Alan Scherstuhl

Often, a scene-survey doc that takes on so much — cultural history, present-day portraiture, regional distinctions, celebrity interviews, fly-on-the-wall reportage — can play as scattershot. That’s not so with United Skates. Round and round it flows — why not jump on in?

Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.

The film unfolds as a sort of first-person procedural, a vivid step-by-step account of a reporting trip to hell.

Too often, viewers just have to take a movie love story’s word for it that its characters actually belong together. Not so in Carlos Marques-Marcet’s loose, observant Anchor and Hope.

Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.

When Jared finally erupts, Hedges nimbly navigates the character’s hurt, fear and burgeoning pride — his relief at having at last found his voice.

Wiseman doesn’t engage with immigration or migrant labor in his town portrait, which helps make Monrovia, Indiana a stubborn entry into his canon. Many of his subjects are invested in the continuity of what they perceive as a timeless American normalcy, but they’re too polite — and cagey — to say what that means on camera.

Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.

It’s a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how’d-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium.

The film, a sort of cinematic state-of-the-arts speech, is endlessly warm, playful and lovable, a sprawling and prankish hangout comedy with no clear precedent.

The second half proves somewhat darker but also more brazenly inventive in its scene craft. If Part One centered on the role of the arts in the lives of these characters and their community, Part Two finds their lives becoming art. Suddenly, song-and-dance numbers break out in parking lots and coffee shops.

The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.

Dano’s film is shrewd and exacting, composed with rigor yet alert to the rhythms of its performers.

Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.

The Kindergarten Teacher dares us to work out for ourselves, from moment to moment, whether Lisa is a hero, a monster or something in-between

While watching the film, I not only laughed a lot and gasped oh, shit! in the right places. I somehow never once found myself tempted to sneak a peek at my phone to check in on our real American hellscape.

The Hate U Give takes time to focus on the nuances of Starr’s life, on the effort of code-switching, on the layers of self that Starr must sort through in everyday interactions.

Jenkins (director of The Savages and Slums of Beverly Hills) is always more interested in emotional truth than she is in laughs. Throughout Private Life’s tense 124 minutes, she continually achieves both.

Rather than a tragic inevitability or a comic detachment, the final scenes have about them the whiff of resignation, possibly meaningful or possibly not.

To watch Honnold think through each ledge of his climbs can stop the heart; to watch him navigate human emotion might melt it.

As her marriage opens up, and Colette begins to take lovers of her own, Knightley summons up a moving sense of both relief and recklessness. This Colette is thrilled suddenly to have new options, but she’s committed to pushing for more.

Since the movie is in such a hurry, we’re not given much chance to soak in this strangeness. Making up for it: Black is paired with Blanchett, who plays a neighboring witch in smashing violet skirt ensembles; the two rat-a-tat insults at each other like a vaudevillian comedy duo.

Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.

Stephen Maing’s searing documentary Crime + Punishment offers a fuller look at the question of what can be accomplished from inside, revealing both the personal toll fighting the system can exact but also the urgent necessity of such battles.

Faraut’s film doesn’t just put us courtside — it steeps us in the legend’s boiling mind.

Brawling yet tender, wild yet rigorously controlled, first-time fiction director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals is an impressionistic swirl of a film about masculinity, about abuse, about growing up queer, about chaotic family life, about the jumble of incidents and stirrings through which a child discovers a self.

Yuh Nelson proves adept with her young actors, drawing out relaxed and detailed performances while carefully managing the space between them in the frame.

If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.

We observe moments of living rather than the beats of a story, all that natural lighting and everyday quiet stirring the sense of lives taking shape before our eyes.

Gavagai offers moments of sublimity unlike anything you’ll see in most contemporary movies. It also tests the patience. In that key respect, it’s much like life: You have to throw yourself into it to reap its rewards.

Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.

It’s wild and singular, often beautiful, a feast and feat of self-definition through verbal dexterity. It’s shaking with laughter, teeming with insights and tense as hell when the police roll up.

There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.

Vranik’s film couldn’t be more timely in its moral inquiry, but it’s timeless in form and technique, a melodrama tempered with a painstaking realism.

The first scenes are hilarious, all sharp surprises and adeptly staged physical comedy. But then the story turns, the way that milk does, curdling into tragedy.

McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.

Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.

Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.

As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.

As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.

Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.

As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.

The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.

Shuman’s sprightly, restless film trails the sprightly, restless WFMU host Clay Pigeon through the boroughs as he checks in with the people he meets.

The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.

Fargeat is thoughtful about the elements of her genre, flagrant in her inversions of them but also ferocious in her commitment to them. She has an eye for landscape, a love of light — relish the infernal glare of the dust whenever a driver here hits the brakes at night — and an all-too-rare mastery of geography in an action scene.

The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.

This engaging and intelligent script could have been more of both if Beirut made room for the experience of anyone besides the Americans. The filmmakers do memorable work examining what it might take to solve this one particular crisis, but do too little examining the city itself. The title promises something the movie doesn’t deliver.

Writer-director Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) dashes expectations in almost every scene. Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre.

As often in Russell’s films, Good Luck splits the interest between observer and observed, between the lives that Russell and crew capture in their painstaking long takes and the very process of composing and shooting those takes.

There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.

Final Portrait is, in the end, a cheer for craftsmanship.

That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.

At times unbearably intimate, even invasive, the photographer-documentarian Raymond Depardon’s 12 Days is the kind of film you might wonder, as you watch, whether you should be watching. I’m glad I did, and I can’t discount the empathy that this study of mental illness and bureaucratic practice stirs or the understanding it crystallizes.

Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes.

The film ranges more widely than its predecessor, surveying more landscapes and a greater variety of projects. But it’s still a contemplative beauty, a chance to consider and be moved by a richer sort of connectedness than our lives typically allow.

Working with Lyle Vincent as director of photography, Finley continually offers up striking, emotionally resonant compositions, including a wide variety of inventive two shots in which the leads talk at or simply regard each other. Either actress could command the frame; when they share it, the air between them trembles.

Mohawk takes its time revealing all its generic elements, but at its high point dares to vault toward something grander and more mythic than action-adventure realism.

Maoz is as good at youthful languor as he is at the process of grief. This middle section of the film abounds with insights and moments of surprising desert beauty.

Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.

It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show.

Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.

Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.

Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.

[Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.

The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.

Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.

Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.

[A] tender, humane, gently probing film.

Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.

[A] heartbreaking doc.

The camerawork in Allen’s customary long takes is fluid, even arresting, but Winslet’s performance would benefit from the kind of editing these long takes don’t allow. Rather than loose, the ensemble often seems underrehearsed, and too many of Winslet’s lines have little impact.

Yes, Coco thrills with its of-the-moment visual invention, but its core elements — dead relatives, family photos, the power of loving memory — couldn’t be more timeless. When Pixar made me cry this time, it wasn’t just for the characters on the screen. It was for the people I remember, and the ones I hope will remember me.

Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.

The drama is mostly interior, and Washington’s quiet performance tends to reveal the jittery surface rather than the tortured soul. Neither it nor the script is incisive enough to make Israel’s abandonment of his principles fascinating.

Intent to Destroy sometimes plays like a DVD extra that might have accompanied The Promise, but it does have value of its own in its interviews with historians, philosophers, and filmmakers and its vintage photos and footage.

Art itself should seek a restraining order against anyone who insists, “Here is the one thing that Mother! means!”

This minute-by-minute rundown is priceless history, alive with the anxious textures of American life right then, a film that in twenty years will reward attentive viewing. It’s also, for many of us alive in the now, probably too much too soon, the tearing open of wounds that only are just starting to scab over.

Friends, family, and reporters offer invaluable insight in interviews, making this the somewhat rare documentary that’s actually as illuminating as good print reporting on the same case.

In his debut feature, Lee has crafted a mature love story centered on an immature man facing the fear of even admitting that he needs love at all. It’s a film to prize.

Gomis’s handheld cameras work to keep up with the actors, who seem to move with rare freedom, but he also stages some exquisite and complex flourishes.

It’s not always effective drama, but as an example for thousands of struggling American families, it’s a serious breakthrough.

Huezo’s approach situates us right there beside Miriam — it’s as if a new acquaintance is unburdening herself to trek south together.

The film lives up to its own characters’ thesis: that disability need not define a person — or even the film about that person.

You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a movie “stunning.” But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word.

Even in this glossy pulp fictionalization, Marshall is filled above all else with truths that still demand telling.

Wilson’s film, a quiet wonder, emphasizes the courage it takes to choose the hard work of living.

Lynch has crafted an almost proudly minor work, a hangout movie whose reason for being is Stanton’s presence.

Despite some frightening (and effective) scenes of slippery slopes and aggravated wildlife, the film’s heart lies in watching these characters discover in themselves and each other the will to press on.

It’s gently comic, a touch naïve, and somewhat moving: These idealists are ready to fight to keep creepy-crawlies farm to table.

An excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust.

The film is handsomely mounted, traditional in its scenecraft, superbly acted, and much less ham-handed than you might expect from a historical drama about a great man’s great moment.

Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.

For all its raw pain, Strong Island is also a scrupulously shaped work, one of striking compositions and juxtapositions, its faces and revelations presented with artful, thoughtful rigor.

There’s nothing fussy about any shot of Nobody’s Watching, but there’s also no shot wasted, and no shot that doesn’t communicate something vital about the city or her protagonist.

Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s cheeringly low-key debut, Home Again, offers proof that someone making movies understands what Hollywood has in Reese Witherspoon. I hope this star and this new writer-director make a habit of pairing up.

Here adolescent wanderlust, powered by the characters’ persistent and confused arousal, continually edges against comedy and terror. Scariest as an examination of what fascinates us, this debut feature will annoy and alienate many, but it’s the work of a dynamic new talent.

The tense final act...investigates its moral quandaries with a rigor this kind of bad-seed street-teen movie usually can’t manage.