Nicolas Rapold

Mostly you root for Mr. Michel’s couple to reconnect simply so the movie will come to an end.

Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.

The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.

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

The highlight is the crop-cut woman of the group, Wei Caixia, resoundingly vivid in her mix of ambivalence and confidence and worth her own film. Why not this one?

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.

This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.

Despite its cultural detail and fetching leads this Jamaican director’s colorful debut feature is undone by ragged scene construction, weak acting and a scattered script.

It’s a far cry from the wonders of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive” and might have been better off in a kid’s-size portion as a short.

The protagonist’s life changes for the better, but your mileage may vary.

Most often Mortem just lacks bite, and the dedicated leads seem at times a little slight for the staging of a struggle at eternity’s edge.

Neither the very relaxed pace of this builder, Chris Overing, nor Mr. Stone’s sporadically amusing neuroses about his filmmaking make for a gripping documentary.

A clumsy mixed-nuts comedy.

Less a documentary than an experimental essay tapping age-old notions of the sublime, it’s a perplexing artifact that flirts with the banal yet moves with lovely intuitive rhythms.

A gently wry sense of humor about human foibles and some well-turned exchanges keep the proceedings drifting along pleasantly enough, until characters start convening for the requisite heart-to-hearts and making-up.

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.

On its own terms — setting aside the likelihood of knee-jerk political objections to its mission — it’s more convincing than many films pegged to specific causes.

If the lineup is bipartisan, the analysis oscillates between apt and obvious, culminating inevitably in amen calls for popular action.

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

An urban drama limited by its nonprofessional cast and impressionistic, scattered storytelling.

The film’s final shot might seem a little too apt a summary of an audience’s reaction: Mr. Trêpa, looking into the camera, shrugs.

Routinely botching the basics of setting up characters and scenarios, the film lets punch lines die like dogs and at times resembles a pornographic film without the sex.

Stories of humanized hit men make for a small but well-trod patch of screenwriting terrain, but The Dead Man and Being Happy quickly transcends that territory to become a beguiling road movie.

More a medium-length gallery piece than a feature, the movie can look a little rudimentary in presentation... But its subject is eternal.

Blithely hokey, amusingly eager to distract and rather entertaining, the film resembles a children’s travel show with music-video elements more than it resembles a straight-up documentary.

Comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.

More reminiscent of public television than of cinema, this rather humbly wrought movie makes no claim to being comprehensive in recalling a scary time.

Indigo is vaguely defined here as having a certain sensitivity and even power, but the movie doesn’t quite share those qualities, collapsing from a lack of direction in more than one sense.

There’s a loose, bohemian quality to Mr. Cohen’s sketch of a film.

Shot in sleek tones by Christopher Doyle, the film melds class-conscious melodrama with malleable mood piece, but keeps threatening to fade from understatement into stasis.

While the documentary marshals an impressive array of survivors and visits several international locations, it grindingly adheres to an unwieldy tour-style presentation, with more than a few rough spots and, at times, an unpolished look.

Cold Bloom, in its tightly controlled moods, comes to feel like a smaller and more tentative film than it might have been, despite an admirably frank ending.

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 newer film’s picture of neglect and denial, with flashes of connection and empathy, is promising, if tough to inhabit.

Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.

Mr. Rollinger, a protagonist of a curiously circumscribed life, proves to have an opaque appeal.

Mr. Nalin applies an on-the-ground approach, mainly looking at holy men and lost boys at the gathering. But he lets the sprawl slacken his overlong film’s grasp and, strangely, underplays the nuances of the event’s spiritual aspects.

Neither the action nor the comedy in this action comedy is consistently strong.

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.

Warsaw Uprising is marred by a fictional audio drama among three characters (two cameraman brothers and an American airman) who provide an unnecessary, distracting and at times amateurish frame to this resourcefully, even wittily, edited tour. But the flaws don’t detract from the film’s casual and calamitous sights.

The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.

Mr. Wilson’s Antoine is too much of a pill to root for, and the voice-over and wispy songs dribbling over scenes only underline the forgettable filmmaking.

Mining deeper emotions from the fanciful premise doesn’t work out for the film, which gets tied down to a generic musical-contest subplot. It’s a workable comedy that’s sunk by its attempts to impersonate something else too.

The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.

Despite the urgent subject matter and lyrical touches, it’s a film that needs further layers of complication and texture.

Shot with available light, the suburban rambles are portrayed so naturally that it’s hard to believe they are scripted.

There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.

Roddy Bogawa’s Taken by Storm taps that intimate, thrilling ritual of another era: picking a record in a music store, beguiled by a mysterious album cover before the needle has even dropped.

[A] serviceable but slightly drawn-out documentary.

By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.

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.”

Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.

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

The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.

Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Clinging to Hannah’s naïve viewpoint and the cherished ideal of her friendship with Anne results in some hard truths being hidden away or oddly sanitized.

The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.

Dad humor abounds in Family Camp, a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness

a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.

The film’s dramas are ornately costumed but often stilted and lacking the verve of the battle staging. Even the glories of war can turn stultifying when you’re shown one too many thousand-yard-stare reaction shots by military leaders.

The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.

It’s hard to argue with that message, but one doesn’t have to accept the ho-hum experience of watching this movie.

You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.

“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.

The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

The documentary tends to linger on some assertions about sexuality in Lincoln’s era while papering over others. But the general effort of bringing to light (and potentially to history books) an underrepresented part of American experience remains vital beyond defining Lincoln’s identity.

Checkpoint Zoo portrays a caged and dependent menagerie that bewilderingly experienced humans at their worst and, fortunately, their best.

The film, which could definitely focus more on the multiple-Grammy-Award-winner’s music, peters out around 2024, a year before Ye released a song called “Heil Hitler.” But Ballesteros, who started the project when he was 18 years old, does his best to portray a reflexive iconoclast without excusing the inexcusable.

The film’s often frenetic editing tends to weaken this strong story. But this hopeless history does have the flair to deploy Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” capturing the tragic absurdity to Goudreau’s ambition.

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.

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.

The first installment’s critics might think this sequel further desensitizes viewers to violence along national or religious lines. It’s a movie of the current moment, which isn’t exactly a comfort.