Peter Keough

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

Related with stolid majesty, with long shots of brooding landscapes and close-ups of opaque faces, the film provides poor preparation for the subversion of genre conventions to follow.

It follows the lead of more recent Hollywood disaster movies like “2012” and “The Impossible.” It features just one family; everyone else is part of the scenery.

Just when you were about to give up on the Internet as a swamp full of trolls, bullies, and liars, along comes a documentary like Ido Haar’s Presenting Princess Shaw.

Alonso sustains an atmosphere of otherworldly immanence in a vivid setting, with a style involving long takes with characters posed as if in tableaux vivants.

The characters look as if they’d be more comfortable with intertitles than spoken dialogue. And the faces — Marion Cotillard as Ewa, the beleaguered Polish immigrant of the title, holds a close-up as well as Lillian Gish or Louise Brooks.

Code Black shows the passion, frustration, and skill of those who work to heal despite the system, but it remains in the dark about why that system is broken and how it can be fixed.

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range.

In person, as seen in Fifi Howls From Happiness, Mitra Farahani’s ambitious and self-reflexive documentary of the artist’s last days, Mohassess enthusiastically acts out those traits. It’s a performance enhanced by his diabolical, phlegm-choked laughter at his own bleakly ironic pronouncements and denunciations of the world in general.

Unfortunately, Hatley chooses not to offer much context or background history regarding that or other aspects of Helm’s half-century career, other than archival footage of Helm and the Band in their prime, press clippings, and comments from the Band “biographer,” Barney Hoskyns.

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.

It would violate a taboo to relate how this movie magic, masterfully orchestrated by Weinstein and Measom, is done. Their film is as smooth as Randi’s patter and demonstrates how the documentarian’s camera is quicker than the eye.

Bizarre, fascinating, and frustrating documentary.

By the end of Tickled the realm of superficial giggles has long been left behind. Though his lighthearted tone has difficulties keeping up with each new sinister discovery, Farrier has exposed in the least likely setting the network of power and money that preys on the weak with impunity.

A taut, expertly constructed, and suspenseful police procedural, it also explores the issues of loyalty, trust, betrayal, and revenge that those engaged in such morally ambiguous if essential activities would prefer not to think about.

The Wonders evokes many other films, but is utterly unique. It is like being privy to a marvelous story that Rohrwacher is telling herself.

Presents enough teasing glimpses into the dancer’s personal and inner life to demand a fuller picture.

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.

Compared to his previous films, The Dance of Reality offers a nearly coherent narrative and a gentle, reconciliatory tone.

Is it an allegory for contemporary Greece? Beats me. Like the films of Buñuel, it’s about the human condition, regarded with bemusement and acuity.

“Shadows” has its share of lines that will be repeated by fans ad infinitum (a favorite: “Yes, now Google it”).

Field next tries to touch our hearts with her pitifulness. Stay away, crazy woman! At times she seems about to turn into Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

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.”

This walkabout ends less dramatically and not as tragically as the one in Roeg’s film, but perhaps with a greater poignancy. And Gulpilil, four decades of hard living later, is as magnificent as ever.

But when Dark Horse leaves the feel-good realm to show news footage of a failed miners’ strike, or to have the camera linger on the impoverished surroundings where Dream Alliance’s owners still dwell, it suggests that it will take more than a few fairy tale finishes for their reality to change.

All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity. Many of the actors are from the streets themselves, and such locations as a crash pad rented out by a dotty lady could never be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.

Efficient, cogently argued, and visually compelling documentary.

This is no exercise in miserabilism. Instead Moverman and Gere take a problem and elevate it into a universal experience, turning social issues into existential insights.

Unlike the Makioka sisters, this quartet lack ambiguity and mystery.

Though at times it threatens to become too generic to be original, or too original to be generic, it retains enough indirection to frustrate those looking for thrills and to engage those willing to be challenged. And by the time the bottom drops out in a characteristically enigmatic ending, Night Moves distinguishes itself as a genuine Reichardt movie.

Despite his neuroses, VanDyke displays self-awareness and humility, and a charisma that ranges from the goofiness of Owen Wilson to the grandiosity of his hero, Lawrence of Arabia.

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.

Lawrence is an impeccable, commanding subject, not just because of his credentials but because of his presence and demeanor.

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.

In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.

“So how are you going to get them to dance together?” Dancing never explains how. Instead, as in similar films such as “Hoop Dreams,” it focuses on the contest, reducing the participants to a handful of representative kids who end up learning something about themselves and others.

Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.

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

Plympton will be cheated if Cheatin’ doesn’t at least get nominated for a best animated feature Oscar.

Kusama’s handling of point of view is diabolically shrewd. She maximizes the terror potential of the vapidly ostentatious modernist mansion without fetishizing it. She intensifies the monstrosity of some of the characters by making them all too human. And as for guessing the ending — good luck.

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

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.”

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.

Though director Ziad Doueiri’s uneven treatment of this provocative premise suffers from contrivance and implausibility, it nonetheless arouses profound questions about fanaticism, cultural identity, and the essential mystery of other people, even those we think we know best.

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

Like the children’s films of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Bad Hair explores such social pathology, in part, in the guise of a kids’ movie. But it also takes on the intensity of more pointed films such as “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) and even Hector Babenco’s sensationalistic “Pixote” (1981).

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.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

Joe is one more in the line of Southern Gothic miserabilism that includes “Winter’s Bone” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” films that many have praised but some find condescending.

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

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

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

A bittersweet musing about the nature of parenthood and about the conflict between nature and nurture, it is as banal and insightful as its title.

Bernstein communicates Ungerer’s manic spirit and his irrepressible creativity by punctuating the conventions of talking-head interviews and archival footage with animated snippets of Ungerer’s thousands of illustrations.

Has its moments of grace, but too often resorts to conventions and a tone of high lugubriousness.

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.

It’s a mordant if unwieldy thriller examining how evil not only becomes the norm, but a virtue.

Who knows what they’re fighting about, but given the ecstatic ballet of fists and water, tossed bodies and smashed decor, centered by Leung’s majestic impassivity, it doesn’t really matter.

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.

Enigmatic, atmospheric, and seductive, the film unfortunately sheds little light on subjects that have too long been hidden in the dark.

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.

More conventional in approach than Linklater’s 12-year filmmaking odyssey, “Identity” demonstrates its boldness not with stylistic originality but with political acuity.

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

Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.

Despite the fabulism of Tale of Tales, it remains rooted in contemporary issues. Prince Charming does not figure much in this film, but women do.

Though admirable in ambition, McGowan’s decision to broaden his simple story’s scope diminishes an affecting melodrama about the increasingly common, insufficiently acknowledged plagues of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Religious allusions aside, Alleluia is like “Psycho” combined with “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Norman and Norma Bates as the conjoined criminal couple on the run.

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.

Despite the seeming inevitability of tragedy and despair, In Bloom remains true to its title. Though political and personal upheaval threatens to overwhelm them, Eka and Natia’s clarity and courage resist the ignorance, injustice, and rage all around.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

Maybe not entirely depersonalized, however. Hogg has a point of view and a point to make, cryptic though they may be.

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

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

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

A fresh perspective on one of the world’s longest conflicts.

Including the high expectations set up by the film’s early going, Eubank had a thoughtful thriller in the works but along the way he got his signals crossed.

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.”

An opportunity to capture on film a unique cultural enclave is reduced to a Hollywood pastiche.

Visually, this translates into thrilling action sequences of lone knife-wielders hewing down ranks of adversaries with balletic precision. If preserving this means sacrificing a scruple or two, it’s worth the trade.

Though the narrative of “Marnie” bogs down toward the end, this does not diminish its spell.

Though at times Siddharth can resemble a well-photographed report on India’s social and economic ills, Mehta subtly employs different styles to sustain the poetry, poignancy, and drama.

Like “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), the Oscar-winning film about climate change, it is a call to action. As a screed, it builds a credible, engaging argument, presenting evidence, statistics, talking-head testimony, whimsical charts, poignant personal stories, and animated illustrations of digestive processes to make its case.

Plá’s comedy is black, but his moral position isn’t black and white.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

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

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

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

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.

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

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 fundamental problem with this Macbeth is that it insists on reducing the mystery of motivation to the pop psychology of a magazine article.

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger isn’t so much inspired as disgusted by the notorious gangster in his newest documentary.

As for the performances, only homely Giovana has heart and depth. The two boys lack chemistry, even in chemistry class, due in part to the trite dialogue, or at least as it is translated in subtitles.

A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence.

Fatal Assistance has few answers, and adds little clarity.

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 .