Nicolas Rapold

The filmmakers behind Elemental might have done better to commit to a single portrait and been more fearless about avoiding familiar oratory, but small steps are progress too.

Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.

Ms. Ambo communicates the notion of compassion and calm as something teachable, but perhaps feeling already convinced, she’s less ambitious as a filmmaker about taking her subject and her portraits to another level.

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.

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

The film’s ending, introducing farmers whose lives (and weight) have been changed for the better, sounds enough like an infomercial to undermine the whole enterprise.

The movie’s best bits lose out to the requisite moral turnaround.

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.

The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.

The filmmakers’ aversion to coherent narrative and genuinely suspenseful visuals (not to mention a penchant for having Ms. Moore receive terrible news via cellphone) keep the movie’s mystery stew from hitting the spot.

As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.

Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.

The film dresses up pretty young things in fatigues and retro T-shirts for a story so clichéd and brainless that it’s almost more disturbing than laughable.

A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.

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.

This tedious chronicle has the interest level of a home movie of a vacation with bickering and yammering left intact.

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.

This promisingly tragic tale is sunk by cartloads of context and an overbearing, slanted narration.

Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.

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.

As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.

Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.

The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.

The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).

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.

The pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.