Alan Scherstuhl

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

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

Double-stuffed with kill squads, killer ’80s couture and mood-killing howlers, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo is more a greatest hits than a story, the kind of radically compressed life-of-a-legend movie where everything happens in a giddy, ridiculous gush — except for when it slows down to dwell on horrors.

While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.

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.

Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another 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?

Turteltaub is too buoyant for horror — the deaths and danger never sink in.

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

By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.

It’s hard to appreciate the hero’s crafty planning when we can’t really make out what he’s crafted.

The good intentions it carries out to the plains don’t make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist’s clear vision.

The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.

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.

The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it — and even, at times, its welcoming warmth.

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.

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

The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.

Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab.

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.

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

Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.

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.

The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.

It’s stuck between earnest examination of a case and exploitative hustle — and is unlikely to please the audiences interested in either.

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.

ACORN and the Firestorm fumbles with the media story, offering cable-news talking heads in montage but not digging deeply into how the story spread — or why elected Democrats believed they had to shut Acorn down. That sense of fumbling shapes the film.