Helen T. Verongos

There are few feelings as glorious as spreading your wings onstage for the first time. Ruby Yang captures that rare electricity in her documentary My Voice, My Life, about Hong Kong teenagers who put on a show.

For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.

Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.

It’s rare that a director’s first feature film, accomplished with an ensemble of nonprofessional actors, proves to be as quietly powerful as Jean-Bernard Marlin’s simple but lyrical “Shéhérazade.”

Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.

In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.

Broader than it is deep, Equal Means Equal still drills down into enough specific issues to shock us afresh.

In the film, a student of Mr. deLeyer’s recalls some of his advice: “Throw your heart over the top, and your horse will follow.” Harry & Snowman makes you want to do the same.

Humor creeps in from strange sources, including a seller of funeral packages and a march through a Paris graveyard. And while not every motivation is clear, subtext isn’t everything in a movie as complex and satisfying as this one.

There is a delicate beauty to this movie and its visual composition.

While any explanation of this fraught phenomenon feels like an oversimplification, Mr. Dotan sorts out the forces and personalities that shaped the movement.

It conveys a satisfying, informative portrait of a well-read man who looks back at his life, good decisions and bad, with wisdom and intelligence.

What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.

A respectable and all-too-real introduction to a chilling chapter of a Hollywood horror story.

A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.

The title, by the way, is Trinidadian slang for being disoriented or dizzy or just a little bit crazy, possibly because of romance. And you might go bazodee over that contagious soca beat.

The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.

Gentle, coaxing questions from off camera draw out their stories.

A clever film written and directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, H. keeps the viewer watchful, waiting for it to splatter into a familiar horror plot or spin off into an alien abduction.

Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.

Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.

The director, Andrew Nackman, in making a super-mainstream film, leans so far toward the feel-good end of the spectrum that he forgoes the opportunity to make something that is more real, more fraught, more complex.

The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.

A parable about the contagious nature of corruption and the curse of dirty money, 1000 Rupee Note asks, How valuable is a windfall to people who live their lives largely without money?

While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.

It’s easy to fall in love with the animals in Sled Dogs. It’s thornier to sift through the words of the handlers and mushers — many of whom seem to genuinely care for the dogs — and determine how pervasive abuse is in dog-sledding ventures.

This ambitious documentary, by Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani, is largely pleasing to the eye, and it pays close attention to the eloquent activists at its core. Journalists of every stripe provide context, perhaps more than we can digest.

The film, pleasing and inoffensive, often amuses as it wrestles with the nature of familiarity as well as the question of where beauty resides.