I Am a Noise, beginning with Baez actually consulting a voice coach as she prepares for what will be a “farewell tour” (it was undertaken in 2019 before COVID hit the world), is a coherent, cohesive, and sometimes jarringly frank portrait.

Is the human brain built to absorb so much of "the world"? How do we filter anything? Matt Wolf's new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is an interesting meditation on these ideas, as well as a character study of a fascinating news-junkie with a mission.

The extremes uncovered in this film become revealing of what we accept as necessary, in what we as a nation rationalize as justice even without procedure. It is eye-opening, and yet also like Gibney’s best work, affirming in the worst ways.

A sharply crafted, highly entertaining portrait of two young Londoners who made their names and fortunes by managing a fledgling band called the High Numbers, who became The Who.

This film succeeds because it knows how to strike the right balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and quiet, effective drama. The clichés are there, but its heart beats loud enough for us to embrace and forgive them.

Petzold keeps his mystery afloat (sorry) thanks to his impeccable craft even if this is a tale that sometimes feels like it needed a more magical and less direct approach.

What makes it a better-than-average satire on the unthinking hostilities that human beings are prone to is its steady intelligence, combined with a humor sometimes so dry as to be undetectable.

In some ways, Stone’s soul seems part carnival huckster, part 19th century anarchist. A petri dish of toxic pathologies, he has come so far from his Goldwaterite beginnings he could now write his own book: A Conservative Without a Conscience.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an energetic, entertaining treat, full of noble heroes, fair maidens, evil villains, duels at dawn, and swashbuckling sword fights.

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men.

If the subject interests you, don’t let my mildly negative review dissuade you from going to see it. I would like to see it again myself, but this time in the version I can share with several of my relatives whose vision is no longer present.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

The film, directed by Jason Kohn (“Manda Bala” and “Love Means Zero”), turns the slogan “a diamond is forever” on its head with its title. Which is not about the durability of a diamond itself, but about the diamond market, which is being roiled by the high volume, and high quality, of synthetic diamonds.

An American independent film from the 1990s that just happens to have been released this year.

It offers up a deep and often fascinating dive into his oeuvre, utilizing a central conceit so nervy that most viewers will either marvel or recoil at its sheer audacity.

It almost cries out to be a Mike Leigh film starring Jim Broadbent and other members of the director’s stock company.

Overall, the film is superbly acted and a lot of fun to watch, which I suppose is not enough hardcore critical substance to hang three and a half stars on, but there you go.

With such great music coming, one hit after after another, it's always a joy to watch.

There is so much more to know about these people that Gianfranco Rosi’s film fails to communicate because of its prioritization of beautiful visuals over narrative contextualization, and while Notturno shares many moments of profound fragility and deep beauty, it also paints an incomplete portrait.

Harry Dean Stanton: Party Fiction takes a dreamy and philosophical approach, reflecting the personality of the man who is its subject.

This cockeyed, oblique attempt to get closer to the worldview of David Lynch — one of American cinema’s finest oddities — is a compelling slice of cinephile inquiry.

Stamped from the Beginning drives home Williams’ point that racism is so deeply embedded in our culture and society and that it takes this kind of fury to talk about it adequately.

The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

Did I mention this movie is a comedy? It is, and a very sure-footed one, although the style does take some getting used to.

This is one of the better indie comedies in a long time, enjoyable from minute one until the final frame, and deceptively insightful about the structure of the modern world, one that encourages us to do more with our free time but doesn’t offer much guidance to what exactly we should be doing.

Much stranger than fiction, and yet it tells a story that makes perfect sense in the age of influencers and the general need to be seen.

Breillat’s approach is technically intimate yet tonally detached -- languid as a summer’s day, sometimes unbearably so, and often uncomfortably warm.

The sheer musicality of Félicité signals Gomis’ refusal to be pigeonholed into any category of filmmaker.

It's a rapturous experience, mostly, though tempered by a certain Godardian crankiness. Watching it is, I would imagine, as close as we'll get to being able to be Godard, sitting there thinking, or dreaming. It's a documentary of a restless mind.

The main reason that Time to Choose feels different and has value is that it actually offer solutions and hope.

So much of “Influencers” works as well as it does because of Harder’s cleverly unpredictable and often remarkably funny script.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

Jinn holds several beautiful elements, especially in its central mother-daughter story.

There are times when Verhoeven is throwing so many ideas into his purposefully overcrowded screenplay that it starts to feel unfocused, like a dramatic version of the legendary "Aristocrats" joke. And yet there are also times when it feels like a culmination of his career, a film he was inevitably going to make in how it distills sexuality, corruption, broken systems, and provocation into one fascinating story.

The third film from writer/director Travis Stevens (“Jakob’s Wife,” “Girl on the Third Floor”) is forged in fire and blood, taking his eye for striking visuals and elevating it to psychedelic new heights.

It doesn’t deal in easy gags or low-hanging speeches. It understands both the thrill and the agony of desperately waiting for your dream to ripen on the vine.

The film represents a formidable achievement for Fiennes as both actor and director.

It features Cody’s hyper-verbal brand of snark, cynicism and subtle poignancy, but it’s tinged with the wistful perspective that comes from hard-earned maturity and experience.

The movie feels less like a prosecutorial document than an autopsy of a government's conscience, pinpointing the time of death.

Thyberg keeps her cards close throughout Pleasure, using the film’s verité framing to obscure the extent of her involvement as a director. The film feels even-handed, in the sense that its fly-on-the-wall style lets situations speak for themselves.

Time out of Mind seems to have been undertaken for no other reason than that the filmmakers and actors believed in the truth of the material. How many American movies can you say that about?

I’ve been trying to think when there was a historical drama I found as electrifying as Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. It may have been Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” which topped my 10-best list a dozen years ago.

Even if this documentary directed by Lisa Hurwitz had nothing else to recommend it, it would be worthwhile as an excellent source of Mel Brooks.

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in Nimona, a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy.

It’s always a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a movie. And it’s even more of a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a good movie. No, not a good movie. A really good movie.

If his work still shocks, it stirs the soul, for he was a classicist reaching for the perfect form.

I can't think of another recent domestic drama that is simultaneously so optimistic and so melancholic.

But the movie is best of all a showcase for Dyrholm’s full-fledged interpretation of Nico, who is distinctly removed from the poppiness anyone might have for her earlier work, whether it's the "Velvet Underground & Nico" or her solo record "Chelsea Girl."

With visual precision and remarkable intimacy, Hannah Olson's documentary The Last Cruise recalls the harrowing 40-day quarantine aboard the Princess Diamond cruise ship at the outset of the pandemic.

Nature is the most fascinating element of The Seer and the Unseen, but Dosa is more focused on Ragga and the elves.

Even at its most traumatic, Santosh gives viewers plenty to consider.

Stiller & Meara is a fascinating window into not only the history of this famous family but also the beautiful and punishing nature of performance itself.

As a distaff version of James Bond in Spy, Hollywood’s reigning empress of ha-ha Melissa McCarthy has a license to not just kill the audience with laughter but also to slay us with her acting skills.

Carpignano’s impressionistic plot and pseudo-naturalistic style also tends to boil down human emotions so as to only suggest rather than reveal complexity. The limiting style and characterizations in A Chiara are only so thoughtful.

Night Moves eschews traditional tension-building through plot twists and betrayals to focus on its characters, as Reichardt uses her increasingly impressive sense of composition and intuitive pacing to slow burn the audience into a state of anxiety instead of manipulatively pushing them there.

If you’re not enraptured with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and the rest of the artists at Ghibli, it may not be precisely what you’re looking for, but Sanada captures something poetic about art and creativity that could speak to anyone, animation fan or otherwise.

This is Friedkin on the movie. And what he does have to say, after all this time and so many articles and movies touching on “The Exorcist,” is still engaging, fascinating, and entertaining.

A more audacious film, bolder and more violent than its predecessor. It’s also surprisingly hilarious, wringing humor from physical pratfalls and dry wit in unexpected moments.

Within about a half hour, what seemed at first banal is in fact oppressive. With deliberate pacing, minimal dialogue, and solid acting from the leads, the movie makes its point felt about marriage.

The screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift is sharp and funny, and contains knowing insights about misogyny in the workplace and the shifting dynamic between a toxic male boss and an overlooked and mistreated female employee. Mostly, though, “Send Help” is about paying your ticket for an R-rated, Sam Raimi thrill ride with projectile vomiting, flying ropes of blood, and a handful of scenes that fly so off the rails that you wonder if we’re in the middle of a dream sequence, or the mayhem is real.

In recalling his youthful days in an insular neighborhood in the titular city, Branagh has made a film that’s both intimate and ambitious—his Roma, if you’ll forgive the inevitable comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s recent masterpiece.

Unrest is an intriguing period piece but a flawed curio that never quite achieves its soul-stirring goals.

As the film goes from profound life experience to profound life experience, stuck between gathering information and growing art from its themes, the documentary proves to be more noble than notable.

Civil War is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

Like all great movies, Blindspotting is a force to be reckoned with and wrestled with. No matter where you land in your assessment, your expectations are guaranteed to be shattered.

Viewers will find themselves entertained and curious to get home and see just how many of the records in their collections bear the creative imprint of these guys.

The dramatic, personal story of Colvin herself is absorbingly told here, largely because of Pike’s dynamic performance, showing us a woman who was courageous enough to risk her life for a story on a daily basis but remained vulnerable enough to make the stories viscerally compelling.

Despite the sense sometimes that Moselle isn’t driving “Wolfpack” in the way needed to make it truly work, she undeniably finds some beautiful moments in the trajectory of the Angulos, although they are sometimes so fleeting as to frustrate when they aren’t further developed.

Similar to “Gravity” or “Avatar,” it offers viewers experiences that can only be seen in large scope storytelling, this one coming with the budget of NASA trips to the International Space Station.

Infinite Football is as casual as a conversation with a stranger that ends up going for more than hour — the kind where just by being attentive and sporadically asking questions, you take away someone’s life story, and understand the one passion they could talk about on end.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

Hammer is a tense little thriller, a tight movie about someone who made a very bad decision and is now trying to fight his way out of it.

For black kids it's so much about the identities and misconceptions thrust upon them. Despite the film’s notable strengths, this is a careful distinction that writer/director Chad Hartigan misses, much to the film’s detriment.

I got more enjoyment from reading Parlow’s exceptional interview in the production notes than I did from any given scene in the movie, some of which are so murky, they border on incoherent.

Rest assured, finding out whether an on-screen couple have what it takes has rarely felt this cutting, and, ultimately, this rewarding.

While this is a true story, Ozon goes the fictional movie route, taking a bit of dramatic license while keeping most of the actual details intact. The director impressively juggles the large scope of his script while maintaining the sense of intimacy for his male actors that he normally reserves for his female characters.

It emerges as an artistic statement as multi-faceted, nuanced and hauntingly original as any of its fictional counterparts.

It’s a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

The bad news is, there are about ten movies going on in Captain America: Civil War, which is at least seven too many. The good news is, most of them are fun, and there are enough rousing moments to elevate the movie to Marvel's top tier.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

In a sense, Jones’ musical talent and originality, as well as his status as a pioneer of world music, are alluded to more than seriously examined and appraised, and that must be counted as a lack in the film.

Nina Forever subverts audience expectations at every turn and develops the kind of genuine emotional power that keeps it from being just another gory goof.

Hargitay’s approach is intuitive in a really courageous way, because she’s so open to the process, to her own pain and loss. Behind every frame, you feel her need to understand, to learn, to look.

A quasi-romantic variant of “After Hours” that perhaps stretches itself a little too far, but it is always enjoyable and sometimes quite moving.

She was a true talent. And yet Maloof and Siskel’s film presents an interesting moral quandary along with its profile of an amazing photographer. When does creative ability and the desire to share a true artist’s eye trump what has to be considered an invasion of privacy?

Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment, and the girls' casual comments about rape (just one example) stand in stark contrast.

It’s as if the film doesn’t trust Frida’s images to speak for themselves.

Super Dark Times has a deeply unnerving mood, more unnerving than "what happens."

A well-intentioned documentary that makes the puzzling miscalculation of upstaging the Armenian Genocide with “The Promise.”

It’s an admirably vicious piece of work when it wants to be—although arguably could have gone even further and more frequently.

With “SALLY,” Costantini delivers a doc that speaks to the heart and goals of someone who redefined what it means to break barriers.

Carroll’s film never loses sight of Kennedy. It would be almost impossible to do so. She’s a prickly character, an energetic curmudgeon who wields her sharp tongue as readily as she cuts tomatoes with a knife. She will not suffer fools asking her to change recipes or vendors trying to sell her items that don’t meet her high standards. She’s an intimidating presence, even in her old cooking shows from decades ago, who seems unforgiving of mistakes.

Mayor doesn’t feature an impassioned speech detailing the Palestinian people’s ardent plight for freedom because it doesn’t need one. Watching the confrontation in near real time, with lives on the line—a testimony to Hadid’s utmost commitment and hands-on leadership—conveys a forthright message.

While the cast may not include any names that are familiar in these parts, they are all effortlessly charming and engaging throughout.

If this material were compiled into a book, it would be rightfully deemed great literature. As featured in Heise’s film, however, these insightful words are frequently marred by a style oddly akin to a mournful podcast, one that requires listeners to repeatedly peer at their phone to read the subtitles.

The Man in the Basement doesn’t endorse a single answer; it ends on a deliberately tentative note, leaving the viewer thoroughly unsettled.

A well-done but all-too-woeful wallow of a documentary.

It's as visually indistinct and paint-by-numbers-plot-driven as most Marvel Comics-based projects, especially the gaggle of recent Avengers-related films.