What a Mank viewer should be alert to is its achievement not just as a movie about a movie, or even moviemaking, but about the mechanics of cinema and storytelling.

The story told is the stuff of outrageous sci-fi, at least to those of us without doctorates in biology or medicine.

Complicated real-life people have become narrative conventions in a movie full of character types and glib dialogue.

This is funny stuff, contained in a film with terrific timing, punctuated by adoring surveys of New York City, some moody jazz notes and cutaways to commentary from the movie's Greek chorus of neighbors and merchants in Harlem.

The Glorias, an overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem's life, commits various sins of self-indulgence, as is the wont of film director Taymor.

If you're attracted by the idea of a film that probes the hair's breadth between the ritual and the spiritual, the devotional and the obsessive, and the visionary and the mad, this particular movie might well haunt your dreams.

Told with no small amount of urgency, immediacy and visual elegance by directors Jules and Gédéon Naudet, aided by some first-rate editing by the veteran Deborah Peretz.

Ms. Richen has a problematic subject for a documentary, and the problems extend beyond the limitations of footage. She needs to sell the event, thus her lineup of marginally relevant characters gushing about it.

[Iannucci] is clearly at home with sprawling casts of characters and comfortable allowing them to chew the scenery when the mood comes over them.

It scores a point for faith by exploring doubt.

Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way.

Comedy is always welcome, until it wears out its welcome. "HA Festival," being as brisk as it is, never runs a risk of crashing into boredom, certainly, or even losing its way.

In addition to creating a documentary with elements of a thriller, director Muta'Ali Muhammad takes a tidy inventory of the people and outrages that made up the political profile of New York at the time.

It has some savvy things to say about social media, assimilation and a specifically American condition: the peculiar mix of embarrassment and pride (and guilt) one can harbor about one's ethnic origins.

[Spinster evolves] from an example of cinematic misanthropy into something alternately sweet, triumphant, and just a little melancholic.

The Ashman story itself is the stuff of a Broadway musical. It just needed some music -- what's here is doled out in penurious and unsatisfying morsels.

It's a collision of talents, technique and even philosophy: The much-honored Mr. Rylance can be an antidote to actorly artifice; Mr. Depp is a delivery system for eccentricity.

What Mr. Moland is after, in tackling an "unfilmable" novel, is evidenced in the visual tone, emotional content and Mr. Skarsgård's mutely eloquent performance.

A story that needed to be told, about a subject the athletes seem not only happy but relieved to share.

The doc places its subject among the great Catholic writers.