Neil Genzlinger

A sobering study in how individual human beings can become afterthoughts in the face of broad movements like nationalism, a phenomenon that is still much in evidence almost a century later.

The film, a sleepy, low-budget affair, merely enacts a series of horror movie clichés, as if that were enough. Its bland actors and wit-free script do nothing with the familiar elements but present them.

A heartfelt documentary about a subject that inflames cat lovers everywhere: declawing.

After a promising start, it degenerates into unconvincing ticking-clock melodrama.

The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.

Ms. Riggs gives each actor a story arc of sorts, and all three are personable guides to this backstage world, explaining the process and terminology and talking openly about their lives and jobs.

Though colleagues and former students chime in, Mr. Miller lets Mr. Mann and his violin do most of the talking, drawing on assorted interviews and vintage performance clips that convey both the skill and the enthusiasm underpinning his subject’s long career.

Unthinkable is unwatchable, which is too bad, because there are certainly enough oddities in the incident it tries to dramatize to have made for a decent conspiracy theory film.

Marvin, Seth and Stanley aims to be a deadpan travels-with-my-wacky-dad story, but the father in it is almost an afterthought. It still has sublime moments, but it leaves you wanting more of them.

The documentary “Tanzania: A Journey Within” is two travel diaries woven together. One is somber and moving. The other is distractingly annoying.

It’s an awkward mix of sentiment, underdeveloped relationships and rock ’n’ roll pretensions, and it never quite gels into the “Love Story” for the 21st century that it wants to be.

The Rule, by the married filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno, doesn’t show us enough detail about how they’re applied to distinguish St. Benedict’s from countless other parochial schools, private institutions and military academies.

The animated tale Henry & Me aims to inspire sick children, but it also aims to promote the Yankees and the team’s mythology. The two goals don’t mesh very well.

Bonobos: Back to the Wild is an uncomfortable mix of fictionalized account and nature film, but you have to admire the work it documents.

The subject matter is only part of what makes Poached one of the more unsettling documentaries to come along lately. The presentation is also pivotal.

A dreary Australian movie, directed by Nick Robertson, that has more dogs than “Cujo” but noticeably less plot.

Feels as if it’s arriving late to its discoveries and, given the current political climate, as if it’s only scratching the surface.

About Scout is another entry in the “charming road movie” genre, one that banks a little too heavily on charm and not enough on story.

The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.

Even when it could be specific, Love Thy Nature isn’t.

Seed: The Untold Story is one of those documentaries that get you riled up about a situation but leave you feeling that nothing significant can be done about it.

At this point no documentarian can possibly have a fresh take on climate change, right? Wrong. The Anthropologist, a stealthily insightful film by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger, improbably mixes that topic with a mother-daughter story to produce a distinctive study of change and human adaptability.

The movie has a roughly equal number of clumsy moments and sweet ones.

Mr. Brook and Ms. Wells are in a sense not documenting a controversy at all; they are capturing an endemic, heartbreaking defeatism.

The journey could be a bit more eventful, but the payoff is charming.