Diana Clarke

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

[A] sweetly odd documentary.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

No, love isn't sweeping; it's putting brush to canvas and hand to hand. It's accepting imperfections. But it's also being willing to recognize the people we love for who they are, to note our own flaws and work to change them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

[A] compelling and cogent documentary.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.