Robert Abele

Of course, our desire to know more may be the aim in his making art out of civilization’s rubble — that he can get us to pay attention through the sheer majesty of how he pays attention, hopefully making for true engagement, not mere spectating. Still, sometimes you just want more than what you’re given. That’s human too.

One wishes that space in Separated had been saved instead for real stories told by the policy’s victims, or perhaps more historical context. Nonetheless, what we glean from the totality of the interviews and research, and Morris’ well-honed style of coalescing information, is damning enough.

Oldman treats Churchill’s words the way a Broadway virtuoso would: as the showstopper. And who can blame him? It works.

In the new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do an ultra-fine job tracing a born provocateur's commitment to his calling.

To watch Santosh is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.

John Wick’s world is elegant and vicious, full of slaughter and courtesies and, if “Chapter 2” can’t quite replicate the original’s sense of discovery, its ending still made me wish “Chapter 3” could start right away.

You can’t encapsulate the horrors of the Holocaust in 80 minutes, but what the 12 interviewed survivors accomplish in the documentary Destination Unknown is nevertheless a vivid portrait of genocide put into practice, and its everlasting effects on the living.

If anything, you want even more stories from these guys who started out as rock and roll dreamers, transitioned to individual contractors, then came to feel part of something larger than themselves.

Jagged and acrid, yet also slippery and provocative, “The Plagiarists” is a micro-indie talkathon with the edge of something forcibly overheard but fragmented, as if you’d been thrown into a cramped rideshare with many discursive routes and no obvious destination

Considering the amount of such material Welles left behind — sketches, drawings and paintings from his formative childhood travels through decades in movies — it makes for a tantalizing reappraisal sure to appeal to even the most knowledgeable Welles enthusiast.

In its extreme length and precise technique, it’s decidedly not for everybody. But although it is at times distractingly opaque, occasionally Heise’s family’s words, juxtaposed with his sounds and images, crystallize into something singularly wise about the nexus of place, history and trauma.

Manzoor, an instinctive stylist, always finds an honest vibe to win you over, whether it’s sisterly camaraderie (or annoyance), youthful awkwardness or you’re-going-down spunk, which allows the abundant personality in her wonderful cast to hit all the necessary top notes.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

Sober and heartfelt, Union lets us see what Amazon and the world would soon discover about the power workers have when they invest in their dignity first.

Although Greene swerves unnecessarily into obvious audience indictment at the end, Kate Plays Christine makes for a twisty, unsettling probe into our fascination with transforming lives, and deaths, into digestible storytelling.

Evans has made a touchingly honest ode to the inner life of all artists.

Afterimage may depict a losing battle for one uncompromising artist, but it’s also a bracing final dispatch for the uncompromising artist who survived long enough to tell of it.

Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city’s stray colors, sounds and personalities.

By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring.

Both riveting character study and experiential glimpse at the Africa-to-Europe sex slave trade, Austrian-Iranian filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai’s “Joy” builds its reservoir of sadness with pulsing efficiency.

A soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.

If the details of “Kidnapped” aren’t familiar, do yourself the favor of withholding an online search until the full thunder and rigor of Bellocchio’s dramatic instincts can work you over — equivalent to a lavish ’60s period costume drama burnished into an engine of galvanizing narrative intention.

Although its storytelling is at times naggingly staid, its central characterizations teem with complexity and sensitivity, and for that, it’s a modest coming-of-age gem.

At a time when extremes in discourse always seem loudest, the modest pleasures of The Monk and the Gun are appealingly reasonable. Brandishing new ways doesn’t have to mean holstering old ones.

A sublime and stirring documentary.

No matter how reflectively mellow the gray-haired, reminiscing interviewees are, the blizzard of featured illustrations from the magazine's '70s heyday offer scads of they-couldn't-get-away-with-that-today laughter.