Nicolas Rapold

A trade-off for this fleet-of-foot adaptation is the full range of the play’s philosophical soundings and emotional palette. But their “Hamlet” surges with its own energies — palpably a matter of life and death.

For a movie about two people going through a wobbly patch, Fantasy Life glides with a sneaky storytelling ease.

Mordantly comedic, Two Prosecutors is deliberately paced but makes a tightly conceived addition to Loznitsa’s work, which rides deep into the long, dark nights of Russian history with fiction, observational documentary and immersions in the Soviet archives.

It’s an unexpected illustration of how psychiatric challenges can turn one’s life into a “shrinking world,” as Jennings puts it, and how to keep going.

Tucker wisely front loads clips of Jordan (with some texts spoken by Alfre Woodard in voice-over). Jordan seems to be speaking to us today as a voice of conscience and reason in a nation in crisis struggling to fulfill its promise.

Kramer quietly but forcefully recognizes that the conflict cannot continue as it has.

The battle scenes and one-on-one combat roar with energy, blending Rajamouli’s C.G.I. artistry, staging and inventive showmanship. The militarized kingdom of Mahishmati has the grandeur of silent-screen epics, and although romantic sequences with the rebel warrior Avanthika are scaled back, the film’s flying-ship song set piece is a candy-coated delight.

It’s a film of sensations and mystery that feels like it’s wafting toward us from another century, like much of the Quays’ work, channeling uncanny realms of Central European puppetry.

What clinches the portrait is the sure-handed direction and Kana’s organic performance of a daunting character. Dramatically, Yamanaka finds unpredictable ways into and out of scenes, and she has an eye for the poignant details amid the angst.

It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.

Despite comic touches, the story stays in the shadows of heart-to-heart talks and ruminations, with contemplative cinematography that sets faces like gems in the darkness and conjures heady visions of Long in Vietnam.

Pritzker directs genuine performances and has an ear for conversations with the ring of everyday emotion.

The four stories are almost overwhelming to witness all packed together, but the mission to communicate them to a larger audience is admirable.

The most moving entry might be Etimad Washah’s Taxi Wanissa.

Love poem, restless dream, troubled history, alchemist’s scrapbook — Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is pure cinema as it dances through its dense 42 minutes.

William Goldenberg’s feature directing debut comes to life more often as a conventional family drama than as a conventional sports movie.

Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.

Cousins’s attuned eye and ear keep us interested afresh in the Hitchcock magic.

The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.

Blink keeps escaping any pat framing to tap into a deeper ache.

It’s less a slam-dunk nail-biter than a matter of can-do self-determination, or as Jimmy’s friends say: stoodis (“let’s do this”).

The van’s familiar interior has a way of underlining how many other millions across history have had to escape military aggression. Hamela’s work as driver and documentarian reflects that reality while offering a spirit of resilience.

In the end, Dandelion feels like one artist’s emotional prequel, leaving us wishing for even more.

The shifting story, written by Paltrow and Tom Shoval, complicates the act of commemoration and dwells on the moral quandaries and uncomfortable resonances that result from the events.

This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).

Rather than come off solely as a grim forecast, the film presents possible alternatives for the country, most notably from the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the minister and social activist who offers a voice of hope and inclusivity that feels genuinely healing.

Science fiction has become such a mainstay of lumbering franchises that it’s hard not to root for left-field small-scale twists on the genre like the fizzy, funny Molli and Max in the Future.

Landsberry-Baker and Peeler could linger more on details about the people involved instead of the horse-race suspense of vote counts. But who can blame them when freedom is in the balance, and as local media outlets dwindle nationally.

The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.

[Broomfield’s] announcer-like voice-over and sometimes dishy interviews might evoke a “Behind the Music” exposé, but he seems most like a fan with a rueful sympathy for his devil of a subject.

Jacobson’s account does the necessary work of restating the facts and showing that people can be held accountable for fomenting this kind of terror and harm.

In the end, as a document, it’s undeniable: The unvarnished human detail gives the film a life of its own that escapes any particular polemic or hope.

Amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.

Crafted entirely out of the televised 1985 trial of Argentina’s military junta, The Trial lays bare horrific crimes while showing the courage of victims, survivors and their families.

[Abzug's] never-say-die advocacy still inspires, but the film also illustrates the merciless challenges of electoral endurance even for the fiercest fighter.

Uri and Raya (who have disarmingly direct affects) show a mix of insight and innocence that also feels like a faithful rendering of the vulnerability within a relationship.

Davis, a Canadian documentarian, zeros in on how hockey has been a vital part of his country’s identity, and what it has felt like for Canadian players of color who love the game to be told, from very young ages, that they do not belong.

Exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.

[Campbell's] Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.

This is a refreshingly grounded, deceptively plain picture of crime-fighting as a grind of false leads, workplace fatigue and no closure.

Reed’s initial overeager stylings fall back to reveal a mature reckoning with love, hurt, independence, and hard-won wisdom.

Baisho gets across the creeping despair that morbidity and the loss of community can create — a sensation that lets Plan 75 double as a consummate entry in pandemic-era cinema.

The film’s sometimes brusque transitions and decentered perspectives are just as transgressive as any of the graphic imagery.

Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke).

It’s all a heady brew that leaves one wanting to know even more about Roberts, who is now running for mayor in Denver. The movie resists encapsulating him, or perhaps he escapes its director’s full understanding.

For a documentary largely about archives, it should be better organized, but its breathless profusion of information underscores the scale of the task at hand.

A House Made of Splinters is made with such aching sensitivity that it’s a marvel a camera was used and not some form of mind-meld.

It’s all a reminder of the labor and risks that go into creating and preserving essential imagery of the past, even for the most notorious events in history.

Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions.

As edited, Moreh’s interviews prize policy analysis and haunting candor over gotcha moments or grandstanding.

It’s boosterish and jam-packed, like many pop-culture documentaries (not just ones produced by Disney about Disney).

The writer-director, Andrew Bujalski, zeros in on the delicate dances and negotiations between the people in these two-handers, which percolate with sly humor, decency, curiosity and sheer nerve.

The shrewdly observant film sticks with one Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to tell an emotional story that feels as significant as any analysis of troop numbers.

With his feature, Davenport stakes out his own vantage point on the world, one that leaves a viewer wishing to hear his thoughts elaborated even further.

A wistful beauty and a delicately imaginative sense of craft set Vesper apart from most post-apocalyptic stories.

“Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.

What makes the film’s episodic approach flow is the pulse-sensitive camerawork. It’s worth singling out, because it is the kind that is often described as “intimate” but rarely pulled off with such Maysles-esque aplomb.

Hunting’s documentary catches up with where many people are finding their dreams realized, and understands that sometimes the dream is simply to be yourself.

The story ends with an ambitiously staged sequence that reaches for another level of feeling, but it’s hard for anything to match the bruising depiction of Albee and Walker’s rough road to that point.

His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.

In following two young women employed as range riders in Idaho, the film presents its own modern-day picture of hard work and camaraderie.

Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.

Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed.

The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.

The 74-minute film leaps among time frames without much warning. Occasionally, the screen erupts into crackling black-and-white images drawn directly from Bartolí’s work — as if torn from the very pages of his sketchbooks.

The gently efficient story feels like an attempt to illustrate Bhutan’s real-life “Gross National Happiness” initiative.

Any mind-bending conceit or special effect pales before Ali’s incredibly fine-tuned talents.

The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.

Out of the fractured family documentary, what emerges finally is a drama of self-realization.

Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output.

Some of the material feels fairly standard, as they share misfit upbringings and showbiz gossip, but each veteran comedian lends an unpredictable element through self-deprecating candor.

Lllosa’s sensually shot film takes the story of a mother facing strange danger and casts a spell that feels like being dropped into the character’s mind.

The film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.

While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others.

Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.

Unifying this elliptical canvas is the sense of a contemplative search, which can also mean an escape from an altered homeland, perhaps to dull what feels lost.

As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship.

Often as thorny as its subject but also oddly fascinated by his near-magical abilities, “Charlatan” is a temporary cure for the common biopic.

The movie reflects upon how people organize experience through our memories and our actions, but the filmmakers also have a self-awareness about their steadfast methods.

I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.

Ali brings a matter-of-fact compassion to the experiences of three different people: Hanif, a Black Muslim man in Newark, and the two boys he is mentoring, Furquan and Naz.

Mhlongo (who also appears in Beyoncé’s “Black Is King”) carries the movie on her shoulders with an authoritative presence.

Rosendahl’s framing complicates any “great man” narrative of the period, and shows how the energies of public and private worlds course back and forth.

Handsomely shot but humble in approach, the film can often feel purposeful, laying down groundwork that other stories of queer experience might take for granted. But Tai Bo’s pragmatic momentum as Pak has a way of restoring a succinctness to the movie, which avoids minimizing or exploiting the pains of concealment.

The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.

Lacôte crosses the open-ended energy of griot traditions with the surging tensions of the prison’s close quarters.

Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.

The Grand Guignol conclusion does fulfill the flair promised by the film’s tuned-up colors and by Mara’s vintage posters for her movies, which have glorious titles like “The Other Woman Forever.”

76 Days, which gets its title from the Wuhan lockdown imposed from January 23 to April 8, is defined more by the human capacity for resilience and compassion than by a relentless sense of doom (or by a focus on China’s policy decisions).

Is it all a bit much? Sure, but the self-consciousness is baked in: Rankin names one public gathering place “Disappointment Square.”

It’s a bit of a blur, but Thunberg strikingly upends the stereotype of the young innocent as poster girl.

Mr. Abu-Assad’s pop filmmaking is resolutely simple in its approach and efficiently sentimental.

Mr. Steiner’s tightly interconnected documentary, with transporting shots, visits people on the margins in the United States.

Ms. Lambert’s film builds nicely, staying in tune with the ordinariness and intimacy explored in Ms. Akerman’s boldly rendered films.

Mr. Takahata’s psychologically acute film, which was based on a manga, seems to grow in impact, too, as the adult Takao comes to a richer understanding of what she wants and how she wants to live.

Cutaways to nature’s splendor abound: Mists enfold the mountain; Mr. Casanova mesmerizingly holds one cross-fade from these clouds.

It’s both the best children’s animated film this year since “Inside Out” — you might call it “Outside In” — and, unexpectedly, a more stirring depiction of the deadening modern megalopolis than most heal-the-world documentaries.

Mr. Berardini’s packed documentary makes its case early and often, perhaps too often, but it’s more chilling than your average issue film.