Neil Genzlinger

Considering that he’s a stick figure, Bill, the main character in It’s Such a Beautiful Day, sure does have a complex internal life. And this animated film by Don Hertzfeldt does an amazing job of making you feel it, in all its sadness, terror and transcendence.

A slight movie that could have been significantly better with a little story doctoring.

This film isn’t content to be merely a “never forget” reminder; it wants to convey just how deep and lasting the pain is, from this attack and, by extension, many others.

Christoph Baaden, the director, loses sight of the fact that, for people who don't run, the cult of running is kind of boring.

It’s a curious, bittersweet story, flecked with dashes of bombast and overstatement that Presley himself would have admired.

It may not be classic sci-fi like the original “Alien,” which it has in its DNA, but it’s a perfectly respectable next step in the series.

This informative foodie film is more than just footage of assorted chefs cooking delicious-looking cuts of meat. The tour encompasses breeders, butchers, grazing practices and genetics.

There’s nothing like hearing a harrowing tale from the people who lived it.

A charming and clever concoction.

The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.

You can feel just how jarring and stressful it must be for a soldier to go from the life-and-death adrenaline rush of war to the maddeningly slow world of rehabilitation and forced inactivity.

Refreshingly unpredictable but also frustrating.

A comedy that's too late to the Ponzi-scheme party to be topical, and not outrageous enough to take advantage of its own setups.

The Ottoman Lieutenant is an overwrought nurse romance merged with a history lesson, a combination that is hard to take as seriously as the film wants to be taken.

An assured and thoughtful debut.

This film, by Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, reminds us that even the most omnipresent cultural phenomena were created by someone, usually through a combination of hard work and happenstance.

The film is a rare combination of instructive and poignant.

This film doesn’t seem to trust the inherent likability of his story. The director, Dexter Fletcher, and the writers, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, load it up with tropes that actually make it less endearing.

This is not an easy documentary to watch, in the sense that the filmmakers let the story tell itself, without narration or expert commentary. That ultimately makes it all the more touching.

It's a Christmas present for cat lovers. Miss Minoes, the tweaked title of a 2001 Dutch film by Vincent Bal, is being given an American theatrical run (dubbed into English), and it's a pleasantly quirky, family-friendly fable with lots of meowing.

An engrossing, unsettling documentary.

Dazzling to look at of course. But such ponderous, cliché-heavy narration.

If you’re relatively easily scared or are in a theater full of people who are, the film might be good for a few screams. But only if you’re the patient sort. It takes almost an hour to get to the good stuff.

You already know the history told in The Last Man on the Moon, but this story just never grows old.

The filmmaker, Theo Love, presents the people in the story as they are, without passing judgment and without apology, whether they are investigators or pastors or just ordinary folks caught up in the inexplicable. It’s Americana unvarnished and, because of that, as absorbing as it is respectful.

Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.

The film effectively recreates the sense of confusion over how to try to contain the leak and what might happen if the fuel ignited.

The Sarah character isn’t developed well enough to make her journey enlightening or involving.

You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.

A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is usually pretty appealing when he dabbles in acting, and he’s appealing again in Ordinary World. But after a promising start the script lets him down, and the film turns into a predictable midlife-crisis yarn.

Any wilderness ordeal has to help some character clarify something, and for Ben it’s his relationship with his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), which gives the film a modest side interest. But mostly this one is for fans of desert scenery and of Mr. Douglas in cranky, crazy mode.

The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.

Stands as both a tribute and a study in healing.

If you prefer to view dying as a natural part of life, a step in a cycle, this film will feel discordant and perhaps counterproductive. But visually it will certainly stick with you, and your children.

The film is, if nothing else, an interesting meditation on how a child who grows up without guidance might react to a situation that requires judgment.

The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.

Approach Something Better to Come with the same patience that the filmmaker exhibited in shooting it and you’ll be rewarded. That is, if your definition of “rewarded” includes being dismayed by the bleakness that exists on the edges of prosperity.

Those whose tolerance of Greatest Generation war stories isn't exhausted, not to mention those who still thrive on them, will find the group of men who called themselves the Ritchie Boys good company.

Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.

[Grohl] shows a decent grasp of how to pace a documentary and how to push nostalgia buttons, avoiding the marsh of smarminess most - though not quite all - of the time.

An aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it's not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can't have everything in a no-budget film like this.

Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.

Sometimes a film feels a bit too pat and yet is impossible to resist. The Mighty Macs, based on the national championship run of the 1972 women's basketball team at Immaculata College near Philadelphia, is such a film: lots of button pushing, but in the end you're glad you saw it.

The film doesn't just serve up Mr. Balog's amazing and undeniably convincing imagery. It also records his personal struggles as knee problems threaten his ability to hike the difficult terrain to get the shots he wants.

How do you know you're looking at a pretty good piece of filmmaking? When the director and actors can make you care about the central characters even though they exchange almost no dialogue.

The filmmakers found an appealing collection of relatives and others who knew these artists and Savitsky to tell the story, but they also let the art do the talking, with loving, lingering shots of the brightly colored works.

A striking experiment in music and moviemaking.

A thoughtful bit of filmmaking, one that at heart is not really about birds at all.

It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.

The film, by Justin Bare and Matthew Miele, would be better if it spent less time gushing about how great Mr. Benson is and more time confronting some of the questions his approach raises.

The film, derivative (see “The Shaggy Dog” of 2006) and devoid of wit, is about that tiredest of kid-movie clichés, the parent who is too busy for his children and must be taught a lesson.

The film may be one-sided, but if nothing else, it is a reminder that the “coal equals jobs” equation is a serious oversimplification.

Revenge is the theme and cheeky is the tone of In Order of Disappearance, a delicious Norwegian film full of icy landscapes and icier hearts.

This appealing documentary makes you understand why aficionados regard baseball as a form of poetry.

It’s a stretch to call Mr. Everson’s film a documentary.

Leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.

Maybe that's romanticizing things, but baseball wouldn't be half as beautiful without its mythology.

It meanders from start to finish, searching for a tone that it never quite finds.

Eventually, though, Hey, Boo settles into a pleasant rhythm. It gives the fascinating history of how the book came to be.

Ms. Smith does not fit easily into any box, and neither does this thought-provoking film.

It’s hard to imagine what message children will take away from this film other than that monkeys are just like characters in a fictional Disney movie, which they are not.

The way to watch is to ignore the image burnishing and just feel the moment.

The humor in Mr. Krawczyk’s script is deliciously subtle, as it has to be when your lead character is a man of few words; a viewer might easily spend the first half of the movie not even realizing it’s there.

The vivid recollections of the attack by survivors, including Mr. Hughes, take over the film midway through, and the friendship story line never quite re-establishes itself.

The film, by Constance Marks, is a little light on details of Mr. Clash's personal life once he broke through, but otherwise this is a winning tale of the persistence and creativity behind one of the most famous and fuzziest faces in the world.

If the point of Call for Help is to glorify a handful of off-the-grid heroes, it fails. If the point is to follow some young people who took their aimless wanderlust to a trouble spot and perhaps created more problems than they solved, it succeeds.

A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.

Captivating documentary about the creation of, and reaction to, the breakthrough play "The Boys in the Band."

The movie’s flaw is that it mixes tones. Ruth, her relatives and her fellow workers are realistically played, but her gal-pal buddies are caricatures.

It’s not an easy movie to embrace, but it lingers.

The best thing about In Search of Beethoven, Phil Grabsky’s biography of the composer, is the company he brings along on the hunt.

Ms. Streep is a delight, hilarious when she’s singing and convincingly on edge at all times.

Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.

The Widowmaker is commendable in that although it is a work of advocacy, it gives an array of opinions.

The frosty landscapes have a subtle beauty, pale and sometimes shrouded in mist, giving the film a very different look from what often comes out of the big studios — somber, which is appropriate to the story.

This heartfelt documentary is also, more subtly, a tribute to the squadron of caregivers that has enabled Mr. Becker not only to survive for an extraordinarily long time but also to continue to compose music, using virtually the only part of him that still moves, his eyes.

Ms. Rauch (who wrote the film with her husband, Winston Rauch) nails the portrayal admirably under Bryan Buckley’s direction. But that doesn’t mean Hope is anyone you want to spend almost two hours with.

The actors get a chance to create a real relationship, and they make the most of the opportunity.

The experiment’s methodologies and meanings have been analyzed endlessly over the years, and the film doesn’t delve deeply into these interpretations and critiques. It doesn’t need to; this stark and riveting version of events speaks for itself.

Glorious daredevilry is wrapped in a slowly evolving ache in Sunshine Superman, a bittersweet documentary about Carl Boenish, who looked at very tall things and saw an opportunity to leap.

Unfortunately, the fresh blood has been saddled with a tired story, the family road trip that goes outlandishly awry, and the result is another forgettable film.

The history lesson is fascinating, and it’s nice to see an American export other than a Hollywood blockbuster engendering good will.

The plot may be a little too cluttered for the toddler crowd to follow, but the next age group up should be amused, and the script by Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith has plenty of sly jokes for grown-ups.

The best animated movies for children are sublime. This one generally settles for noisy, though it throws in a positive message at the end.

Man Up, a destined-for-romance story in the spirit of “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” has just enough edge to distinguish it from a Lifetime movie. It also has Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, versatile and likable actors who help the mild story considerably.

The film doesn’t unearth anything that hasn’t already been voiced, and it could use more details on the scope of the phenomenon. But with more police shootings in the headlines just in the past few days, it’s nothing if not timely.

Generally speaking, bird-watching is a pastime that is extremely interesting to a few people and not at all interesting to anyone else. But Scott Crocker has turned a bird-watching tale into a multilayered story that will fascinate practically everybody in Ghost Bird, a witty, wistful documentary.

A quirky documentary about, yes, a parking lot, is probably not unlike working at such a lot: there are long stretches when not much happens, but every once in a while there's a burst of activity that is kind of enthralling.

An admiring but restrained documentary about Darko Kralj, a Paralympic shot-putter from Croatia. The film is more about what it takes to overcome adversity and recommit to finding meaning in life, terrain that anyone with a disability has to negotiate, athlete or not.

It would be hard not to make a thought-provoking, heartstring-tugging film from this source material, and Bound by Flesh certainly tells the twins’ story effectively.

Cristin Milioti (“How I Met Your Mother”) is so quirkily endearing in the lead role that she makes it easy to just go with the airy tale.

Nate’s journey is used primarily to show us the variations in extremist groups and how they might accomplish something drastic like set off a dirty bomb; his inner turmoil takes a back seat. The movie works just fine as a straightforward thriller, though.

A delicate, haunting study of a woman who has in several senses lost her way.

There’s no way to prepare yourself for how awful The Secret Lives of Dorks is.

John Waters is darned entertaining as he delivers a monologue that annotates his scandalous movies and encompasses assorted other subjects that interest or annoy him.