Glenn Kenny

The dimension of humanity only buttresses the humor.

Armstrong’s version of tech-bro bantering is a lot more literate and zingy than actual tech-bro bantering would be, otherwise the picture would be rather a bore. After a while, it begins to evanesce, like ice-breath does in the mountain air.

This is not a perfect picture, but it’s a soulful one that offers a lot of pleasure and even a kind of wisdom.

The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually.

It is reported that this movie’s scenario was inspired by the life of Schroeder’s own mother, and the film has a personal tone that is not always detectable in his other movies. It enhances a film that’s one of the most thoughtful in his body of work.

It's not likely you'll see a film more visually exhilarating until, well, Gondry's next.

This is a terrific document and a testament.

Clouds of Sils Maria is oodles more poetic and enigmatic than the term “backstage drama” generally encompasses.

Taking on a novel that’s already been adapted by two of the greatest filmmakers of all time should give any contemporary director pause, you would think. But Benoît Jacquot shows no signs of intimidation in his Diary of a Chambermaid.

Even if this documentary directed by Lisa Hurwitz had nothing else to recommend it, it would be worthwhile as an excellent source of Mel Brooks.

The filmmakers really do manage to visualize a distinctly Ballardian nightmare-scape. This in itself makes High-Rise worth experiencing.

The Sparks Brothers, an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.

Barret makes the viewer understand, implicitly at least, the desperation of these creators, even as views of their work, and the simmering electronic Afro-funk of the soundtrack, make a case for the indomitability of their creative impulse.

Even if you’ve scratched your head over Mr. Lydon’s TV ad work and other efforts to maintain a professional life in recent years, this affectionate and frank movie can elicit newfound admiration for a slightly mellowed iconoclast.

Mr. Moore recognizes an affinity he shares with the president — also a showman. So he is in a nearly unique position to shame the viewer with a frank perspective on how Mr. Trump used his extrovert side to make citizens complacent about the less savory aspects of his character.

Ms. Didion’s triumph, as a writer and a human being, has been to take the age for what it is, to pinpoint how she saw it, and to stick it out.

Gillan plays her messy, mournful role with unfussy integrity. The movie does not stray beyond the borders of the modest character study, but within those parameters, it’s accomplished and impressively straightforward.

Kiki shows us a group of brave and beautiful souls for whom the struggle is, unfortunately, probably about to get even harder.

The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.

The movie’s disinclination to judge doesn’t deprive it of a point of view. Skate Kitchen is unfailingly compassionate to, and genuinely appreciative of, the people it chronicles.

It is a disarmingly and consistently sensitive movie that remains engaging even when its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp.

If you’ve entertained “Green Acres”-inspired reveries on the joys of “farm living,” this documentary may rid you of them in short order. But it may also revive your wonder at the weird but ultimately awe-inspiring ways in which humans can help nature do its work.

While the word “feminism” is never uttered in this movie, Jane B. par Agnès V. is an exemplary feminist work, one in which two female artists, self-aware but hardly self-conscious, create beauty by exchanging notes.

The measured tone with which the movie presents its ostensible revelations is more than half the fun; nothing that comes up is ever played as a twist; the aforementioned opening scene shows Munch’s hand deliberately.

Whatever genre it belongs to, The Other Side is powerful and disturbing.

This picture earns its tear-jerking without becoming treacly. OK, without becoming too treacly. And it has other charming, enlightened components.

While the last third of Butterfield’s life is tragic, spending the better part of 90 minutes with the man and his music is exhilarating. The picture may get at least a few people talking about him again.

The drama is well-paced, and all of the actors are wonderful. Mr. Dussollier, a regular presence in the late works of Alain Resnais, is resourceful in communicating Berthier’s disturbing dual nature, and Ms. Dequenne remains appealing even when her character is making the most grievously ill-advised choices.

Framing John DeLorean doesn’t fully answer its own central question, and leaves several others hanging as well. As frustrating as this can be in hindsight, the movie, while it’s playing, is unfailingly engrossing.

This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.

Nobody’s Watching addresses immigration issues head on, but it’s more about being set existentially adrift.

Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.

Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.

As a music industry story, Kenny G’s rise, engineered by the mogul Clive Davis but at times bucked by the artist himself, is fascinating.

“Jeannette” throws the modern back at the medieval, making no distinction between religious ecstasy and that experienced in certain contemporary contexts of music and ritual. It’s a provocative proposition that yields a film of genuine spiritual dimension.

“Rock & Roll President” is a potent and poignant reminder of how some things used to be and may never be again.

The movie’s most provocative aspect is its near-methodical portrayal of hive-mind thinking pursued as a kind of norm — not just by the examiners, but the hopeful applicants.

Directed by Maggie Betts from a script she wrote with Doug Wright, The Burial develops into a lively courtroom drama with wide-ranging pertinence. Of course its two lead actors give the bravura performances you’d expect from them, but they don’t eat the scenery — they take the material seriously and invest in it with welcome nuance.

The concentration of the performers and the power of Wilde’s unusually baroque, even for him, language (he originally composed the play in French, as it happens) makes for some mesmerizing scenes.

It’s a striking, human portrait of men in trouble, looking for escape and possibly redemption.

This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.

Ms. Johnson directs the picture with an assurance that matches that of her plucky protagonist.

Wilde Salomé is most fascinating as a portrait of a superstar actor who, for all his wealth and privilege, encounters unusual frustrations as he pursues genuine artistic ambitions.

This film adheres to Rams’s aesthetics by being brisk, matter of fact, well lighted and composed of clean lines, metaphorically speaking. Brian Eno’s score, which he recorded as a series of discrete compositions, adds to the movie’s linear elegance.

This film lays bare how the American health care system seems designed, at every level, to fail the mentally ill and those who try to be of genuine service to them.

Thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.

A lively, engaging and moving documentary.

Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.

As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.

The movie’s climax has sufficient twists and turns for a conventional payoff. But the movie, adapted from a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, is ultimately more concerned with the genuinely tragic dimensions of the story than its suspense angles.

This is a harrowing movie that depends on our collective hindsight to underscore its manifold and particular ironies.

This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist.

If you’ve ever been curious as to how a cartoonist gets into The New Yorker and what happens then, Very Semi-Serious offers very satisfactory info.

The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.

The film is as beautifully composed as Uzzle’s pictures. The director Jethro Waters also shot the movie, a subtle feast of light and color.

Beth B is not out to deliver a comprehensive biography. Instead, she achieves a vivid snapshot of a still-vital artist late in a still-purposeful life.

Mandela did not die before effecting a huge change in his still-traumatized country. This movie sheds a valuable light on his struggle.

When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.

The antics never out-and-out surprise, but they almost never fail to amuse.

The Endless rewards patience with mind-bending twists and turns.

Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world.

This intense documentary shows a driven creator walking the walk, so to speak, in the most perverse fashion possible. The story is both repellent and strangely inspiring.

Here and in the earlier picture it’s perhaps easy to apprehend Dumont’s approach with a “What’s this oddball up to now?” smirk. But if Dumont is joking at all, it’s a form of what used to be called “kidding on the square.”

This gangly picture isn’t a lost masterpiece, to be clear. But it’s a magnetic curio, a fascinating relic of a vanished strain of European cinema.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie, directed by Bouchard and Bernard Derriman, is such a breezy, engaging picture that it qualifies as a summer refreshment.

The reversals the characters suffer across the movie’s running time are epic, and the movie’s finale unfolds to genuinely startling effect.

In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.

The filmmakers’ bold pushback against the rigid formality of the genre they draw upon doesn’t always deliver. With the exception of Ms. Korine, the performers often seem to have a hard time shaking off the aura of the contemporary. Nevertheless, there’s much of value here.

A lively, fun one.

This affectionate, heartbreaking documentary about his life, directed by Garret Price, presents Yelchin as a soldier of cinema, and a lot more.

This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.

This effervescent picture has an often infectious underground-movie aesthetic.

There’s a lot to like here, particularly Steinfeld’s performance.

The movie is a fast account that is sometimes a tad facile in its analysis of a cultural moment. But as Mr. Schrager’s personal too-much-too-soon story, it’s compelling.

This movie packs in plenty of cinema acrobatics and spectacle without ever feeling out of control, even as it morphs into a far-fetched whodunit.

In its sensitivity and attention to detail, Ocean Waves makes itself into something special, and kind of magical, and so proves very much a Ghibli gem.

The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.

The movie’s intellectual provocations — mostly pertaining to the elasticity of cinematic form — remain as lively as they were many decades ago.

The ensemble is packed with seasoned acting professionals across the board, who more than sell their drunk scenes and deliver more than a few laughs on their way to redemption.

The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.

While her filmmaking style can sometimes come across as staid, [Ms. Asante's] sense of pace is always acute. The best reason to see A United Kingdom, however, is the performance by Mr. Oyelowo.

This movie, which was written by Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal, has an energetic-to-the-point-of-boisterous style. Its lively frequency is embedded in the writing, bolstered by Carlos López Estrada’s direction, and kept buoyant by the performers. This particular aspect of the film makes it exciting to watch, but can also be confounding.

Fowler’s film is made up of familiar documentary components: archival footage, reminiscences by friends and readings of the subject’s letters. But these are ordered in a way that is less concerned with telling a story, or explaining Bartlett’s life, than with evoking his qualities of erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, care and sometimes anger.

The movie tells an incomplete version of the band’s story...but provides a comprehensive and sometimes harrowing portrayal of the grind a working bar band in the 1970s had to endure to get by.

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years’ hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess.

I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, The Wailing is the hard stuff. Handle with care.

The characters and the actors playing them are appealing, and the fight scenes have a lot of moxie, not to mention a lot of steel-slinging.

Ms. Dorfman emerges as an artist of deep compassion, empathy, humor and wisdom.

Andresen’s determination to rise above misfortune, and his hopes for himself, make this movie less than a total tragedy. But it’s an often shudder-inducing cautionary tale.

Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.

The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.

The Salt of Tears is quite a bit more than a cad’s progress. There are fleeting shadows of Flaubert in this tale, which Garrel crafted in collaboration with two venerable screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann.

Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film.

When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.

Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.

This quiet movie, shot in black-and-white and color, is an unhurried, beautiful, and pained work that through simple means resonates on various levels.

As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.

Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.