Bill Stamets

This moving, Oscar-nominated documentary is an odyssey of a tragic observer.

Algren admirer Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist and a Long Island neighbor, called the Chicago exile ”the loneliest man I ever knew.” Caplan and Mueller invite viewers to befriend this contrary figure.

Michael Caplan’s Algren is a beguiling appreciation of the novelist, reporter and essayist.

[Kirby Dick's] new documentary enrages, yet makes its case in an even-tempered manner.

Hogtown is the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date.

Resisting screen rules is Godard’s forte.

The masterful script deals with telling words.

Servillo charms in his dual turn, then takes it up a notch when one brother shows off his childhood knack for impersonating his look-alike.

A paean to creative impulses, this work channels the vision of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

Volker Schlondorff’s talky drama...is less than persuasive.

This thoughtful film is designed with taste. Music is minimal. Cuing a little Nine Inch Nails at the end, Poitras enables “citizenfour” to commit an act of reverse surveillance on the NSA.

[A] slightly diverting documentary.

Hicks may devote too much time on hospital errands and bedside moments as Terry’s health declines. But he succeeds at honoring the career of one man who is helping another’s.

Level Five (1996) is a poetic if occasionally opaque film essay on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

This understated documentary, though, has no agenda to shame any one family or agency.

The Identical evangelizes and entertains with sincere mediocrity. If the style is unremarkably mainstream, the message is theologically murky.

Writer-director Hiroyuki Okiura, however, does not match the high expectations for story and design set by other Japanese animators.

Puenzo’s initial premise is more promising, though, than her sensational tone.

Filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller unfortunately adopts the format of prime-time docu-tainment.

In the introspective The Last Sentence Swedish director Jan Troell invokes ’50’s and ’60’s Swedish cinema: masterly black-and-white cinematography, philosophical angst, a lifeless marriage and loved ones visiting from the afterlife.

A disquieting film about testing faith.

Hoogendijk is a guest with more tact than curiosity about why a three-year plan went so over schedule.

Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer, Paul Harris Boardman, deliver a routine procedural with unremarkable frights.

Instead of venturing outside Outpost Restrepo, we hear what the soldiers feel about their 15-month deployment.

Supermensch sells the impression that its subject is a genuinely good guy.

Shapiro fails to sell Shavitz as the “wise and wry, ornery and opinionated” figure the press notes promise. No opinion, wise or otherwise, is uttered by this rustic quasi-eccentric, let alone a green ethos.

Despite our narrow angle on Nepal, Manakamana peers into lives at close range.

Snappy graphics channel the info flow like a sugar rush. Scary music cues are overused. Narrator Katie Couric wisely stays offscreen. That keeps Fed Up from feeling like an Oprah special.