Glenn Kenny

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.