As the film focuses more tightly on [Ressa], it becomes a more gripping document. And it certainly is gripping, as the cloud of menace threatening her becomes firmer.

One of the most atrocious viewing experiences of the year, “The Tax Collector” relies on a trite visual language built on obvious flashbacks and bland imagery that match the unimaginatively dreadful writing where every Latino in sight is a gangster.

How might Crawford have brought cinematic life to pages full of words? No clue. But the director who took up the job simply relies on people who were there to tell us how great it all was. And that keeps Creem trapped in history — a fading memory as opposed to a useful example.

This is proficient, measured filmmaking from a director who has already peered more deeply, and persuasively, into colonialism’s heart of darkness.

It’s full of missed opportunities and lacking in telling details.

The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.

It gestures toward controversial ideas but always swerves back to a simple but profound message of togetherness and family, and the personal importance of honoring tradition and memory.

The message — explore and embrace the rich legacy of your ancestors because it’s part of you — may sound simple, but in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s hands, it’s hardly a rudimentary platitude. With Black Is King, she creates a pageant of sight and sound honoring the Black diaspora, weaving a collection of vibrant, profound and defiantly creative scenarios into one abstract and mostly cohesive narrative.

The documentary, based on Cooper’s self-published memoir (he connected with Mazzio on Twitter after she’d read it), illustrates the differences that can be made through the efforts of a few and draws attention to the high levels of trauma experienced by residents in our poorest neighborhoods.

It’s competent filmmaking in the service of lousy storytelling.

While the filmmaker keeps his eyes peeled for every possible shred of good news in the wake of disaster, he has little interest in peddling easy inspiration; the stakes are too colossal, the devastation too raw.

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is a thoroughly engaging retrospective of a hard-working, hard-living performer who survived to tell the tale.

While the performances ensure that the movie is always watchable, the hesitant storytelling makes it far from compelling, a bad trip about a bummer vacation.

It starts throwing details at you almost immediately, each one building on yet also undermining the last, as if it were deliberately trying to confound your sense of what kind of movie you’re watching.

Maine’s film captures something indelible about adolescent female desire, without condescending or objectifying, because she understands, subjectively, what that looks and feels like: all the confusion and shame, but yes, also the pleasure to be found there. She beautifully depicts something that has been rarely seen on film: the lustful gaze of an adolescent woman (as opposed to the lustful gaze being directed at her).

A breezy, energizing and fun look at the hip-hop and improv theater collective

Father Soldier Son is a demanding film, a sometimes brutal story told with immense empathy. There is sorrow and joy; success and failure; marriage, birth and death. The Eisches are a tough crew, absorbing the challenges and even tragedy with a fragile resilience.

The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.

Nothing here is especially revealing or deep; but the doc is pleasantly positive, and it does have something to say about how the expectations for dads today are higher than ever.

What emerges is a chilling portrait of what happens when people in power just ignore sociopolitical norms and behave as though the rules don’t apply to them.

The story of that one miserable shoot is still a useful way to consider both the brilliance of Sellers and the damage he wrought, as well as demonstrating the ludicrous leeway granted to celebrities and the ways that obvious warning signs of possible mental illness often went unheeded.

Like a lot of recent documentaries about the overdue reckoning for sexual predators in positions of power, Athlete A is a reminder that the rot is sometimes within the system itself, not just within the criminals it benefits.

The whole point of this illuminating and often moving film is that all of these people have a tale to tell — and one that’s not as simple as Hollywood would have it.

Without a more probing look into her artistry, it’s hard to think of Olympia as a definitive Dukakis profile — though it’s certainly an unusual celebrity documentary.

Perhaps, despite its lack of structure, the film will inspire a new generation to investigate this funny lady who could sing the lights out.

The most important thing is that it is genuinely great, a singular and moving glimpse of loneliness, community and finding the strength to face another day.

For most of its running time, Relic feels more like a chamber piece than a full-fledged horror outing, but a nail-biting third act ups the ante.

For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.

It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.

While the documentary recounts the arc of the astrologer’s life, with vintage video that is a veritable feast of over-the-top Mercado-ian aesthetics, it focuses — most compellingly — on his final years.

Schneider’s direction is taut, limiting much of the action to the confined spaces of the ship’s bridge and its vantage points. The close quarters ratchet up the tension and intimacy of a space where everyone can see you sweat.

In the final act, the film embraces some of those larger points, and Herzog ends with a striking final image leaving us to contemplate the transactional nature and true cost of all human relationships.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.

The Outpost is a visceral battle picture but little more.

That Hoon lived such a prototypically rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, while simultaneously commenting on it — he notes his first broken hotel room mirror — is fascinating. And heartbreaking.

There are a number of sharp political and philosophical points made, but they are undercut by “The 11th Green’s” overload of history, speculation and fantasy that strands it in a narrative Bermuda Triangle.

Though it’s a shame that Mr. Jones is not more cohesive, the remarkable story of Gareth Jones retains its potency. It’s a bracing reminder that we can never allow the advocates of truth to be silenced.

In sharing these often harrowing stories, “Unsettled” paints a sobering but ultimately hopeful portrait of possibility for those who are allowed to enter.

As in his previous films, the Oscar-nominated "How to Survive a Plague” and “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” France, an investigative reporter, presents ordinary citizens doing remarkable things. If only our governments could learn to follow suit.

One of the show’s more obvious lessons is that history is a living, breathing entity, and that the cyclical rise-and-fall narratives of leaders and empires can be studied and recounted in ways that uncover bold new patterns of meaning. This film, a straightforward capture of a momentous work of art, illuminates those patterns in ways both sobering and thrilling.

Inspired moments can be found throughout “Eurovision” if you have the patience.

There’s a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can’t abide imperfection in herself or others.

The slapstick generally works and the movie milks Bautista’s sheer size and roughness, compared with tiny Coleman’s crafty fearlessness. Much of the story is telegraphed, but it’s not about shocks or surprises. It’s a charming diversion stocked with people who are fun to watch.

If this misleadingly titled movie is meant to be a whimsical Capra-esque fantasy, as the production notes suggest, then why does it make such a show of its topical relevance? If it’s meant to lay bare the realities of the system, as the production notes also suggest, then why does it feel so toothless and inconsequential?

Lee keeps his celebration smart and not soppy. He gets you excited, makes you feel the moment, see what was new in it, why it mattered.

Lee has sacrificed some clarity for inclusiveness; this is the document as monument, artful and rough by turns, and determined to be as big as its subject.

It covers a lot of ground in a skin-deep manner that’s more useful as an intensive overview of the events — if you manage to keep track of who is working for which organization at any given time and why.

Mendelsohn and Davis, among the finest Australian actors working today, are both awfully good at villainy, which is why their characters’ emotional restraint and fundamental decency here feels refreshing as well as true.

An engrossing, smartly contextual look at the history of transgender depictions in film and television.

The writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples, making her feature debut, has a deft way with understatement, and here she casts an affectionate, gently ambivalent eye on the traditions and rituals that have long held sway in a small Fort Worth community.

Unfortunately, the movie’s thriller elements amount to pale reflections of many other works.

The cast, especially Gordon-Levitt and Memar as Vedat, the youngest of the hijackers, excel at combining drama and physicality. Rather than the over-choreographed fight scenes of most Hollywood movies, the violence here is clumsy, painful and visceral.

There’s a terrific ensemble — including Ella-Grace Gregoire as a girl Jack has a crush on — but it’s Nighy who will have you enthralled. He delivers a subtle, nuanced performance that allows the actor to shine while in full support of his costars.

There is real potential in this premise, and a few flickers of genuine artfulness, but the storytelling is frustratingly abstruse, making for an Exit Plan that’s a real missed opportunity.

The film fails to coalesce largely because viewers are left to wonder what joins the couple in the first place.

This is not a “but the book was better” argument. It’s simply that by abandoning the original character and cobbling together broken story shards and spare parts, Branagh and company have produced something off an assembly line: safe, generic and utterly disposable.

While it’s sometimes dizzying in its visuals or its joy, it’s often not cute. It can be fun, even exhilarating. It can also carry the emotional impact of loss.

The tonal shifts can be so abrupt as to induce whiplash, not to mention a kind of moral and narrative chaos, which seems to be very much to the movie’s point. The rich, tumultuous history of Black life over the past century could certainly find a worse cinematic analogue than this heady swirl of wry comedy, seductive music, ferocious argument and devastating carnage.

It’s a simple recipe and remarkably effective.

The King of Staten Island works hard to strike its own artful balance of humor and heartache, qualities that both seem permanently etched in Davidson’s face. Part of the movie’s inevitable fascination is the question of how much is made up and how much might be rooted in lived experience.

The movie would like to see itself as a feminist allegory of abuse and systemic oppression, but it comes off as something far more scattered and unfocused.

The camera stays close to Dafoe for nearly every moment of the movie and he brings a compelling vibrancy to the screen. He somehow conveys both the tranquility of Tommaso’s current life and all that simmers just under the surface.

The documentary “After Parkland,” released in 2019, takes a more intimate approach to the lives lost. Parkland Rising, on the other hand, focuses on the activism and the political impact it had, an impassioned record of incremental change in an age of uncertainty. The fight continues.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.

Powered by unbridled optimism, Gameau defies skeptics by doing his homework and bringing receipts.

The film frequently feels like a branding exercise but manages to remain entertaining and informative.

While director Daniel Traub has little time to dive too deeply, the documentary serves as a fascinating glimpse into an artist’s work, inspirations and process.

Though it is only now receiving a U.S. release, it says something about the ever-prolific filmmaker’s consistency and extremely high level of proficiency that the film still seems fresh and enchanting, by turns delicate, romantic, mysterious, witty and crushing.

The High Note, written by Flora Greeson, sits less comfortably on the fence between insiderish melodrama and broadly accessible crowd-pleaser.

Hawkes is terrific with a softer-edged character than we’re used to seeing from the actor (“Deadwood,” “Winter’s Bone”). He’s heartbreaking in scenes where disappointment and resignation play across his face. Lerman is a fine foil, energizing scenes with his edgy impatience and willingness to be unlikable for the majority of the film.

More evolution than sequel, Chen maintains the laidback, low-fi charm and black-and-white aesthetic infused with Nakamura’s dreamy, pensive music but also grows the characters, infusing them with more narrative purpose.

Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.

The film drifts from grown-up to kid problems with mostly anecdotal evidence but very little science to back it up. It tries to cover too much ground in 71 minutes without going deeply into any of the areas it lightly explores.

No surprises await, but the performances by Scott Thomas, Horgan and company and some pleasant harmonizing make Military Wives palatable Memorial Day weekend viewing.

The result is a movie that feels both truthful and evasive, deeply moving and a little perplexing.

Rae and Nanjiani have a quicksilver chemistry, flashing from playful banter to genuine, hurtful arguing in an instant.

Scoob! was never going to be a great musical, but did it have to turn out to be just another superhero movie?

The Wrong Missy is a lightweight throwaway, the kind of movie it is difficult to suggest one actually choose to watch, but if your algorithm somehow lands on it provides a certain harmless diversion.

The original film was not a time capsule; it was a snapshot, capturing a unique time and place. The new film simply doesn’t have the same spark and energy.

One way to approach Spaceship Earth, Matt Wolf’s layered, absorbing and sympathetic new documentary, is as a madly inventive primer on responsible dystopian-hermetic living. But the film — which is being shown at drive-in theaters, in pop-up cityscape projections and on multiple streaming platforms — would make for fascinating viewing under any circumstances.

Once the movie shifts gears, it’s less about the working man and more about the human. That sounds like a good thing, but the further Working Man creeps into emotionally over-calibrated basic cable territory, the less real it feels.

Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.

Amiably paced with comfortable, lived-in performances, Arkansas isn’t so much a crime drama or dark comedy as a depiction of a world in which illegal activities and their aftermath are simply part of a way of life.

It’s a Shakespearean rhapsody in indigo where love, friendship, betrayal and revenge swirl and blur with life-changing consequences.

Some would call this picture flattering — not unflattering, anyway — though it strikes me as a believable picture of a person who doesn’t need flattery, either to look good or to feel good about herself.

With The Infiltrators there is an audacity, an unrestrained boldness, to both the events depicted onscreen and the way in which they are portrayed in the movie itself.

The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.

As directed by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton, “Capital” is a sleek tour of economic history over the last 400 years or so.

What the Pierce brothers lack in flavorful storytelling or compelling characters, they almost entirely make up for in good old-fashioned atmosphere and suspense. The Wretched rarely surprises, but it’s well-crafted enough to get under your skin anyway, with an able assist from the creepy camerawork of cinematographer Conor Murphy and unsettling score by Devin Burrows.

The relative lack of “action” in Bull does mean the audience has to make more of an effort to engage with the film. But like the recent arthouse favorites “The Rider” and “Lean on Pete,” this movie has a rare sense of place. It preserves an entire world and the fragile people within it.

Tammy’s Always Dying is a richly observed comedy-drama. Johnson’s direction is intelligent and restrained.

Wu is confident enough to make the bold strokes her characters speak of and craft a movie that’s comfortably different.

With a patient and unobtrusive eye, filmmakers Lucas and Bresnan paint impressionistic portraits of a quartet of charismatic teenagers over the course of a pivotal school year.

True History of the Kelly Gang, for its part, strikes just the right balance of scary and crazy, and it subjects both to an impressive measure of discipline.

Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.

The highly decorated Cohn is a feminist heroine who definitely deserves her own cinematic close-up. This one’s a start, but perhaps there’s a star-driven narrative feature to be had that can more richly bring her striking story to life.

Barker and Borten have chosen to retain the documentary’s framing device of the rescue attempt. In the nonfiction film, it served as a propulsive engine, carefully balanced against the interviews that told Vieira de Mello’s story and its tragic conclusion. Here, it feels abstract, disjointed from the scenes with him and Carolina, thus weakening and muddying the story.

Extraction would be better if it just doubled down on being dumb. Instead, although the movie does indeed have some dazzling action sequences, they are interspersed with dramatic scenes that feel increasingly belabored, giving the movie a peculiar stop-start rhythm as it makes its way to a lumbering, extended gun battle final set piece.