Jeannette Catsoulis

A frustratingly fragmented yet warmly intimate portrait of an evolving bond that frays but doesn’t sever.

Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.

A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.

Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.

Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.

Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.

The Girls in the Band is everything a worthwhile documentary should be, and then some: engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters.

Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.

Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.

The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.

A blue-collar meditation on the meaning of community and the imperative of compassion, one that endures even as an unexpectedly prurient drama unfolds at its center.

Rhythmically blending vintage recordings and live performances, The Winding Stream exudes a quirky warmth that counters its PBS-pledge-drive aura.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.

Its violence is low-tech... and its look is old-school, but its message could not possibly be more momentous.

The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.

Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach.

At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.

The director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.

Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is a chase movie disguised as a western. Its humor is as dry as prairie dust...and its morals are steadfastly gray.

A film with nothing to please the eye and even less to excite the mind.

Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.

Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.

Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.

Poised self-consciously between art and entertainment, Joshua offers imaginative staging and some superb performances.

If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.

Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, this strikingly original travelogue glides on the lovely lilt of Mr. Santos's Portuguese narration.

Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.

This devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues.