Peter Keough

White Noise is an expertly edited, four-year immersion into a phenomenon that has shaped the volatile politics of our time. It’s an auspicious debut for both Lombroso and The Atlantic, and its intimate and empathetic approach might be a more potent way of countering those who promote such toxic ideas than blunting confrontation.

The lawyers in the film are compared to superheroes, to David and Goliath. But they know their efforts are not enough.

Will print books ultimately disappear, replaced by digital versions? The ever-entertaining and insightful Fran Lebowitz offers anecdotal evidence to the contrary. She notes that on the subway she sees many people in their 20s reading actual books. So perhaps there is hope a new generation will revive the bound medium.

The experience of watching Crip Camp might inspire you to reexamine your attitudes about disabled people and how society treats them. Though occasionally sentimental and preachy, it is an essential reminder of a civil-rights struggle that many have forgotten and a cause that has yet to be fully achieved.

“[Dance] gives you nothing back,” says Cage. “No manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Kovgan’s film comes close to capturing that moment.

Anchoring this diverting, disparate collage are interviews with those who still believe in Van Tassel’s faith and message.

After watching the movie, its relentlessly catchy numbers might keep playing for you; as one of the interviewees says, “You’ll be singing these songs for the rest of your life, whether you like it or not.”

Similar to Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence” (2014) in its confrontation with those implicated in past crimes, Wang’s film differs in that many of her subjects are both victims and perpetrators.

Argott and Joyce subordinate these more pressing political questions to a mirror-box exploration of the nature of truth and the unfathomable secrets of the soul. As such it is thoughtful, sometimes ingenious, but you can’t help thinking that they missed the real story.

[A] peripatetic and ultimately poignant documentary.

Never has space travel looked so sordid, debased, mean-spirited, or crummy, qualities intensified by the (intentionally) ugliest cinematography ever — except for the close-ups of faces — from the great Agnès Godard, Denis’s longtime collaborator. But seldom has space travel served as such an eloquent and tragic representation of the human condition.

Oblique, often beguiling, and portentously cryptic.

These men tend to be laconic, tormented, tattooed, impenetrable, usually bearded, potentially or actively violent, with screwed-up families and traumatic pasts. Nothing that a good horse couldn’t cure, or a talented female director.

There are only two moments in Jia Zhang-Ke’s obliquely epic mobster (or “jianghu”) movie Ash Is Purest White when a gun goes off. Unlike the shots fired in Hollywood movies, these have consequences. As in many of the films Jia has made since his 1997 Bressonian debut, “Xiao Wu,” petty choices prove fateful and marginal lives are swept up by seismic social change.

Von Trotta comes closest to the object of her search when she looks at images from his movies. Especially images of the seashore.

Dava Whisenant’s documentary, Bathtubs Over Broadway, offers a glimpse into a world few are aware of: industrial musicals — Broadway-style productions similar to Broadway shows except that they promote products like bathtub fixtures, surgical supplies, and John Deere tractors. They were performed exclusively for company members, sometimes recorded or filmed, then forgotten.

Schnabel tries to re-create van Gogh’s inner workings during the intense last two years of his life — his point of view and his way of looking at the world that resulted in the masterpieces that have since become invaluable investment commodities.

Everett draws effectively from Wilde’s own writings and witticisms.

Westmoreland’s narrative is cluttered with undeveloped subplots and loose ends. He compensates by evoking the era with images drawing from painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec and soundtrack music that ranges from Strauss-like waltzes to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

There is a fair share of such Betty White-ish feistiness on display, but the pathos creeps in unexpectedly.

Reed follows the proceedings as they happen and builds the suspense of a top-notch courtroom drama.

As for Drucker and Ménochet, they vividly embody the roles of abuser and victim but have little else to work with.

Murky, clunky, but sometimes nihilistically exhilarating.

Though not as graphically powerful as other documentaries on similar subjects, such as Fredrick Wiseman’s “Meat” (1976) or Georges Franju’s “Les Sang des Bête” (1949), the emphasis on the disastrous global impact of these practices is more disturbing .

In this semi-autobiographical period piece, Simón achieves the rare feat of faithfully recreating the mysterious consciousness of a child. Though her techniques can get repetitive and stall the narrative, more often than not her elliptical editing recreates an innocent’s perception of the slow drift of time.

In his three-decade run, Rogers touched millions of souls. But the film is honest in questioning whether, in the end, he really made a difference.

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

Ronit’s ebullient spirit spreads vivacity, discontent, and resentment. She offers the possibility of choice — between secular independence or religious tradition. But Lelio opts for an insipid neutrality that does a disservice to both.

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

Perhaps Fiennes’s intent is to draw the viewer into the solipsistic intensity of what it is to be Grace Jones. It is a bracing experience, because she is hedonistic, exultant, funny, and fierce.

Sarnet elevates his Rabelaisian folktale into a tragedy illustrated by haunting, metaphorical imagery.

After watching David Douglas and Drew Fellman’s visually spectacular, technically amazing, and occasionally cutesy documentary, Pandas, you’d think that IMAX 3-D was invented solely for close-ups of adorable panda cubs, their giant doleful, domino faces peering out with cuddly curiosity.

The clichéd dialogue, stereotypical characters (except for Toby Jones, who distinguishes himself as the wryly incompetent company cook), and the constrained setting (it takes place almost entirely in the officers’ dugout) deadens the suspense and diminishes the mood of dread endured by those awaiting their doom.

At a time when financial regulations have been gutted, stock market indexes reel, and trade wars threaten, Jed Rothstein’s slick and revealing documentary The China Hustle should only add to the anxiety and gloom.

If anything, Chernick’s film shows a life that may be too perfect. In addition to his triumphant career, Perlman has a seemingly ideal marriage — to Toby, a woman who is his match in ebullience, wit, and passion for art and music. It has lasted for more than 50 years.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

The message is clear, if not original: stray from the herd and you’re dead. What makes Hirayanagi’s iteration of this familiar theme appealing are the quirky characters, the nuanced performances, and the curious cultural topography of Tokyo.

As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.

A moody, mannered, and lingering coming-of-age story with a Stephen King-like twist.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.

Sharif is a paragon of decency and endurance, but his camera skills are limited and often constrained by circumstances. For the most part this roughness reflects the raw immediacy of the experience.

Channeling Nye’s own gift for making complex ideas simple and clear, the filmmakers edit together these various aspects of Nye’s life with deceptive ease, drawing on interviews and archival material and following him throughout his hectic schedule. This is not hagiography, however; they don’t back off from examining some of his more controversial endeavors and characteristics. That includes his fondness for the spotlight and his ambition, which in a couple of instances has backfired on him.

Though he might be uncertain about sex, or even kissing and cuddling, Scott is an incurable romantic. And steadfastly loyal and kind. The value of that is made clear when the filmmakers disclose the full tragedy and horror of what Dina has gone through, and when he sings to her “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

The film confronts not just the expected issue of environmentalism but also explores themes of survival, separation, loss, and death.

In the end, the film describes not so much an arc as a circle. Kim, who had criticized the World Bank for its callous approach to financing health care for the poor, is appointed its chairman by President Obama in 2012.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

In Brad’s Status, Stiller becomes the face of white male privilege — and its comeuppance.

Jolie does not dwell on the atrocities, though a horrifyingly ironic battle scene near the end contains some gruesome imagery.

Kogonada establishes a meditative tone and rhythm as his compositions parallel the building’s pleasing symmetries.

After Lake Bell’s smart, unconventional debut, “In a World. . .” (2013), her new film, I Do . . . Until I Don’t (she apparently likes ellipses in her titles), is disappointingly ordinary.

The main reason it does not seem contrived is the performances of Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot. Because of their authenticity, and Provost’s mostly sure hand at maintaining mood and tone, the film is a moving immersion into the mysteries of time, memory, and mortality.

Funny, heartbreaking, impeccably observed, and nearly flawless drama.

The painterly beauty of anime detaches the viewer from the terrible events depicted, but it also makes these cataclysms more accessible to the imagination.

Step, the African-American competitive art that is the subject of Amanda Lipitz’s taut, intimate, passionate, and celebratory documentary of the same title, is not to be confused with its Irish namesake in “Riverdance.”

This is a hard movie to watch, and even more painful to think about.

Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.

The film manages to be both crudely hilarious and bluntly satiric while also establishing sympathetic characters, a sharp contemporary wit, a sly, dry absurdism.

The story offers many opportunities for glibness and sentimentality. Walsh falls for none of them. She enhances the grimness of Lewis’s surroundings, but does not exploit it.

Perhaps it’s just as well that other issues remain in the background and the film focuses instead on the bond between Leavey and Rex. Not only is it a compelling metaphor for a woman finding independence and empowerment, it dramatizes a primal emotional relationship that proves heartbreaking and triumphant.

Consider it the PG-rated, Hassidic version of “Bridesmaids” (2011), and like that movie the comedy is rooted in pain, eroding hope, and triumphant faith.

Like films such as Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), Glory transforms that realism into metaphors that don’t just criticize a particular system but lay plain the universal exploitation of the weak and honest by the corrupt and powerful.

Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.

Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.

At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.

Being cluttered isn’t the only problem with Your Name. It also features insipid characters and dippy montage music from the J-pop band Radwimps.

When Ducournau keeps the viewer off balance and doesn’t lose her own, she shows signs of being an outstanding stylist and storyteller, balancing mood, composition, startling images, slow-burning suspense, and sardonic humor.

Slowly it emerges that Gaga is Naharin’s “dance language,” a way of expressing one’s inner being through external movement. Gaga is dada — for dancers.

One appreciates the desire of the filmmaker to let the audience fill in the back story, but Rasmussen’s behavior reflects badly on the Danish and heightens sympathy for the POWs.

The creepiest part of XX, a quartet of short horror films by women, might be the Jan Svankmejer-like stop-action segments between each of them. Sofia Carrillo’s animated antique dolls and little furniture walking on stilt-like legs are the stuff of nightmares.

Those who don’t especially like cats — or Istanbul, for that matter — might not get a lot out of Turkish director Ceyda Torun’s love letter to the feline population of her native city. For everyone else, it should be an almost unadulterated pleasure.

The ending is deeply moving.

It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.

It is at least 10 movies in one, some of them ingenious parodies, but all adding up to a cluttered, confused anticlimax.

Unlike “Belle,” however, in this case Asante does not allow her story to be overwhelmed by period decor and costumes.

As often happens in films about putting on plays, life imitates art, but in this instance obliquely.

When the effusive Pedro Almodóvar adapts the minimalist Alice Munro, he reveals the passions seething under the bleakness of the latter’s monotone mid-Canada. By setting his version of the Nobel Prize-winner’s interlinked stories “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” in the vibrant settings of Madrid and other Spanish locales, he adds a Sirkian twist to Munro’s Chekhovian sensibility.

It’s only the first week of January, but it will be hard to beat Hong Kong director Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers for the best opening credit sequence of the year.

More spectacular special effects might have helped, or at least something more creative than a spaceship that resembles a giant Christmas tree ornament shaped like a corkscrew. Perhaps as a well-written play for a cast of three, Passengers might have been first class. Instead, it’s just another mediocre thrill ride.

Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.

It answers most questions by the end, except the most important one: Is the devil in Miss Sloane, or is Miss Sloane the devil?

The voice-over narrator (Perrin) recites environmentally pious platitudes that offer little enlightenment about what’s on the screen. This is annoying when something strange and unfamiliar is being shown.

Visually, it has the intense intimacy of a dream.

The coming of age is not just that of character but of a whole nation, and despite the mild-seeming moniker, the Jasmine Revolution earned its victories the hard way.

It is epic in scope, intimate in detail, and otherworldly in its dimensions, like the Bayeux Tapestry with special effects and a stentorian soundtrack.

The performances are meticulous and passionate, the narrative low-key and obliquely sensitive enough to conceal, until the traumatic incidents keep piling up, the film’s contrivance.

Campos really doesn’t need to tack on such heavy-handed irony as the scene near the end of a disconsolate woman eating ice cream and singing along with the theme song of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Lassgård won’t let you off easy: A scene in which Ove weeps hopelessly before the magnitude of his loneliness will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has suffered a loss. His Ove is a man indeed.

The film works adequately as a historical drama.

Kenner and Schlosser not only remind us of a danger that never went away, but honor the men whose bravery was never recognized.

What they don’t quite make clear, and perhaps it is impossible to do so, is what really happened in this odd episode of international espionage epitomizing movie-mogul tyranny.

John Landis’s “Animal House” (1978) this is not.

Because of the film’s earnest awkwardness, these excursions into the demimonde come off as campy.

The sardonic laughs include title cards with the name of each character who has joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Their non-specific excursion unfolds like a blithe Woody Allen movie without all the name-dropping.

Vitkova brings a distinct gender sensibility to her story, especially with her recurring imagery of milk and blood.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

At its best the film evokes the palpable terror of a city where uniformed thugs could arrest or kill anyone at any time with impunity.