Michael Nordine

The problem with The Human Experiment as an actual film and not just an anti-chemical treatise is that, though these people and the troubling statistics they cite are on the level, we're too rarely afforded the opportunity to reach our own conclusions based on them.

If one measure of a documentary’s quality is whether it inspires you to learn more about its subject after the credits roll, The League is an unqualified success.

And Then I Go isn’t elegiac or fatalistic, nor is it a dread-filled slog toward an inevitable conclusion.

A film about individuals who refuse to be silenced could stand to take a few more chances itself.

Armstrong, who's mostly played himself in previous forays into acting, has a low-key charm suggesting that, if he desired it, he could get more onscreen gigs in between albums.

Acclaimed filmmakers often face the challenge of big expectations on their second features, but Kent joins the ranks of sophomore filmmakers whose new movies expand on their debuts in startlingly ambitious ways.

Everything about La Flor — that financiers agreed to bankroll it, Llinás and his team were able to complete it, and festivals, distributors, and exhibitors are now screening it — is a marvel. Anyone with a disdain for the studio system’s endless parade of franchises (and with 14 hours) to spare would do well to give it their undivided attention.

Shot on delightfully grainy 16mm and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, the film is so alluringly disorienting that, by its end, some viewers will find themselves struggling to remember how this fever dream started.

Creepy is both a return home and a return to form.

Tickled inspires many laughs throughout but, true to its subject, more and more of them are born of discomfort as it goes on — part of you wants it all to stop even as you’re amused.

Everything about the film manages to be forward-thinking and old-school at the same time, giving the genre a bite in the neck it might not have wanted but certainly needed.

Schnabel fuses form and content in a way that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved; in risking the same derision with which Van Gogh was sometimes met, he transcends the limitations of the conventional biopic and creates something that feels genuinely new.

It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.

Schrader’s direction is unobtrusive but agile, as though she considers it her duty to provide a cinematic soapbox for Zweig and politely exit the spotlight.

That Battered Bastards is practically a hagiography doesn't negate the fact that it has more anti-establishment joie de vivre in any given scene than most talking-head docs about previously unheralded mensches contain in their entire run times.

It’s unlikely that any documentary could make us feel half as bad for the poachers as we do for their prey, which might not even be Kasbe’s aim. He succeeds in bringing shades of grey to a situation usually thought of in black-and-white terms — not enough to change many minds, perhaps, but at least enough to open some.

You wouldn't lose anything watching Fastball on ESPN rather than in the movie theater, but it does stand as further testament to baseball's status as our most chess-like sport, and one that, even when broken down to its tiniest component parts, never loses its magic.

You might not want to live here, but the imagery makes for a nice postcard.

The problem with movies depicting the banality of anything, of course, is that they tend to be pretty banal themselves; in setting out to be the exception to that rule, Eye in the Sky only proves it.

[A] suitably workmanlike documentary.

Pop Aye never dips into cutesiness or sentimentality, even when you might find yourself wishing it would; it’s less a big-top circus and more a low-key character study.

These aesthetic flourishes are as necessary as they are nice to look at, and go a long way toward making the darker shades of Hounds of Love less of an endurance test.

Propulsive battle sequences in which sandstorms make the fog of war quite literal are the ostensible focus of American Sniper, but the real tension comes from our anticipation of how they'll affect the life this sharpshooter is reluctant to return to until he feels he's done everything he possibly can.

Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.

“In My Mother’s Skin” finds a rare sweet spot between story-book nightmare and historical allegory.

Steve Hoover's film (which was executive-produced by Terrence Malick) doesn't feel dishonest in its behind-the-scenes glimpse at its subject.

Sensuous and arresting, Alleluia constantly feels as though a séance or ritual murder is about to be performed; the actual deaths, when they arrive, turn out to be rather unceremonious affairs.

They're still thirteen-year-olds, which leads to Breaking a Monster's funniest moments.