Nicolas Rapold

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Shine of Day pulls itself together with an ending that feels a bit ready-made for drawing out the parallels between its kindred performers. But the movie gratifyingly observes the openness that seems the base line for Philipp and Walter, and the glimmer of realization in a stage actor about the void that may lurk among his many liberating roles.

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.

It’s not unlike many of Mr. Strickland’s beloved Italian films, which could be superb exercises in cinematic style and atmosphere while remaining imperfect.

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

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.

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.