MLK/FBI demonstrates documentary film’s ability to assemble and contextualize historical facts in a provocative and insightful way, and it’s a perfect launching pad for further exploration of the government’s assault on dissent and civil rights, not to mention the news and entertainment media’s acquiescence in being used as a propaganda arm.

He offers glimmers of what lies beneath the near-mythic, elegant exterior, but Larrain’s take is more impressionistic than revelatory, more presumptuous than knowing.

With bleak serenity of a man who has peered into the abyss and responded with a smile, the filmmaker offers no answer or easy way out to the intractable, and perhaps foundational, human capacity for hate than with his own virtuosic talent.

It's a lengthy burlesque on paranoia, on conspiracies both real and imagined, so dazed in its color schemes that Anderson clearly wants you to get stoned watching it. But the sense of being blissfully out-of-it, which can have its pleasures, soon drifts into another aspect of drug use: detachment.

Wardle spent five years making Three Identical Strangers after several other filmmakers had given up on this subject because they were always hitting a dead end, and so he deserves credit for journalistic doggedness and also for making a documentary that plays like a nerve-jangling thriller.

In other hands, this film could go kitsch, could all be a big joke, but Fargeat directs Lutz like no other Rambo-style action hero before her.

Midnight Family is both a compassionate portrait of a working-class family and a frightening ride through a broken healthcare system that risks the lives of both patients and providers like the Ochoa family.

A doc that always feels a little removed from its subject, as if Turner wasn’t fully committed to going through it all again.

There’s no real tonal conflict between the lightness of the comedy and the import of the issues it is addressing; American Fiction runs on serious conversations that are never bogged down by being treated too seriously.

It’s a film about hubris, selfishness, failed bureaucracies, and a stubborn inability to learn from past mistakes.

The wistfulness on display is touching and funny, often both at the same time.

In spite of an excessive, metaphor-bash of an ending — forgivable when everything else on screen is this frenziedly fun — In Fabric seduces like its bias-cut main character, then taunts you for your desire.

The performances are uniformly fantastic, but I was most impressed by Wright Joseph and Nyong’o, both delivering distinct and completely unique work. Nyong’o gives a master class in acting in dual roles and is almost unrecognizable as her doppelgänger persona.

The film’s compassion for everyday Americans...along with its energetic determination to entertain, enlighten, and infuriate make it a laudable surprise.

Moana does what it does so well that you wish its makers had imbued it with some X factor that separates the classics from the merely beloved.

A marvel of cinematic craftsmanship, Shadow acts curiously as both a return to form for Zhang Yimou and a perceptible departure. Not only are his characters more physically grounded, but his writing also seeks more ties to emotional reality even if the stories are still far from commonplace.

In laying out the facts, Costa is, for the most part, posing a series of sad questions rather than supplying the answers; in truth, she may not know whether she’s documenting a stormy political era or chronicling the end of something.

Premature captures that unexpected, earth-shattering moment in life when you realize adulthood, real adulthood, is not so simple and cute. It’s difficult, it’s scary, and it’s heartbreaking at times. That’s what Howard’s beautiful performance conveys.

It’s a shame that Lessin and Pildes don’t tell us what these amazing women went on to do after the Collective ended. But they all remain, half a century later, passionate and eloquent and thoughtful and fierce.

The best surprise in A Fantastic Woman might be how lived-in Marina’s existence feels despite the tenuousness of her housing, her romantic fulfillment, and her legal rights.

The Go-Go’s tackles the seminal all-female ’80s rock band with such honesty, openness and effervescence that it not only rises above that clichéd, almost telegraphed arc but transcends the ranks of other music documentaries to offer a story you desperately want to keep watching, even when you already know where it’s going.

The film is not alienating; it does not obfuscate its intentions. Pizzi knew what he wanted to make, and what he has made is a touching yarn about the pangs of familial maturation.

It’s powerful, provocative and devastating, blending the incisive power of dramatic emotion with the immediacy of the evening news.

Come See Me in the Good Light is a tender expression of love conquering all despite the burden of needing to go against the wind.

As crushing as it is stirring, the gritty fable co-written for the screen by Clapin and Laurant (“Amélie,” “A Very Long Engagement”) finds an ideal visual medium in the filmmaker’s evocative animation.

Johnson freely bounces around buzzwords like “disruptors” and “influencers” with dripping mockery, but he stops way short of satire. He never entices us to take an active interest in this new cast of characters, and there isn’t much suspense or high stakes to speak of even when things start to head south.

Anchored by a pair of extraordinary child performances and titled like something you’d scrawl fondly under a faded photograph in a well-thumbed album, Summer 1993 is a delicately brushed memory of confusion and joy, as if the movie itself can only smile awkwardly — and eventually, tearfully — as it looks back trying to make sense of it all.

Breathing rare emotional truth into on-screen depictions of small children and the parents who raise them, Hosoda’s unassumingly sumptuous Mirai is a hand-drawn miracle, rivaling Pixar and Ghibli’s efforts to devise family entertainment with a complex and humanistic edge.