Nicolas Rapold

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

Along the way the movie strikes its chosen couple of notes resoundingly, making clear what makes Singh run.

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

Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.

Not every point of view portrayed in the film will sit well with each viewer, but Mr. Schenck and Ms. McBath do their utmost to act in good faith.

Zarafa may not be the most groundbreaking feat of storytelling, but it does have a giraffe in a balloon.

Despite the bracing beauty of the wilderness, and the respite provided by cubs at play, the movie is primarily a sobering treatise on survival.

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.

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.

Mr. Reich ties together his talking points with a reasonable-sounding analysis and an unassuming warmth sometimes absent from documentaries charting America’s economic woes.

Ms. Wallach has fashioned a multifaceted, informative portrait conveying the emotional urgency of the Kabakovs’ work.

With their sensitive feature clocking in at an hour, the filmmakers make you wish only that they had developed their material further.

What little we learn of Pascal, who has worked in Switzerland as a shepherd for more than 30 years, and Carole, who is a former dietitian, fits in a scene or two, but their practical journey yields a certain contemplative equanimity.

Mr. Voss’s metaphors pile up helplessly: Finance is like being in the army, like catching a virus and as hard to grasp as quantum particles. The film in which he appears is a vertiginous look inside the bubble behind the financial bubble, with no end in sight.

Though Ms. Louise-Salomé’s film strikes a potentially irritating pose as a kind of artistic séance — shrouding interviewees in shadow, conjuring up clips with the drifting rhythm of the unconscious — it delivers articulate insights and has an elegant construction.

At once loose and dense, Ms. Endo’s treatment wilts somewhat when drawn out to feature length, though it’s a nice place to visit.

Pulp done with passion can be its own reward, as the veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam shows with his feverish cop thriller That Demon Within.

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

The real pleasure of this film lies in its recognition of session artists and in the oddities and mysteries within the evolution of any given item of pop culture.

Smash and Grab has a grating, repetitive score and can look a little homely on the big screen. But unlike many true-crime accounts, it cherry-picks its material successfully and preserves the conspiratorial sense that we’re learning the ins and outs of an illicit art.

In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.

Loving difficult people (and being difficult, and sometimes helpless) is the subject of the film’s drama, shot through with comedy and satire, thanks to Mr. Tobia’s razor-sharp, rapid cutting of scenes and needling dialogue.

The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.

Documentary masters like Mr. Leacock and Mr. Blank have long been drawn to filming other artists, even though the enigma of artistic endeavor may appear to elude portrayal on film. But in How to Smell a Rose, it’s just as important to feel the relationship between these two, with Mr. Leacock as something of a mentor.

Since the filmmaker's main agenda here is to keep things bumping along, the fraught situations are happily played and funk-scored as crowd-pleasing rather than issue-stroking.

12 O’Clock Boys packs more life into its 72 minutes than many longer documentaries do.

If this isn’t the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across, and unlike Mr. Gibney’s Scientology exposé “Going Clear,” this movie has a harder target (albeit with its own devoted following).

Unlike those in many art-house releases, this wilderness is not an abstract arena for playing out alienation but a living, breathing land with deep, abiding significance for Charlie and his fellow Aborigines cast adrift.

Bringing out truths about fatherhood, love and pride without dissolving into crowd-pleasing, that material feels like the genuine article. Fluffy, not fluff.

Mr. Platt’s good-humored attitude helps keep the potent material from turning mawkish, and having his perspective also wards off a sense of exploitive voyeurism.

Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.

If there’s a certain depth missing in The Amazing Catfish, the film brings forth the small-scale pleasures and poignancy of an ambling short story.

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

The fearless streak displayed by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble deserves its equivalent in a bolder movie technique. But Mr. Atlas delivers a rousing finale.

The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.

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

The new film displays enough nutty writing and sheer brio to confirm the stamina of its enduring and skillfully voiced characters.

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

The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.

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.

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.

The film is essentially an evolved hybrid of global environmental documentary and the group-trip experiments of reality television. Its biggest step onto unfamiliar terrain might be its ambivalent ending, conveying uncertainty about what can or should be done next.

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.

In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.

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.

In truth, it’s less Manglehorn than Mr. Pacino that you warm up to in this film, as so many times before.

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

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.

As with his other features, brevity — in this case, 1 hour 10 minutes — has a way of making the film seem minor. It’s a little diffuse, but it suggests that Mr. Côté is trying out a sketch, with more experiments to come.

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

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.

Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.

Feeling a little stage-bound because of frequent far-back long shots, the show can’t quite become a true extravaganza on screen. But Peaches — even without commanding the screen — shines through, vulnerability winning out over bravado here.

The gloriously scabrous ending to it all leaves the viewer wishing this talented writer had let it rip earlier.

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

Mr. Fleifel helps walk us through the history with an ingratiating voice-over that lightens the seemingly permanent clouds of a dire history.

This succinct documentary sticks smoothly to its beat.

Regular hazily scored, gauzy interludes cut into the film’s immediacy and tone. But the filmmakers shade in humble, sympathetic portraits of these children.

The ultimate break comes with a glorious full-screen CGI zoom into blazing heavenly bodies, a refutation of the title's modesty.

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.

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

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

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

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

It’s gratifying to see the care taken with his characters, though it would be no betrayal of them for Mr. Hartigan to flesh out their world and their lives further.

The pleasant surprise of Gareth Evans’s sturdy sequel to “The Raid: Redemption” is that neither its undercover drama nor its two-and-a-half-hour length bog down the bracing, and numerous, fight fests.

Some of the deadpan moments and more fraught exchanges don’t really come off. But all in all, it’s one curious, and furious, escapade.

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.

Despite the poverty of his collaborators, Mr. Andrews, who seems to live on sardines and rice, doesn’t feel like an exploiter. He calls his friends “beautiful eccentrics,” which aptly describes him, too.

The Safdie brothers capture a density of activity as endemic to the city as it is to Harley’s daily hustle. By tapping into her routines, instead of framing her along solely tragic lines, the filmmakers fashion a diary of experience that’s all the more absorbing.

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

The indomitable personality and talents of the serial prison escapee Mark DeFriest outshine the weaknesses of this documentary that bears his name.

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.

This is a documentary fascinated with and fearful of cinema’s potency, but it’s also devoted to the idea of open discourse, a stance that underlines the urgency of thinking about film critically.

When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.

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.

Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.

The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjection.

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

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.

The filmmaker Caroline Strubbe’s affection for her characters is evident, even through the often oblique narrative.

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.

Mr. Erlingsson’s upbeat outlook suggests that generations of horses and men have coexisted and will continue to do so for centuries more.

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).

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 King of Escape is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed.

Mr. Kurosawa expertly modulates an uncanny flow of energies between shame and grief, between venal urges and high-minded moral demands. The women’s travails suggest something that’s part curse, part mythic cycle of guilt and part kaleidoscopic dread.

As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.

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.”

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.

Ulrich Seidl’s raw portrayals of ordinary people have been criticized as unflattering and wallowing in abjection. But occasionally, as in his newest, In the Basement, the director can make you wonder whether the problem doesn’t lie with his films but with everyone else’s.

It’s honestly easier to feel more invested in these characters (or to have a reference point for the understatement of Rimuru’s role) if you’ve been hanging out with the show for one or more seasons. But it’s a diverting dip in the anime sea.

Watchers of the Sky is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.

Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.

Not far removed from the director’s interest in trance states, his Nosferatu posits a self-pitying creature exhausted by immortality: Sunken-eyed Kinski inverts his usual frenzy into a fatigue underlining the importance of eternal rest.

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.

“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.