The Librarians is a documentary about the hysterical, unfounded, personal, and sometimes violent attacks on librarians. It is also about their unwavering commitment to making facts, literature, and inspiration available to anyone.

This is a good film, but change would be a much greater achievement. How much longer must we studiously document senseless suffering?

It doesn't move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I've seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters -- and of life itself -- is rare and precious.

20 Days in Mariupol, about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, spares no one's sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the images are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory.

While the film’s slightly bloated finale overpowers some of the leaner moments that come before it, Turning Red flickers with a bright feminine spirit, one that feels new, crimson-deep, and unapologetically rebellious.

As we tag along with Haroun’s characters, we learn to appreciate their story as a small, but vivid study of lives that are so much more than their progressive developments.

Several of To's recent films concern economic upheaval and its effect on personal relationships, but Office is one of his recent best because it makes something as dire as a financial crisis seem like a natural subject for a modern musical.

The dual nature of “Babi Yar. Context” as both an essay movie and a cut-up historic document might create an uneasy tension with viewers who would like to know more about whatever they’re looking at. If nothing else, Loznitsa succeeds at being upsetting.

Last seen in “Starred Up” and Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” O’Connell continues to bring equal measures of toughness and vulnerability to his characters. Despite his good looks, there’s an everyman’s quality to him, which he uses to full effect in ’71.

In a sea of so much tragedy, it’s a marvel to stop and consider each individual’s experience fighting the tide.

A brilliant genre exercise, a cinematic study in tension, sound design, and how to make a thrilling movie with a limited tool box. The film’s own restrictions actually amplify the tension, forcing us into the confined space of its protagonist.

Of all of the things Tatiana Huezo captures in Prayers for the Stolen, her first narrative feature, the terror of the night is most unnerving.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

My own taste runs to different modes of poetic cinema, but I credit The Girl and the Spider for the seemingly paradoxical clarity of its mysterious vision.

Full Time looks and sounds like a nail-biting thriller and tells a story that many viewers will be able to relate to on an intensely personal level.

This is a frustrating documentary, in that it honors the work of its subject with wide-screen cinematography and leaves-crunching sound design, but as a viewing experience cannot shake the overall feeling of a dirge.

Predators often seems to be going for an Errol Morris-style, “What is the truth, and what does the word even mean?” approach that’s equally explanatory and philosophical. It succeeds a lot of the time, but other times seems to get bogged down in tangents that take it too far away from the central issues.

I found it compelling for its depiction of the mechanics of the current athletic scene and the triumphs and tragedies that occur along the way. It may not leave you cheering in the end, but it will give you something to think about the next time the Olympics come around.

While it’s ultimately a bit too self-conscious to provoke the existential dread and true terror of the best films like it, it’s still an impressive accomplishment thanks to Eggers’ fearlessness and a pair of completely committed performances.

Việt and Nam only initially looks like something that you might expect to find on John Waters’ Best of the Year list. Soon enough the movie becomes a gentle romance about loving the dead.

Rose Plays Julie is very controlled in its style: this control reaps huge rewards.

It's truly refreshing to watch a film where nobody has anything figured out, where life proceeds messily and imperfectly. Saint Frances is unpredictable in a very human way.

It’s a really difficult film to capture tonally and even narratively in a review, largely because it is such a stylish, visceral experience that it demands you give yourself over to it actively instead of passively analyzing it.

It is a true peek into the life of a private superstar. How did he become a rock icon? How did he turn his childhood pain into art? How did his emotional demons overtake him? These are much more difficult questions for a filmmaker to answer than “Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam” or other such garbage of the traditional rock doc.

The most pleasurable aspect of 20th Century Women (and it's pleasurable throughout) is that it allows itself to be messy.

Love remains distinct, given its unsparing view of people as flawed and not very sure of themselves.

Qhile this particular story takes place nearly a decade ago, it remains unfortunately timely as Russia’s horrific war in Ukraine rages on; Klondike helps put a specific, vivid face on a faraway conflict.

What makes La Camioneta so interesting is not so much the story that it tells as it is the way that Kendall has chosen to tell it.