It's tempting to call The Four Times documentary-like, except that documentaries usually explain what it is we are seeing. Instead, Frammartino uses his background as a video installation artist to create something that one could just as easily come across playing at an art gallery.

An acutely observed chamber piece played out by two exceptionally well-cast actors who keep you guessing about the subtle shifts in their characters’ relationship, this is an unflinching account of human lives rendered disposable by greed and corruption.

Thoughtful performances and earnest (if especially subtle) writing keep the film compelling enough until its final minutes, which are even more startling in their heart-wrenching effectiveness than in their mind-bending twists.

Wellesians will vigorously debate the aesthetic results of this torturously achieved accomplishment but, to the credit of those who, against daunting odds and nearly a half-century's worth of obstacles, arduously pushed this project to completion, the end result feels like a plausible fulfillment of the style Welles himself established for it.

An assured nonfiction storyteller, Smith works with editor Joey Scoma to weave together a nonstop, inventive collage of ephemera around concert footage, music videos, pre-existing and new interviews and a generous sampling of Mark’s graphic arts contributions, often spinning into animation.

Arnold plunges us straight into her subject’s point-of-view and never leaves it until the bitter end, during a final scene that’s shocking in its bluntness.

Thorny, blood-boiling and finely made.

Less a political movie than a boxing film without the gloves.

Comprising seven individual films with a cumulative running time of more than 8 1/2 hours, Have You Heard From Johannesburg (the title comes from a Gil Scott-Heron song) naturally will find a more receptive home on television and home video, but New York's Film Forum, presenting it in three parts, is to be commended for giving the series its world theatrical premiere.

It is fresh and spontaneous, plausible at its most logically improbable, thanks to Altman's superior direction, Lardner's script, the fine selection of actors and to an omnipresent camera under director of photography Harold E. Stine and operator Bill Mendenhall.

Which Way is the Front Line is more than a chronicle of a life and a brilliant ten-year career cut short at age 40. It’s also a strangely beautiful insight into one man’s distinctive way of looking at and experiencing war.

Refreshingly free of the tired human-interest personality profiles that afflict sports documentaries on both the big and small screens, director Eryk Rocha has created an impressionistic, visually stunning cinematic essay.

By focusing his camera on those “half-men, completely broken” by Habre’s reign and allowing them to tell their stories, Haroun is helping his country to finally mourn its own tragedy, while his warm and understanding approach offers up what feels like a path toward appeasement.

At first, the writer-director’s onscreen presence feels like an unnecessary distraction, and it could certainly be pared down. But as his interviews push deeper into the situation — and its overlap with the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — his investigative methods and congenial manner of confrontation prove productive, the results compelling and revelatory.

The script dares to go deep and confront what is going on in the hearts and minds of all three family members, but it does so articulately and without hysteria.

Most importantly, the pic gets laughs out of the class system without being glib about its cruelties. The gulf between rich and poor clearly matters to Huang, who poignantly shows how poverty robs even the dead of dignity.

Lee's direction is utterly masterful: delicate, lively, rambunctious and spontaneous all at once. The performances are similarly splendid, particularly Sihung Lung as the embroiled father and Chien-Lien Wu as his careerist daughter. [03 Aug 1994]

Harka darts between genre conventions: One minute it feels like a thriller, the next a heart-wrenching drama, another a psychological study. When the risky mix-and-match works — and sometimes it doesn’t — the results are emotionally potent. Nathan is fascinated by desperation, the kind that roots itself in the mind and soul. What lengths will a desperate person go to in order to survive? That is the essential, thrilling question coursing through Harka.

Gariépy, masterful in her emotional and physical exactness, is a revelation as the enigmatic Kelly-Anne, whose stringent control over herself and her environment masks a sick compulsion whose origins we can only guess at.

With its fine mix of dark humor, healthy anger and self-compassion, this portrait of the artist as a young woman is the work of an inspired filmmaker, and it was worth the wait.

Filled with beauty and fury, the film offers an immersive portrait of an endangered community.

The film captures with enormous sweetness feelings probably familiar to many queer adolescents still figuring out who they are — of insecurity, questioning and giddy crushes on frequently unattainable objects of desire.

Borenstein and Talankin keep the focus mainly on the kids and the slow creep of authoritarianism, rather than the adults, but Pasha’s voiceover and occasional address to camera hint at qualities the filmmakers seem hesitant to discuss.

Feels lavish by normal documentary standards and will have great appeal in such F1 hotbeds as Europe and South America.

Attanasio has made a sharp, affecting film that's brimming with darkness and hope, every instant of it vividly alive.

Beyond the Hills is less fun than any film about lesbian nuns and their psychotic ex-lovers ought to be. But it is an engrossingly serious work, and confirms Mungiu as a maturing talent with more universal stories to tell than those defined by Romania’s recent political past.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intriguingly titled Wife of a Spy (Spy no Tsuma) bookends the Second World War in an absorbing, exotic, well-paced thriller with moments of disconcerting realism and horror.

Serves to not only put a very human face on this horrific condition but also as a triumphant valedictory of Campbell's poignant farewell tour.