert cinematography.

By glamorizing struggle and ideology across the Israeli-Jewish political spectrum, it once more invites identification with only half of those locked in the conflict Rabin was trying to solve.

The Tainted Veil is a long conversation, wide in scope and geography, but nonetheless intimate.

Like a well-executed fine-dining experience, this sleek documentary entertains, delights, and makes viewers comfortable without evident sweat.

Fleifel gathers the messy detritus of everyday living, laughs at it, then shows the viewer what it means.

Although Speed Sisters is not comprehensive, it's vital.

The most fascinating moments in Hieronymous Bosch come from art historians once they’ve turned to the work of history: creating meaning and context, wrestling with these questions. The film renders this conversation beautifully, and in moments begins to feel urgent in spite of itself.

Harris is wistful, funny, and articulate about his romantic neuroses and insecurities... Unfortunately, he sometimes fails to go deeper.

Lilti tells a fine story, but he doesn't always look closely enough at what he's saying.

[A] sweetly odd documentary.

[A] bizarre and wonderful doc that's pitched like a home movie but crafted with fine, poignant sensibilities.

The Yes Men visit rural Uganda, Canadian oil fields, Zuccotti Park, and a climate change conference in Copenhagen, but in its best moments this loopy yet informative doc becomes a buddy movie.

This gripping documentary about unleavened bread and the people who need it asks us to consider what we in the world owe one another — and demands that we do better.

It's rare to find a film that portrays dancers of all shapes, colors, ages, and sizes as beautiful, which they are.

With the facts so poignant, there's little that needs dramatizing.

Fowler's work is bureaucratic, institutional, Western-focused. Which shouldn't matter, because it's good work, but as a story of salvation it feels too familiar.

This movie about violence and how it comes into intimate spaces refuses to make even animals only animal. It's beautiful and important and very strange.

Ben-Ari elegantly conveys the crippling social pressures that arise when a woman suggests that she might be allowed agency over her own body and that of her child, without adding any words of her own.

Monk With a Camera hints at answers, but imposes nothing. Like a good photograph, or a wise abbot, it only presents the evidence and allows us to arrive at truth.

Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams’ globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.

Driving both the filmmaker and her subjects is wonder and wanderlust. Their enthusiasm for the Camino is contagious, and it might make you drop everything and head for Spain.

This strange, quiet film takes social narratives about romance and gender and upends them, often seeming like one thing until it's another.

For a film whose central motif is dance, there's remarkably little dancing done onscreen, and though Rowland and her co-star share moments of tender, revealing conversation, the movie is ultimately underwhelming, its emotional range as limited as that of its characters.

It can be unsettling, for regular documentary viewers, to take in a film so relentlessly optimistic, communal, and lacking in nostalgia, but those qualities were key to the success of the women of Biolley.

This particular rendition of a history often told is little more than propaganda.

It's too rare for movies to depict women working together as friends to effect political change, and this one makes it seem righteous, loud, and fun as a rock concert. Free the Nipple won't change the conversation, but it might help start one.

It's a movie that thinks it stands for openness and cultural understanding, underneath the poop jokes, when in fact it manages to be offensive to almost everyone, including people who like to laugh at something because it's funny, not just because it makes us uncomfortable.

An enraging portrait of entrenched sexism in competitive sports that proves parity is worth fighting for.

The Jewish Cardinal uses the luscious pleasures of the everyday to underscore and endure the big questions of identity, humanity, and home.

This very serious film sometimes feels like a farce.

Vail's film earnestly interrogates authenticity even as her camera lingers on a beach without footprints, inviting the viewer to walk.

[A] gorgeous and unsettling documentary.

The documentary can sometimes feel like a video game, with cartoonish pinging graphics, but the real-life consequences of digital activity, from arrests to CIA monitoring and a total lack of privacy for ordinary citizens, heighten its stakes.

Urgent, deeply painful yet lovely in its aesthetics.

Despite its context in a global conflict, Uprising is a strangely intimate film.

It's laugh-out-loud silly if you're in the mood, but mostly embarrassing. Science could certainly use more philosophy, but not at the expense of dignity, never mind common sense.

The short documentary On Beauty is all surfaces, skimming, lightness, flash.

At least the filmmakers are Jewish — and in their admirable quest for an understanding of what makes good sex and relationships, they've created a mightily silly but occasionally insightful, and certainly entertaining, film.

A dance is not only motion, but emotion. This fascinating film reminds us how closely the two are linked.