Nicolas Rapold

This two-track meditation wraps ethereal glimpses of age-old Slavic locales around a fairy tale told through hand-drawn illustrations.

There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.

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.

The film falls short of explaining Mr. Ali, who, like many outspoken individuals, can stubbornly repel scrutiny, nor will it pacify the many who opposed his conscientious objections. But it also underlines one enduring quality: namely, that he probably couldn’t care less what people think.

Whatever the facts, Mr. Gracia’s messily structured film works best as a document of fear in today’s Ukraine and as a kind of ghost story about the Soviet Union.

Mr. Nance turns his thought into a performance of vulnerability that’s all too relatable in its indulgences. It has heart without becoming cloying.

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

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

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.

Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.

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.

Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.

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.

Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis, the activist and beacon of counterculture radicalism, is a snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it’s equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.

Mr. Gomes remains laudably faithful to his character, and Ms. Guedes’s bodily sense of languor gets across more than any crystal-clear dramatic statement would.

Mr. Rush can’t fly far on Mr. Tornatore’s dialogue and workmanlike plotting, and Sylvia Hoeks, as Claire, doesn’t bring a corresponding energy.

The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach.

Golden Slumbers has a tendency to wallow in its romanticism, not to the point of trivializing its history, but definitely dropping off into somnolence.

The dark comedy (punctuated by the catchphrase “Toodle-oo”) doesn’t always come off, and the filmmaking is more off-kilter than necessary, with capricious camerawork and pacing.

Partly thanks to Ms. Reed — as well as to Scott Bakula, as Wendy’s beleaguered boss, and minor players — the movie has its share of underplayed little scenes of realistic color.

The hand-me-down showiness and sluggish storytelling by the director, Paco Cabezas, underline the monotony in this ordinary revenge thriller.

A deserved tribute that puts us inside the music, and the head space, of a great, lost band.

Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.

The movie is not always well unified and sequenced, but that seems to reflect Mr. Henin’s ambivalence over a past that’s like a book he is at once rereading and rewriting.

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.

Mesrine's promised end in November 1979 arrives as history recorded it, but, by that time, you're hoping the next vogue in biopics is the short film.

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).

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

Though not terribly nuanced, a bit muddled and lacking certain perspectives, “Zipper” drives home the fragile identity of even the city’s signature locales and the alarming cultural myopia of much redevelopment.

The survey, pockmarked with sometimes dopey animations and music, feels scattered and less than the sum of Mr. Miller’s many parts. But it has its heart in the right movie-mad place.

Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.

William Eubank’s The Signal demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel.

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 tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.

Premature bops along with a wiseacre self-awareness and a nimble cast... But Mr. Beers and his fellow screenwriter, Mathew Harawitz, also have a numbing Seth MacFarlane-esque weakness for purely attention-getting crudeness and unfunny stereotypes.

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.

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.

This New York drama in some ways finds new names for age-old insecurities among men and women, though it doesn’t entirely deliver on its promising buildup.

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

Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.

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.

Technology remains no substitute for well-written characters and genuine intrigue and atmosphere, so despite the cute special effects and camera jostling, this film feels like an extended episode of an after-school show by Disney.

The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies, and even if the material can feel lean at times, Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.

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.

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.

Like the 1994 documentary landmark “Hoop Dreams,” Lenny Cooke measures out the years with a pensive jazz motif, but the film feels comparatively stuck on a couple of notes.

King Georges feels stretched into feature length, but its ending neatly portrays a man with a fierce personal code who seems to have accepted change.

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.

As Denji and his adversaries converge on and above city streets, it’s possible to enjoy the combat on the level of pure sensation. Here, the rapturous ability of anime to isolate and prolong movement and emotion within a frame is on full display.

It can’t fail to trigger shudders of recognition as well as feelings of release, but the filmmaking lacks a certain drama.

Mr. Zizek’s daisy-chained improvisations amount to an argument on behalf of complexity and unseen depths, and, like much academic writing, it risks monotony and becoming as reductive as it can be seductive.

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.

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.

Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.

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

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.

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.

The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge).

Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.

Ms. Bradley’s debut feature flutters along with inoffensive lyricism and a kindly eye, but it’s not enough to bring off a full-fledged portrayal that holds together.

Home From Home is imbued with the villagers’ attachment to the land, but while dutifully capturing the period, the film feels less layered than Mr. Reitz’s past work.

Mr. Meltzer doesn’t quite find an effective tone or structure to stay on top of his unsettling person of interest.

The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: Big Gold Brick looks all right but it truly just sits there.

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

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

Though floridly written and relentlessly scored, the film's dramas are more persuasively framed than many human ones, going so far as to include multiple flashbacks.

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.

Wiktor Ericsson’s A Life in Dirty Movies outlines this filmmaker’s work reasonably well, but, somewhat surprisingly, truly hits home with a heartwarming look at Mr. Sarno’s relationship with his wife, Peggy.

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

The many red herrings and the dark-secret finale recall the reliable, compulsive appeal of a page-turner, although the tensions don’t always feel fully translated to the rhythms and demands of a film.

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 extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.

There’s a lot to learn from How to Make Money Selling Drugs, but sometimes there’s just a lot.

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.

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

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.

While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there’s the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.

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. Sembène was an inspiration; as a film, Sembène! is something less than that, petering out as it goes on, but at least offering a fair-minded tribute to a master.

The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies.

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.

Goofball antics and a terrific, raucous finale can’t make up for the essential slackness of its repetitive comedy and punk chest thumping.

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

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.

Mr. Chow has perhaps achieved more sustained and elaborate adventures, but he hits a sweet spot of comedy that never grows too self-aware or forgets the value of a good, clean demon whomping.

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.

The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the-making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.

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

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.

Rather than distressed retro photography, or Guy Maddin mash-up fantasias, the movie’s often deadpan episodes feel like something out of one-act theater

Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.

While these ninnies' antics and banter are remarkably entertaining, the quality of the satire depends on when the movie is sending up ludicrous extremist logic and when it's just engaging in repetitive buffoonery.

This succinct documentary sticks smoothly to its beat.

At least for the uninitiated, the drift of the filmmaking seemed to fall short of the transcendence envisioned by its story.

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

Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.

The Forecaster has the distinct hermetic feel of a documentary that employs an echo chamber of people too close to the material.

As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.