Matt Fagerholm

Boesten’s picture leaves viewers contemplating all that they have been unwilling to forgive, and all that could be achieved once that baggage has been thrust from their shoulders.

Indeed, González has the keen eye of a documentarian that can perceive the very details that normally escape one’s gaze. His film demonstrates just how much we can glean by slowing down to savor the sights around us and those who inhabit them. To take the time to look at the world through the eyes of others rather than be limited by our own perspective.

Though the film initially promises to follow its subject into a dark night of the soul wherein he wrestles with demons, “McEnroe” is every bit as much a celebration of his legacy as a gifted bad boy.

Chin and Vasarhelyi make a solid case for why space exploration should continue, and the benefits we could reap from it, provided it doesn’t keep our heads perpetually lost in the clouds.

I doubt How to Survive a Pandemic will alter anyone’s opinion regarding the necessity of vaccines, yet it does pay admirable tribute to the scientists fighting to save the world, including those stubborn earthlings who have no interest in being saved.

Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili’s Tribeca prize-winner, “Brighton 4th,” is a tragicomedy that sneaks up on you stealthily before flooring you with an emotional sucker punch in the final reel.

Robinson is matter-of-fact, thoughtful and enormously compelling in illustrating hidden chapters of our shared history.

The travesties of justice on display throughout “President” become so repetitive and inevitable that it renders one exhausted, grateful if only that the killing of democracy has been so clearly and meticulously documented.

By inviting viewers to share in the most private of transformative periods for his family, Max Lowe scaled the Mount Everest of the soul, creating a cinematic gift that cuts to the heart in ways few films ever do.

Maggio’s film is also deeply moving in how it illustrates the ways in which a single life can have an eternal ripple effect throughout the generations, seamlessly blending Parks’ voice with those of the modern day photographers who carry on his legacy.

What Convergence reinforced for me, more than anything, is simply the overwhelming gratitude I have for every essential worker who took my temperature, bagged my groceries and drove me to my desired destination over the past twenty months.

The Human Factor is as much about modern day America as it about Israel and Palestine, and how much we have to lose when we give into the easy temptation of demonizing those who think differently—even if it’s as a result of listening to Tucker Carlson.

What’s most rewarding about curator Sam Abbas’ short film collection, Erēmīta (Anthologies), is in how it magnifies the ways in which all of us, regardless of where we live, have become intrinsically connected by the challenges of this unprecedented era.

Regardless of one’s whereabouts or knowledge of the Great White North, viewers will likely find this comic fable chillingly relatable, as the world teeters on the brink of totalitarian collapse.

Since Thunberg is one of the most gifted and arresting speakers alive today, I Am Greta is inherently compelling as a behind-the-scenes document of the vulnerabilities masked by her forceful persona.

The vast majority of this picture is extremely well done, which is what makes its sudden misstep into wish fulfillment sentimentality during the final twenty minutes all the more of a letdown.

What’s remarkable is how Alexandra Pelosi, shooting much of the footage herself with a handheld camera, captures images that resonate on multiple provocative levels following the events of recent months.

Had the filmmakers put forth the effort to view the story through Jamal’s eyes, they may have had a worthy cinematic counterpart to their noble off-camera achievements.

Our Time Machine leaves you wanting a whole lot more, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Rather than massage the ego of its progressive target audience, this film stares back at us with a piercingly critical gaze.

Like the director’s 2017 profile of Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words explores how its titular subject is driven by ideas rather than ego or a desire for stardom.

If anything, the picture is a touch too benign for its own good, though it does earn enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, at least in its first third.

Polsky’s skill in mining the darkly humorous shades of disastrous hubris is not all that surprising, considering he produced Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s funniest film to date, 2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”

Laughter is an essential fuel when dealing with subject matter as heavy as this, and The Fight does a splendid job of humanizing its heroic lawyers.

What I enjoyed most about the film is how it illustrates the ways in which we view life through the prism of art in order to reach a deeper understanding of it.

The final four minutes turn what was already a fine picture into an unforgettable one, affirming Morchhale’s status as one of the most exciting figures of the Indian new wave.

I went into the film knowing nothing about the Cantopop star, and came away from it as an instant fan rejuvenated by my connection to every soul throughout the world currently fighting to preserve human rights against the rising tide of totalitarianism.

Daddy Issues is not the laugh-out-loud rom-com it had likely aspired to be, yet it’s just charming enough to make you wish it were better.

Monsters like Cohn are created by a nation that judges its people based on the level of their clout rather than the content of their character. Cohn embodies the primal urge to succeed at all costs, and the first step toward defeating him is to root him out in ourselves.

By respecting the spiritual journeys of his subjects, Karslake affirms that he is more concerned with reaching across the aisle than preaching to the choir.

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

What makes this film special, first and foremost, is the performance by Chin, who has lost none of the acerbic edge she sported as Waverly’s mother in “The Joy Luck Club.”

Its visual landscape is unlike any I’ve experienced, and though everything about it is aggressively repellant, it still managed to hold me in a constant state of gobsmacked awe.

Apart from its numerous profound achievements, Neulinger’s picture is an extraordinary work of film analysis, inviting the viewer to study certain encounters frame-by-frame as a way of revealing their unspoken subtext.

In some ways, The Infiltrators is reminiscent of 2018’s under-seen gem “American Animals” in how it blurs the line between narrative and documentary while incorporating genre tropes into the nonfiction medium.

Resembling Maude Apatow in her youth, Rachel is a richly fascinating figure in her own right, and though she originally hadn’t planned on putting herself in the film, she wisely chose to have her face on camera (a la Bing Liu in “Minding the Gap”) when interviewing Josh, which heightens the emotional impact of their scenes together considerably.

One of the best films I’ve seen about fine art. It casts an entrancing spell that allows the staggering depth of its subject’s work to consume us, while showing how her trailblazing vision left an unmistakable imprint in over a century of iconic art spanning various mediums, resounding through history like a drop of colored paint in a pitcher of water.

I fully endorse the message blatantly expressed by Beemer’s picture, but as a work of cinema, it drove me nuts in how its style was antithetical to the principles its numerous subjects were championing.

Tape isn’t just a movie. It is a rallying cry.

Beyond its message and intent, Chandler’s film is a raw and insightful portrait of the psychology fueling addiction, and how the healing of pain and depression must be tackled in a healthy way.

If this material were compiled into a book, it would be rightfully deemed great literature. As featured in Heise’s film, however, these insightful words are frequently marred by a style oddly akin to a mournful podcast, one that requires listeners to repeatedly peer at their phone to read the subtitles.

There’s no question that Islamophobia is also on the rise around the globe, and this film — however inadvertently and well-intentioned — plays directly into it.

I imagine even Billy Wilder would’ve gotten misty-eyed during the final, perfectly-pitched moments of this extraordinary film.

This is screen acting of a very rare sort, and Clemency is a vital emotional powerhouse sorely deserving of being seen.

Filmed over the course of three years and clocking in just over 70 minutes (minus credits), When Lambs Become Lions is a triumph of shrewdly economical storytelling on the part of Kasbe and his co-editors Frederick Shanahan and Caitlyn Greene.

Landsman’s film is enraging for all the right reasons, and more than a few wrong ones as well. It comes off as more of a puff piece than an exposé.

The overwhelming positivity in this footage is illuminating and encouraging, yet also more than a touch puzzling, raising questions of precisely where this intolerance hibernates when cameras aren’t around to support such devastating legislation.

God is destined to forever be a complicated subject for most mortals, yet there’s no question this film has made me a believer in the boundless artistic potential of its creator.

Though its generic title may evoke memories of the archaic science videos you fell asleep to in grade school, Schwartzberg’s film quickly proves to be one of the year’s most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs.

The plot seems sillier the more one mulls it over, yet it’s a testament to the film that we’re not preoccupied with questions of probability for the duration of its running time.

Many of the film's backdrops are admittedly breathtaking, yet the foregrounded people never seem to be actually populating them. The character animation is so flat and uninspired that it causes Dilili and her fellow humans to resemble stickers grafted onto postcards, with the subtle use of shadows and reflections doing little to add dimension.

By the time Margo finally announces that she’s ready to leave, I was eager to gather my things and join her in escaping this would-be comedy.

With a running time clocking in just over two hours, Promise at Dawn often plays like a truncated miniseries, with scenes moving along too quickly for their emotional peaks and valleys to reach their fullest expression.

This is one of the year’s best films.

The best thing that can be said about the script, penned by acclaimed playwright Alice Austen, is that it never sounds written. Most of the dialogue seems as if it were improvised by the film’s remarkable ensemble, particularly when scenes of prolonged verbal altercations reach Cassavetes-level decibels.

I didn’t laugh a whole lot while watching Adam, but I was never less than wholly engaged, and by the end, I felt grateful for having seen it.

When a comedy is made about a real-life topic that is no laughing matter, it had better be funnier than Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire. The premise is a richly flavorful one, but the execution is as bland as unseasoned hummus.

Share is a relatively restrained work. Nothing is made explicit aside from the internal agony of its heroine, whose headspace we occupy so fully, we can’t help sharing in every tremulous emotion that ripples across her face.

At War is an exhausting film to watch in the best sense, venting our anger at the dehumanizing forces in society until we are left drained, contemplating our impending challenges with newfound clarity.

What they tell us is inherently alarming, yet it’s a shame that such crimes aren’t conveyed in a more visually compelling way.

I got more enjoyment from reading Parlow’s exceptional interview in the production notes than I did from any given scene in the movie, some of which are so murky, they border on incoherent.

Like her brilliant 2012 debut feature, “Elena,” which recounted the “inconsolable memory” of Costa’s older sister prior to her suicide, the director’s latest work, The Edge of Democracy, is haunted by loss.

Echo in the Canyon appears all too content in banking on our nostalgia for the formidable roster of artists it has assembled, relying solely on our familiarity with their work to keep our attention rapt.

At a time when the long-overdue rallying cry for representation has inadvertently limited the type of stories artists have the permission to tell, depending largely on their outward identity, the success of LeRoy’s work—and the countless lives it mirrored—stands as undeniable proof that art should never be constrained by the boundaries of one’s experience.

It’s not a film so much as a lecture punctuated by a patronizing moral, and more importantly, it’s not much fun.

With these two top-drawer talents anchoring Michael Engler’s The Chaperone, one expects the picture to be terrific, and for the majority of its running time, it does not disappoint.

Far stronger than its lackluster buzz from Cannes suggested, this film is yet another testament to Farhadi’s genius in mining immense power from silence and stillness.

The Unicorn marks the actor and musician’s second time in the director’s chair, and it is an endearing symphony of misread cues, fumbling advances and accidental epiphanies. The stunted growth of modern day thirty-somethings is well-worn subject matter, yet Schwartzman — being a member of the generation himself — approaches it from an empathetic and refreshingly nonjudgmental perspective.

Regardless of its missteps, Grossman’s film should be seen as a necessary introduction to a multitude of stories warranting greater analysis.

With its balance of exuberant humor and rigorous insight, Bathtubs Over Broadway provides as stellar an education for the uninformed as Siegel’s “The Bathrooms Are Coming!”

Esparza’s aim is to capture nothing more than the relentless flow of “life itself,” a term famously selected by Roger Ebert for the name of his 2011 memoir and its subsequent 2014 cinematic incarnation.

As tough as the subject matter may get at times, the film is guaranteed to be an uplifting one for viewers of all ages, with its emphasis placed on the joy of its subjects, whether it be in their everyday life or in the midst of their creative process.

Michell’s film allows us the privilege to spend an unscripted hour or so with the four acting goddesses during their routine visit to Plowright’s home in the English countryside, and though our time with them is brief, the very thought of our world existing in their absence is almost unbearable.

There are no thrills in this western yarn, just a mounting series of tragedies that are by turns frustrating and numbing.

There’s a priceless scene in Jack Bryan’s new documentary, Active Measures, where McCain is seen smirking through a speech delivered by the Russian president, as he sneers with theatrical menace in the senator’s direction.

Its star, Jeremy Irons, certainly appears to be relishing his role as an unapologetically bad-mannered actor, savoring each profane syllable of his dialogue like a fine wine.

Among its many notable achievements, Memoir of War is one of the best films I’ve seen about the ways in which grief can pull a person in both directions simultaneously. Whereas the film’s first half plays more like a thriller, the second half proves to be an emotionally wrenching interlude perched on pins and needles.

For all of its breezy charm, what makes “Guernsey” an often frustrating experience is the fact that the story uncovered by Juliet is exceedingly more interesting than the one she finds herself confined within.

When it comes to conjuring a sense of place, Driver’s film succeeds spectacularly, though it comes up short in other areas.

The great value of Christian Duguay’s A Bag of Marbles is the degree to which it makes such a barbaric and bewildering chapter in human history comprehensible for young audiences.

Even with the inclusion of modern cell phones, this 2018 release feels like it arrived fresh from 1974, and that is what makes it a delight.

Cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos gives the actors very little room to hide, often framing their faces in extreme close-up during bracing moments of emotional nakedness. There are echoes here of Cassavetes’ most agonizing stretches in “A Woman Under the Influence,” as casual pleasantries detonate into a fiery inferno of resentment.

Entanglement is gleefully weird at times, but it could’ve been a whole lot weirder.

The post-apocalyptic landscapes captured by the courageous lens of cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov are deeply chilling, especially when Alexandrovich stumbles upon a classroom littered with gas masks.

With its frequent use of puppetry and quirky animation, Boom Bust Boom suggests what an old-school episode of “Sesame Street” would’ve played like, had it focused solely on the subprime crash.

What Hammond and Markiewicz are most gifted at is cinematography. I’d gladly watch this film’s entire B-roll again just to bask in the gorgeous Mexican landscapes and vivid snapshots of the cities, outdoor markets and parking lots where various matches occur.

So vague is the picture about the meaning of the artworks it presents that they proved to be of little interest to me, until I researched them afterward. Far more compelling is Beuys himself, with his signature hat, haunted gaze and outspoken belief that art can be a vehicle for communication.

One of the most refreshing things about Laurie Simmons’ similarly provocative feature directorial debut, My Art, is in how it challenges the very notion of what constitutes a happy ending.

Many of the year’s best films feature female protagonists who are resolved to live on their own terms, and My Happy Family ranks right alongside them.

A well-intentioned documentary that makes the puzzling miscalculation of upstaging the Armenian Genocide with “The Promise.”

Though Donald Trump is never mentioned by name in all 140 minutes of Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, Human Flow, the picture is, quite simply, the most monumental cinematic middle finger aimed at his scandal-laden administration to date.

Perhaps die-hard fashionistas would find this reasonably diverting, but to everyone else, it is guaranteed to grow tiresome very quickly.

The execution is riddled with problems, not the least of which is the absence of Salinger’s actual work.

Fallen fuses its one good idea with countless bad ones generated not from life experience but from recycled formulas.

No filmed footage could replicate the experience of watching “Bronx Gothic” live, but documentarian Andrew Rossi does an admirable job of channeling its power in his movie of the same name.

What resonates most potently are the scenes of the 1972 trial.

Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower is not a great film on the order of Nanfu Wang’s “Hooligan Sparrow” or Alison Klayman’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” both essential profiles of muckraking activists whistleblowing against government corruption in China, but it does have an equally great story to tell.

American Anarchist presents us with a young man who believed he was living in the apocalypse, and whose book has gone on to have an apocalyptic effect on society.