Nicolas Rapold

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.