Wes Greene

The film is at its most effective and engaging when simply capturing the vibrancy of a world onto its own.

In simplistic and self-congratulatory fashion, the film renders its main character as a sort of feminist crusader who undermines the sexist traditions of her time.

Rarely do the interviewees express their own thoughts on Beltracchi, as Birkenstock lets him speak for himself, for better and for worse.

The film tends toward the dramatically monotonous, but its unwavering sense of purpose ensures that it’s also compellingly human.

The sobering quality that informs both the documentary's aesthetic and content largely suppresses any spontaneity or much-needed moments of levity.

Writer-director Edson Oda never really puts a unique spin on the familiar story of otherworldly figures peering in on the lives of the living.

The unbalanced appraisal of Vidal's life and work in Nicholas Wrathall's documentary diminishes the effect of the writer's engaging dissension of American political policy.

A well-intentioned story of an impoverished father searching for his missing child is muddled by an ambitious sociological agenda in Richie Mehta's film.

The film’s poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character’s identity crisis.

For as potent as the film’s shocks can be in the moment, it’s difficult to shake off that the screenplay lacks for the breadth of variety that’s necessary to make more than just a restaurant’s tasting menu take flight.

The inadvertent effect of the oppressive, almost overbearing gloom that shrouds Falcon Lake is that it manages to sap the life out of its initially carefree depiction of young people’s emotional lives.

Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman's film immediately announces itself as a modest triumph of world-building.

Right out of the gate, the film only sees a kind of blunt irony in this blurring of her public and private selves.

The filmmakers never effectively detail the characters’ relation to the various cultural, psychological, or historical intricacies of their milieu.

Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object.

What They Had gracefully coasts on its patient observations of one family’s dynamics, but once the third act hits, Elizabeth Chomko goes about neatly tidying up seemingly every loose end.

Its sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound.

Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime.

The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.

It may channel the loose, adrenaline-fueled lives of pilots, but the film's inconsistent, often impassive study of this intriguing real-life adventure feels half-told.

After a certain point, Olivia Newman's film treats the womanhood of its main character as an afterthought.

Director Fredrik Gertten's Bikes vs. Cars is passionate but contradictory, a frustrating combination for a documentary that utilizes admittedly interesting data as a pitch to wean our car-crazed world off excessive driving.

At its most honest, the film wrestles with the reluctance or unwillingness of women to fulfill ostensibly requisite roles.

Sansón and Me has a way of frustratingly pulling focus away from its ostensible subject.

Director Aviva Kempner profile of Julius Rosenwald suggests a 60 Minutes segment stretched to feature length.

Thomas Wirthensohn frequently sinks into dully positing Mark Reay as something close to the pinnacle of human integrity.

It's something unique for both a genre exercise and a documentary: a science-fiction film that doesn't contain an ounce of fiction.

Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's Seasons is a nature documentary that reveals itself as a story of tragic usurpation.