Alan Scherstuhl

It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.

Christopher Felver's stumbling hagiography Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder does no wrong by its celebrated subject-- but it never illuminates him, either.

An energetic, well-acted, handsomely mounted b&w literary tell-all whose script would be laughed out of the room by its famous subjects.

Swanberg has made an inspiring career out of rejecting the aesthetic crimes of Hollywood. It's dispiriting, then, that he so doggedly indulges in its tradition of male gazing.

Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.

This movie's got everything except gravity or a sense of emotional coherence.

Lead Mia Wasikowska looks convincingly miserable in the role of a young wife who's driven to seek her pleasures outside the marital bed, but whatever complexities roil in the character's heart and head are nowhere to be found on her face.

This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.

It's dispiriting that a film about a humor magazine that broke and rebuilt the forms of both humor and magazines is itself so staid — and so lacking in sociologic sweep.

Since it’s hard to buy the character, it’s hard to buy the story, no matter how good Macdonald is.

Condon, like this Holmes, can't quite keep everything in his story straight and clear, but he and his film come close just often enough.

This is a crowd-pleaser, and it's no surprise it snagged the audience award for documentaries at Sundance last winter. Getting to these moments is a bit of a climb itself, though.

The key relationships are well drawn, if not especially revealing of anything human, and director Fletcher sometimes dares some welcome absurdity. But if you've seen movies built from the same parts as this one, you'll likely find this too familiar—but energetic, well-acted, and distinguished by artfully artless chatter.

It's a mistake, I think, that the movie never addresses the fact that a camera crew is following Shaw around.

With rasps and desperate eyes, Gugino communicates Jessie’s thinking and planning so powerfully that cutaways to that other Jessie, the chatty vision, egging her on, prove redundant.

It’s almost as if, in their fascination with trauma, the filmmakers have forgotten entirely what everyday life looks like.

Field can't make it all make sense, but she does make it diverting, even pleasurable.

It's too bad...that a movie so attuned to natural currents in the end gets caught up in Hollywood's impossible ones.

Gere jabbers amusingly, and there's something touching in his Norman's persistence.

The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.

Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.

The film is sometimes too sentimental, too predictable in its drift, but electric in individual moments.

The film is admirably committed to simulating the messy experience of life as a real Maisie might live it. But sometimes, as she's tuckered out on her exquisite linens beneath gorgeous exposed brick and shelves of handcrafted toys, Maisie's world feels easier to admire than it is to worry over.

As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.

Revisiting Beast may prove more satisfying than just visiting once. The first time through, the film simply proves too successful at capturing the listless ennui it’s depicting.

While overstuffed and scattershot, this episodic documentary makes a vital argument: That American popular music, especially the blues and rock ’n’ roll, owe much more to Native Americans than has been commonly credited.

You know that moment about fifteen minutes before the end of most American narrative features, when the protagonist is brought to his or her low point, and it looks as if there’s no possible way things could get better? Something has probably gone wrong if viewers are cheering that.

Fortunately, Live From New York! isn't all overblown hagiography.

You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you may not, as Rage offers exactly what you think a Nic Cage movie called Rage would, except maybe for continually inspired lunacy.

It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.

As with the Twilight series, The Host's infelicities—drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than there is story—are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities.

That Guy Dick Miller is a cheery and likable film, one that bops along the surface of its story with lots of interviews, too-quick film clips, and spazzy-quirky-tootling music meant to let us know how fun all this is.

The persuasive power of individual moments suggests that director William Eubank has a bright future — and could push himself harder when writing his scripts.

The moment-to-moment inventions are great fun, but the larger narrative inventions are less inspired.

The performances are strong and the scenecraft absorbing.

Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter.

Too much of the movie feels like notes toward a portrait rather than the portrait itself, and Mock's failure to nail down the Thomas case drains the power from the victory-lap scenes of Hill addressing adoring crowds.

Landscapes and lyric conundrums distinguish the first two-thirds of this find-your-own-meaning artflick, which unfurls like some stranger's life you're half reliving.

Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.

Commercial filmmaking still fumbles interiority and moral complexity. So it’s fortunate for the filmmakers that Brierley's book also is thick with the kinds of things that crowdpleasers ace.

It’s hard not to wish, as Scheinfeld's restless film hustles along to touch its next base, that we could just sit and listen to more from Shorter, who actually has insight to share. Lord knows the movie won’t make time to let us hear some John Coltrane.

It's often more The Office than le Carré, and none of it's anywhere as interesting as the great counter-historical gag at the film's heart.

Powell can be evasive and embarrassed at times — who wouldn’t be, faced with the worst of your own youthful mind? But Siskel seems to think this film is exposing a monster in the now rather than witnessing a man wrestle with his past selves.

A time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot.

Rob Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There's little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one -- it's just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands.

The family squabbles jangle the nerves while not hitting on insights or memorable emotion.

The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd.

The film fails as a portrait, and it's not much better at drama.

The Conjuring's problem, beyond its lack of a conjuring, is how its otherworldly hokum is stubbornly of this world.

Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.

When it slows down, when it gives you time to think, Popstar reveals its weaknesses.

Simply put, the care and thoughtfulness that goes into footage-faking has not been applied to the film's script or structure.

The film creates a conflicting impression: Here’s a committed wonk and public servant seizing every opportunity he can to combat what appears to be the greatest danger facing our planet. But here’s also a man who would sign off on a movie that so often sets aside his message so that we might admire him and his work.

Active Measures is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the mind. By coming on so strong, so fevered, Bryan achieves the dubious feat of making his host of documented facts, reasonable inferences, and alarming subjects for further research all seem seem less persuasive than if they had been presented more soberly.

For all its stellar nature photography, its low hum of suspense, and Gedeck's raw and affecting performance, the film often feels like an illustrated audiobook rather than narrative drama.

Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported exposé than it is cliché-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes.

A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.

It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.

The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.

The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.

The crew's recollections and occasional demonstrations, on their instruments, are revealing and delightful, but the film itself could use more of their professionalism and chops; the editing's haphazard, and it's not always clear why one segment follows another.

The movie undercuts its own undercutting.

LA 92 is about what this all looked like on TV, a sort of Los Angeles Burns Itself.

The film soars early as a fantasy steeped in life and crashes into a drag of a crime drama, one ripped from the movies rather than anyone's idea of small-town Colorado.

Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.

It’s a Rocky movie, just the latest go-round, its story more formulaic, its people less specific, its rhythms as wheezily familiar as a workout you should have changed up weeks ago. It’s a diminishment of Creed, a dumbing down, just as Rocky II was a diminishment of Rocky.

In between Storks' bumptious best and worst are its uncertain quiet patches.

Rather than reveal a showman, The Reagan Show in the end imitates one.

The mayhem is hypnotic, scabrous, scarifying, unpredictable, astonishing, dispiriting, repetitious, clearly both amoral and immoral, and by the end, a little dull. Even over the short running time, you can feel your humanity’s diminishment.

The Widers opt for much footage of the still-empty house itself, inside and out, shot by gently gliding cameras. This conveys an appropriate lonely stillness, a sense of a soul wandering a static world, especially in early scenes, but by the end the footage seems repetitious – yes, we’ve nosed around this sad doorway before.

Some of the surprise works, but the final gotcha won't getcha.

Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.

The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.

It's all shocking, of course, but it also often looks staged and performed rather than merely observed.

Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.

Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.

Disconnect might play better a decade from now, when it's more clearly a compendium of contemporary fears rather than some dire expression of them.

The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.

What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?

Some moments still work after the movie grows mawkish.

Once it gets going, it's fine, a somewhat scattered précis of the life and accomplishment of one of the 20th century's towering musicians, activists, and curiosities.

The filmmakers observe rather than interview or investigate, and much of the film is footage of actual church-sanctioned exorcisms.

The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.

Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?

Davis holds forth memorably on the histories of country, blues, and rock 'n' roll. (He played with Chuck Berry.) But neither he nor Accidental Courtesy has much time to consider the scene with the BLM activists, who, in the film's schematic presentation, get depicted as something like a Klan equivalent — just less friendly.

The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.

There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.

Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.

The movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.

All that prickly inner conflict Ruffalo is so adept at suggesting? Cheery Begin Again wants none of it, offering instead lots of scenes of two characters we don't believe could ever exist arguing about authenticity in pop music.

For all its familiarity and rote nastiness, the film's sharply crafted and quite promising.

It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.

Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey's debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off.

The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.

Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit.

The film itself is more a record than a narrative: proof to the future that, yeah, we knew.

The movie — based on Les Standiford’s novel — is pleasantly simpleminded, often assembled from parts of other movies.