Nicolas Rapold

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.

The film’s state of play is still less exciting than its famous ancestor (Battle of Algiers) and offspring (The French Connection), but the military junta that ensued in Greece gave the film (shot in Algeria) a sense of urgency approved by Cannes and Oscar alike.

Exquisitely drawn with both watercolor delicacy and a brisk sense of line, the film finds a peculiarly moving undertow of feeling in a venerable Japanese folk tale.

Throughout, the filmmakers achieve the rare documentary feat of delving into a topic from multiple angles without slathering it in adulation.

Mr. Berliner’s film bravely brings us to the edge of language and experience.

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

Mr. Miyazaki renders Jiro’s life and dreams with lyrical elegance and aching poignancy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This heart-wrenching and deceptively conventional documentary manages the tensions in its subject and in the vérité approach in a fruitful, illuminating and surprisingly moving way.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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

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.