Alan Scherstuhl

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.

The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.

Watching it is something like watching a play’s first full dress rehearsal or a gangly baby deer’s initial efforts to stand, where it’s the effort that’s more engaging than the achievement itself.

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.

The series’ borrowings often have about them a whiff of playful improvisation, the logic of kids with action figures saying, “And what if then they had to drive into that tunnel from The Stand and it was full of zombies?” As The Death Cure grinds on, though, they become less inspired.

Fuglsig is adept at showing choppers and peaks, caves and campfires, at suggesting the great silence at the roof of the world. He’s also a sure hand with the geography of battle, with ensuring we understand why the bullets fly in the direction they’re flying — and both where they come from and where they hit. That said, the firefights do wear on.

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

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.

Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.

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.

The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.

The material is often weak, but the stars earn their paychecks.

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

Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.

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.

Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.

[A] heartbreaking doc.

An article, a book, and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’s voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism. The movie, though, at least lets us be the witnesses to something unsettling rather than just asking us to take some dude’s word for it. That means these cameramen are journalists.

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.

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

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.

What Gustafson has achieved is certainly artful, and sometimes, through montage and smart camerawork, suggests correspondences between these century-crossing assignations that the stage show could not. But even at its best, this Hello Again struck me as an uncertain, even ancillary work.

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!”

LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.

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.

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

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.

Curiously drab and airless, tinted to a distracting bluish miasma that suggests an advertisement for antidepressants, Peter Landesman’s Mark Felt is the wrong movie at the right time.

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 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.

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

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.

It’s less the story of a woman taking a year off from city life and her husband than it is a pleasant revue of sketches and scenarios on that topic.

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.

At Gook’s best, Chon captures, with sharply memorable dialogue, both the essence of his particular characters but also the broad drift of generations.

[A] muted, sometimes arresting drama.

It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s wilder, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus Seventies- and Eighties-style nudity.

It is at once a desperate echo of long-gone glories and a glory itself.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Walls’s book of the same name just often enough bursts to raucous life.

A real-life absurdist thriller that, in its electric coverage of one Russian scandal, can’t help but illuminate another ongoing one.

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.

Levitt’s film assembles a devastating case against the practices of dog racers and trainers, who often conceive of their animals as tools to be discarded (read: shot) when no longer useful.

Person to Person is a gently comic slices-of-life drama, the kind where a variety of people’s conflicting, occasionally overlapping experience of the city comes together into a messy whole.

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.

It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.

Few period pieces get our dynamic relationship with the now so right, or chart so smartly how the present shifts even under the feet of the youngish.

Becker and Mehrer’s film is more about place and silence than it is about tension or psychology.

Yates’s films, like the world itself, have no template — they’re messy, rich with feeling, liberated from simple theatrical structures, always honest about what is possible. That one of hers ends with hope is a gift.

The film is a devastating success, moving in its beauty and wrenching when that beauty withers: Acres of coral waste away to chalky ash before our eyes.

First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.

Here, as Berry warns, the imagination is limited by the camera. In a world in which I couldn’t buy Berry’s New Collected Poems, I might make an effort to see this again someday, with my eyes shut.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is comics, unapologetically, as close as blockbuster filmmaking gets to cartooning.

Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.

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

The film is gently thrilling, often revealing, alive with talk and scenic beauty and well-observed vignettes.

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

The movie is glazed in flop sweat, moist with the producers’ fear that if the wildness lets up for a heartbeat, we’ll be bored.

The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.

Raising Bertie charts nothing less than what it’s like to try to grow up free in the prison capital of the world.

As an introduction to its arresting, charismatic subjects, Night School is invaluable.

Matter-of-fact in its scenecraft but searing in its content, Sami Blood is about girlhood and racism, passing and escape.

The film examines, with wit and patience, the hard work of community-building — and the toll on someone far from home, doing work that’s not his calling.

The proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.

No matter her influences, Tamblyn has filmed for us something singular.

Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.

On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.

Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.

Liman, for all his action acuity, struggles to make lying behind a wall exciting. He manages some tense and rousing sequences, but between them yawn scenes of the killer jabbering bullshit and the hero passing in and out of consciousness.

The ending is a joy and a heartbreaker, but what lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.

It's not for nothing that generation and generic share a root; the characters scan as vague, of-their-age types, despite having each been dressed up with superficial quirks.

Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.