John Anderson

Joy may not be sweeping the nation portrayed in Our Towns, exactly. But a certain amount of happiness abounds.

The otherworldliness of “Tina,” which exists for many minutes in a kind of vacuum created between the various silent images and the distanced voiceover, is transporting; the ambient score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans helps transform what might have been a series of mere tawdry recollections into a kind of prison memoir.

There are degrees of villainy in “Operation Varsity Blues,” but it’s hard to peg the privileged, bribe-paying parents as the worst of a bad lot. Besides, they have to live not just with their criminal convictions but with those wiretapped conversations, in which they reveal what they really think of their own children.

The world may be divided into “developed,” “developing” and “under-developed,” but the young people here seem to pay no attention to such differences. They may be thinking locally, but they’re aspiring globally.

Anyone expecting “Biggie” to be some version of “Unsolved Mysteries” will be disappointed. But it’s unquestionably an affectionate, entertaining and even enlightening portrait.

Shook has the requisite twists to make it much more than a straightforward horror-shocker, and the sharp turns are sufficient to have viewers profoundly dizzy about where it’s all going to go.

Ms. Newton is the kind of performer who seizes one’s attention immediately; Mr. Allen is, by nature of the story, relegated to more of a supporting role as the narrative progresses, but he’s an amiable presence.

Ideas being realized on screen? It’s something Mr. Cahill’s characters accomplish far more effectively than does the director himself.

Mr. Timberlake has displayed his many gifts in multiple formats, but nothing quite like “Palmer,” not in his character’s complexities or in the way he navigates Palmer through the social circumstances explored by Ms. Guerriero’s canny script. Young Ryder Allen is also something to see: He makes Sam’s matter-of-fact self-acceptance funny, yes, but inspiring as well.

The depths of the characterizations are commensurate with the complexities of the men, making Malcolm the most resounding. Mr. Ben-Adir does him justice.

Penguin Bloom is alternately despairing and inspiring—more of the former than the latter, I found, simply because of the production’s honesty, and the lifetime of difficulty the Blooms’ story suggests.

The film is terrific fare for kids. But the underpinnings of its fantastical story lie in tortured Irish history, English imperialism, and the use of religion to rationalize oppression; there’s a hum of yearning for a pre-Christian Hibernia of pagans, Druids and nature worship. Adults will be eager to see where it’s all going to go.

Given how early the illicit-insemination angle of Fortier’s history is revealed, viewers will suspect that even worse is to come, and they will be right. But that doesn’t mean those same viewers might not have other questions.

Mr. Morris is among the most intellectual of documentary makers, but on an artisanal level his trademark is the head-on confrontation, the face-to-face interview. In refining that process, he developed the Interrotron, which enables him to interview a subject eye-to-eye while still having that subject look directly into the camera.

It’s a rare documentary portrait that doesn’t oversell its subject.

Uncle Frank feels like a memoir, and also feels extraordinarily true, and fresh, thanks to the untrammeled terrain it visits, at least in New York.

It’s unclear what if anything Mr. McQueen or his co-writer, Alastair Siddons, lifted from judicial transcripts, but the inherent boundaries of a courtroom help give more shape and momentum to the storytelling. The setting also allows the characters to stop telling each other things they’d never say.

Dorothy Lewis, the subject of director Alex Gibney’s collagist masterpiece Crazy, Not Insane, is out to demolish “the myth of pure evil.” As such, she may be among the most dangerous women in the world. She is certainly a “pioneer,” as one colleague calls her, adding that pioneers are often not treated very well.

Jiu Jitsu is an ambitious undertaking in its way, one that will probably tickle hardcore martial-arts and samurai movie fans, although the attraction may be more academic than adrenaline-fueled.

It’s a clever gesture, but also points out what’s ultimately wrong with director Dan Friedkin’s postwar thriller: It knows a lot about art history and presumes we know nothing.

Being a person who grew up with him as a live cultural presence, I’m a highly biased fan of the man. Still, like its subject, “Belushi” is sometimes simply too much.

Even when it falters The Forty-Year-Old Version exudes confidence—the director has confidence in her lead actress, and vice versa; both trust the writer, whose more amusing lines are often contained in asides between characters discussing.

An overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem’s life.

Ms. Richen has a problematic subject for a documentary, and the problems extend beyond the limitations of footage. She needs to sell the event, thus her lineup of marginally relevant characters gushing about it.

Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way, the interviewees are all charmingly surprised that they lived through their teenage years and there’s a remarkable amount of action footage from the park, considering that it predates cellphones. (The animation by Richard Langberg is amusing, too.) Where the film has a problem is Mulvihill.

A rehashing of decades-old race relations in New York, or anywhere in America, might seem superfluous given more recent events, but Mr. Muhammad’s point isn’t to stir up anger. It’s to decry damage—the waste of a promising young life and the collateral wreckage visited upon a family and friends.

With a screenplay by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee from his 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians is a parable of depressingly timeless relevance, which means it’s faithful to its source material.

Lushly visual and much of its cinematic power arises from the seductively dreadful space and starkness of the Norwegian landscape in winter. And in the way Mr. Moland and his cinematographer, Rasmus Videbæk, use their delicately detailed, even painterly depictions of the flora and fauna surrounding the film’s very complicated people to put the latter in their cosmic place.