Lisa Kennedy

“Aisha” resists tidy answers through the gentle force of its performances and by staying on the rebuffs and uncertainty Aisha suffers.

Come See Me in the Good Light, is very good on the existential. But Gibson and Falley are even more generous in sharing their journey through the medical morass.

The movie sticks to the shallow end.

In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. Paper & Glue, while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter.

The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.

A first-rate raconteur, Johansen — wearing a pompadour, sunglasses and bespoke suit — brings the funk. The storied Café Carlyle delivers the chic.

Architecton is as gorgeous as it is grave. The score (by Evgueni Galperine) and sound design (by Aleksandr Dudarev) contribute mightily to the film’s heavy lifting.

Kolodny handles his movie-as-documentary conceit with subtle flair and finesse. For a subgenre as crowded with movies as boxing has weight classes, The Featherweight isn’t a knockout. But it does land more than a glancing blow.

With its rough-hewed realism, “Will” is remarkable not so much for its craft as for its philosophical depth in portraying the tensions between a struggling individual and his community, which can be both supportive and enabling.

Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.

Directed by Shoshannah Stern, who is hearing impaired, the documentary — made for the “American Masters” series and premiering at Sundance — is both straightforward and subtle.

In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.

“Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.

Dear Mr. Brody invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity.

If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.

The film’s seven protagonists are the result of McBaine and Moss’s broad and deep interview process. Demographically diverse, the women are immensely watchable and touchingly articulate.

There’s a refreshing willfulness here to leave some quandaries lingering, and like the rough beauty of the volcanic island the movie is set on, Islands beckons and rebukes and beckons some more.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.

A film that skillfully navigates vulnerability, brainy insights and artistry.

Luminously photographed and nimbly edited, The Worst Ones — which won the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 — offers a provocative critique of filmmaking practices. It also presents a subtle defense of the onscreen miracles revealed by the young and the raw.

[A] haunting, revelatory documentary.

In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.

While Ride and O’ Shaughnessy never wed. Her candor here marries a spectacular professional saga with the personal love story convincingly.

One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.

Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.

One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.

Its early execution strains and wobbles some, but “Backspot” sticks its landing.