Robert Abele

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.

The blurring of real testimony with a compassionate filmmaker’s inventions is so compelling that when the documentary portion arrives, the movie can’t help but sink a bit.

She may have a terrible co-star inside trying to upstage her, but with humor, strength and messy honesty, Blair makes a memorable case for why her show must go on.

The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.

When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.

Set on a remote farm in the Icelandic tundra that could center either a horror film or a children’s fable, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature — which is sorta both — is in certain ways unexplainable, and in other ways as straightforward as a family portrait.

As a representative display of historical-but-reimagined players on well-worn ground, The Harder They Fall has undeniable pop, but as a movie needing character, narrative, and pacing beyond revitalized nostalgia, it’s all too often a bloody, showy mishmash that rarely holds its clichés and archetypes together with any lasting resonance.

Ponciroli shows natural flair for holstered and unholstered suspense (if not always story logic), plus he’s got a worthy partner in the muted exteriors and sparsely lit interiors of John Matysiak’s cinematography, and a cast that dutifully plays along with every stare-down and line of colorfully poetic cowboy dialogue.

If there’s a quibble with this graphically imagined The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s one common to the movies Coen made with his brother: It’s ruthless, intelligent, and entertaining, and mightily drinkable as filmmaking, without necessarily raising the emotional temperature past a clinical, grim efficiency. Often, even with the never-not-human Washington going for it, dazzlingly so.

The intimacy, warmth and humor of the memories give the footage of him teaching the feeling of watching home movies from the adoring offspring of a cherished father.

In the aggregate, Karam’s directing is so meticulously composed about conveying the density of what’s unsaid, and the mood around the people instead of the people creating the mood, that “The Humans” can feel a bit suffocating.

To the less patient viewer, the lack of clarity on the finer points of high finance and characters’ backgrounds and not getting period-orienting news updates about the political situation, might seem confounding. But Azor works without them, because those details would only disrupt the artfully portentous chill Fontana gets from the pitch-perfect performances and design, and Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography.

In eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

Wife of a Spy doesn’t necessarily change its tone when the stakes are raised so much as shift its concerns from what’s on the surface to what courses underneath in a time of war.

At its best — when the flow of voices, archival clips (co-director Pollard being a master at the textural impact of found footage), and nicely blended-in recreations made to look archival, is thematically strongest — "Citizen Ashe" becomes a documentary about how experience becomes voice becomes action.

A road movie that, considering who made it, starts pretty far down that road, Cry Macho is familiar and loose, sometimes rattly, occasionally wince-inducing, and in a few moments genuine in ways no one else seems to know how to do anymore.

As a curdled storybook, Bad Tales is highly watchable. The problem is that the brothers aren’t telling stories fueled by powerful characters; they’re staging awkward cruelties as if for a gallery show.

A crisis scenario striving for issue-driven importance that should have paid more attention to its dull suspense mechanics, slapdash style, and implausibility.

That blend of tones is not always smoothly handled, but there’s enough heart in its express train of ambition, flaws and fallout to allow its leading lady wide berth for a wonderfully committed, soulful, even sexual turn admirably devoid of caricature.

Where the filmmakers’ approach sets itself apart in these days of image-massaged biographies is in juxtaposing the bookending health catastrophes of Fauci’s career as an especially illuminating lens through which to examine his drive, decisions and personality.

Who You Think I Am may ultimately be just a corker of a melodrama, but at least with Binoche and a director enamored with the hurt, power, and sensuality she provides, it’s a tingly riff on a very 21st century kind of dangerous liaison.

What we’re left with is, thankfully, sharp exchanges about loss and conscience, a director’s sincere approach to potentially melodramatic material, and in-the-moment actors like Keaton, who makes the humbling weight of adding up lives into the stuff of compellingly sober contemplation.

No Man of God may have been written by a man, but you can’t help feeling the reason this umpteenth examination of a modern devil works as well as it does is because, as a woman, Sealey knows where the exploitation traps are and avoids them by focusing on the people in her frame, their exchanges well-paced by editor Patrick Nelson Barnes.

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.

In all too many ways, it’s a predictable, tiring wade as both a domestic tale and a pandemic yarn.

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama.

It’s also worth remembering that someone as complex as Alvin Ailey isn’t going to be captured in any one film. Ailey is, therefore, best absorbed as an elegant, impressionistic primer, a chance to bask in his mastery of movement and dance, as framed by those near enough to him to know what it took out of him to gift it to the world.

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.