Robert Abele

Combined with the forces of anti-regulation in government and profit-driven companies who know how to market to doctors and cover up their mistakes, the movie lays bare a blueprint for countless suffering.

When Masear dedicates herself to something as simple as an impaired hummingbird’s hesitant first jump from one stick to another, the tension is both unexpectedly beautiful and poignant. These are small, scary steps for hummingbirds, seeding faith in giant leaps for humankind.

At its most absorbing, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles makes it clear there are no easy answers, perhaps especially when the art itself isn’t easy.

For the diehards and the curious, it should hold some intrigue, because in its exploration of pop longevity and band dynamics, it’s more a cousin of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster . . . than the typically image-conscious, preserve-the-legacy music doc.

The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.

Becoming Cousteau may not be as deep a journey as some would hope, but for having to chart a lot of years, it hits its points about passion, fame and activism smartly, even movingly.

That dance of performance and being — mindsets committed artists don’t always manage smoothly — is what makes Val an appealing, at times even touching hodgepodge of the actor’s journey.

The same intelligence, wit and mature spirit that actress Vera Farmiga brings to her performances is richly apparent in her directorial debut as well, the inquisitive spiritual drama Higher Ground.

While it may have started as a spellbinding evening of theater, what Raim’s unfussy, handsomely mounted documentary reinforces is that film is its own spiritually transporting medium, with its own risks and rewards, and its own ability to turn the enjoyment of art into — what else? — tradition!

Fusing exquisitely shot color 16mm footage from 1964 of the team’s training sessions, drone-like music and splices of animation, we get a delirious sense of what these committed women endured six out of seven days a week.

Even with the thinnest of narrative framing and some arty touches that feel superfluous, there’s an overall portrait of authentic grit and resilience here, of knowing when to hold on and when to let go, that is well-nurtured by Beecroft’s admiring eye for these renegade women.

Mothers are complicated. Children are complicated. Daughter of Mine doesn’t try to explain this bond — it just wants to revel in its glorious, enriching messiness.

Sully, an honest, skillful rumination on what makes a hero, is just one more example of how Eastwood, having directed movies only slightly longer than his protagonist had been flying planes, is still a masterful pilot himself.

Kennebeck’s handling of the labyrinthine narrative is commendable, particularly since the realigning she needs to do in the final act requires a deft touch, like changing the flavor of a dish already prepped, spiced and cooked.

The movie is practically a textbook about how ravenous corporations and feckless government can strip-mine the souls of workers, and replace them with a political narrative about their problems that keeps reality forever hidden behind a fine, dusty fog.

The result, anchored by enchanting performances and Kormákur’s reliably visceral storytelling, is an appealing pivot for a filmmaker who tends to gravitate toward adrenalized tales of survival.

As the memory of it washes back over you, Omaha lingers, like a devastating short story — devastating because it’s about a pained father for whom the road ahead only seems to get narrower.

In its garishness, Mommy is a weirdly compelling overreach for this young filmmaker. It's the work of someone clearly passionate, if not disciplined yet, about his cinematic interests.

[A] fleet, gripping documentary.

The movie exists in a space beyond arguments about immigration policy and border security, and while sometimes a little too willfully pokey, it speaks to something indelibly human about dreams and their costs.

It's a character study about faith in connectedness, with an unforced love for cross-generational companionship that's special indeed.

Taguchi and Lefferman approach it all less like journalists or vérité documentarians than friendly guests who want to be respectful yet connect to something deeper about pain, mourning and forward movement.

A refreshing instance of world building where the emphasis is on satirical wit, activist smarts and character, it feels like one of those movies we’ll be looking at decades from now and, however tech has transformed our lives, saying “Yeah, ‘Lapsis’ had that.”

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down never fully escapes its branded-content vibes, but as a parallel love story and back-to-battle story, it succeeds.

If it’s too much to ask of Arnold that her bid for heightened naturalism make a ton of sense, “Bird” at least maintains a heartbeat of ache and affection for youth in all its rudeness, revealing a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of losing her claws if she traffics in the thing with feathers.

There’s little that’s not dispiriting about Among the Believers and its measured, direct entrée into a closed world of hopeless boys and girls memorizing the Koran, but forbidden from learning its meanings.

There are times when The Tale of King Crab seems like it could have been made in the silent era, so dedicated are Rigo de Righi and Zoppis to the simple, dramatic power of what they choose to show us. Their characters search for love, justice and gold while the filmmakers make clear what they treasure: ageless tales like these.

However one ultimately feels about Fisk’s reportorial compass, This Is Not a Movie presents a necessary, thought-provoking portrait of a dedicated truth-seeker.

Informally sketched but deeply felt, Bradley Beesley's documentary Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo mingles with the spirited cowgirl inmates who compete in Oklahoma's annual state penitentiary rodeo.

Instead of sinking into crude, one-night-stand joke territory, Night Owls roots around for the spark of real chemistry and, in the winning turns of Pally and Salazar, finds it.

For a movie designed to honor the unexpected depths of a cultural hallmark, Ramen Heads does achieve, to borrow the ultimate standard of ramen quality, enough satisfying slurpability.

The Ward is bland shock therapy from the guy who reinvented bloody peek-a-boo with the classic "Halloween."

Part biopic, part mystery, part exposé, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed is ultimately a cooled celebration, one eager to acknowledge that gurus are complicated, showbiz is treacherous, and some landscapes hide things.

The combination of technique and message is ultimately winning. It’s tempting to think of Biggest Little Farm as the real-life equivalent of an epic pastoral storybook tale, but with the kind of happy ending that suggests a blueprint for saving the earth.

Sollers Point boasts a cool, classically observational tone marked by Sabier Kirchner’s invitingly elegant cinematography that eschews the vogue for artificial shaky-cam edginess, and the naturalistic detail of a lived-in neighborhood populated by at least a dozen instantly memorable characters — by turns stressed, satisfied, curious, weird and sad — just doing their thing.

The details are mesmerizing as is the rule-breaking psychology behind it.

One of the best sports documentaries in recent memory.

Though admirably sensitive to the inner lives of opened souls, The World to Come is more a journal with faded photographs than a past made vividly present.

How are the action sequences? They’re fun until they feel familiar, and even then they’re still a trip because the long takes demand admiration for the sheer brute exertion at work.

Queen & Country — though often charming — has a tendency to wander and strain.

In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.

Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.

The key to the fun is that Yeon eschews lookie-loo gore for thrilling set pieces: his fleet, imaginative action scenes recall Brad Bird’s crisp transition to real people in peril when he made his “Mission Impossible” movie.

You don’t have to be a Deadhead, or even a casual listener, to find in Long Strange Trip a compelling tale of what happens when iconoclasts become icons.

It’s a fascinating story of endurance, shaky scientific methods, and solidarity that’s been given a thoughtful resurrection thanks to the writings of Genovés himself – acted in voiceover by “Zama” star Daniel Giménez Cacho – and the recollections of seven participants.

Whether snarling behind shades in uniform or off hours in elegant dresswear, Chen is a rule-breaking hoot, never more so than when she’s gearing up to heap abuse on a near-tears little girl in order to break her.

Like any craftily layered confection, what at first presents itself as colorfully whipped reveals itself to be a more tangy, lasting bite.

Despite the good intentions, structurally it's all over the place with an excess of montages, archival footage, interviews and information practically drowning out any chance to appreciate the richness of the German composer's beloved achievement.

This is Krieps’ show, another elegantly virtuosic, intelligent turn that, in this case, imbues sickness with dignity so that every strained grasp for breath feels like a victory for autonomy.

The result is a “Spider-Man” that feels a little more punchy, laugh-filled, and exciting than one might expect from a property that’s already been given plenty of chances to succeed.

Though this look back is formidably researched and should appeal to both obsessives and the uninformed, it’s the insistent echo to our present upheaval, and the refreshing reminder that a polarized nation only got more unified in its desire for the truth, that gives “Watergate” its peculiarly of-the-moment power.

Besides never knowing where to stick a camera, or how long a given scene should last, Hopkins quickly ditches any potentially subversive joy in her cartoon vigilante by saddling her with a redemptive love story opposite James Badge Dale's kind-eyed sheriff.

Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.

It’s a wealth of information The Ivory Game vitally offers, and action it means to incite. That may well be enough to get audiences involved.

It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

Larraín, who wrote the movie with Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos, approaches the material like a scientist both fascinated and cynically bemused by how a particularly virulent sickness operates.

Considering its subject often enjoys the simple wonder inherent in characters who look into the distance, Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny does an extra-fine job of looking back with similarly rich and appreciative curiosity.

Good Grief ultimately promises more than its starter kit of rom-com elements and good intentions can deliver. But within that inviting aura are a number of pleasures, starting with Levy’s homo-neurotic appeal as a cynically romantic gay lead.

Hive is occasionally bumpy, but it’s the rough terrain of a raw narrative — the out-of-place music cue or awkward dream snippet doesn’t disrupt the social realist momentum, which is at its best when focused on the grit of how moving forward is also moving on.

Director David Bowers keeps things peppy and brightly lighted, but the movie's swiftest pleasures come from moment-seizing cast members.

Whether you agree with his system-damning rhetoric or see him as no better than anyone else in our clogged punditocracy, Brand: A Second Coming is, if not a careful portrait, at least an orgy of personality.

A skillfully rendered narrative that should satisfy fans and pique the interest of the uninitiated.

In Haynes’s psychologically and atmospherically astute compositions and careful nursing of the emotional impact on Bilott and wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway), it’s more a brittle ache of a quest than a righteous melodrama.

A documentary that begs to be seen in a theater, Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang offers an inviting glimpse into the life of a truly international artist, one whose colorful fireworks displays literally paint the air.

Almost Holy captures something meaningfully urgent in the brutal day-to-day of tough love amid a world of tougher indifference.

As Leonor Will Never Die parties to its close, Escobar reminds us that while life is unerringly finite, cinema is the complicated, messy, riotous love affair that never has to end.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a case of the inexplicable rendered without forced mysticism or explanation, but rather explored with a clinical dramatic focus that somehow boosts the eeriness.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist’s ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure.

In a year that’s seen a valuable rethink of how we process crime stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched book “Murderland” — Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.

Anchored by performances that refuse to tell us what to think (especially Hoult’s cagey calm), Juror #2 skillfully depicts how, in practice, the ideal of blind justice too easily becomes the shortsighted, look-the-other-way kind.

[Filho's] mastery of pacing, theme and stylistic eccentricity throughout Neighboring Sounds is so assured as to be breathtaking. Don't miss it.

It’s a touching glimpse at a community solution to an inclusion problem, where the water’s more than just fine.

Scott whips it all into shape: the tense action involving the kidnappers, the investigation’s twists, the maddening campaign to give Getty a financial incentive in freeing his grandson, and the emotional toll it takes on everyone (Getty included).

In her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. And that their fears can easily become nightmares.

It’s a deceptively dimensional portrayal, that of someone who worries his stage is getting smaller and smaller. And in Frias’ magnetic feature is enough spirit, sound and artistry to give his journey a meaningful spotlight.

Hal entertainingly reminds us, his influence as a righteous, challenging, humanist chronicler of mortal foibles — and as a filmmaker on a quest for a greater understanding of our world — remains a force among today’s more conscientious directors.

What Salmerón is after, however, is a simple portrait of hilarious exuberance, hard-won togetherness and strange wisdom. That search yields results.

A briny Northeastern noir powered by women with secrets, Blow the Man Down is a pleasantly spiky slinging of small-town sin that should prove to be eminently companionable viewing for these sequestered, streamable times.

The Death of Dick Long may be a made-up story, but inside this crisis management suspense-comedy is a weirdly down-to-earth humanity about the ripple effects of out-of-nowhere recklessness.

Where Miyazaki’s wisdom kept his prodigious imagination in the service of intimacy, “Big Fish” is daringly, if haphazardly, epic with its vision and feelings. The urge to awe may feel self-conscious at times, but it’s rarely not heartfelt, even when it’s skirting the edge of incomprehensible.

Zahler's still starkness, enhanced by a fondness for long shots and dark spaces, is refreshing in this shaky-cam era, and his ear for Old West sensibilities — from the mythically polite to the realistically xenophobic — is clinically effective.

In the fraught relationship between controlling subject and probing filmmaker who start out as comrades in activism, the tension should be explored, not glided over. It leaves “Risk” feeling like the outline for a dozen different documentaries, instead of a complete one itself.

The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.

Less a journalistic endeavor than an admirer’s tour — with room for blackly funny Herzog-ian touches in his choice of archival clip or patently demonic voice-over.

The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization.

Power could just as easily have benefited from the docuseries treatment, although at under 90 minutes, it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.

Corben’s account is a prideful slab of snark, about Florida, its usual suspects, and the glittering allure of fraud, which one interviewee states is “the unofficial state business.”

Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.

Activist in tone, and paced like a thriller, Reed’s movie painstakingly details how an election can be brusquely seized and swayed by unseen forces. Candidates need do little but sign on to be successfully co-opted.

The Painted Bird ... is not the wallowing miserablist parade you might fear, yet not quite the Holocaust-themed masterpiece it wishes to be. But it’s always starkly compelling as a reminder of why war survival stories are essential to our understanding of innocence and beastliness.

The Lure may not be everybody’s siren song, but as debut features go, it counts as a splash.

Eubank's fizzy mix of self-conscious, set-piece image-making and small-scale human detail is admirable.

While Christine the movie may leave you in a coldly analytical space about sad people — even its dollops of humor have a chilliness — Christine the woman stays with you, thanks to a career-best performance from Hall that’s stark, thoughtful, and mesmerizing.

Dope is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.

Director Stephanie Soechtig’s passionately contended, slickly produced film may not sway the most fervid 2nd Amendment defenders, but in its problem-solving vigor could spur a lot of others who believe in change to make that call, join that group, or vote a certain way.

Pieta, which won last year's Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is disturbing, for sure, but its larger points save it from being a quick and dirty wallow.