Alan Scherstuhl

Moments of pain and revelation keep coming, all varied and surprising. These accrete into a mountain of evidence for Sauper's thesis: South Sudan might be new, but the forces shaping it are the same that have damned Africans for centuries — the rest of the world's lust for resources and conversions. That everything is beautiful just makes it hurt all the more.

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

One of the year's best films, Mary Dore's She's Beautiful When She's Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live.

A commanding indictment of the exploitative nature of geopolitics, and of Europe's and the U.S.'s abuse of native peoples around the world.

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.

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.

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.

It's just zombies versus an international research station on the wastes of the Red Planet, with all that such a premise promises.

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.

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.

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.

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

The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.

I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.

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

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

Valedictory and elegiac, Keach's film captures a performer who only truly seems to inhabit himself during the performances.

Winter on Fire's thrilling rebellion is neither the beginning nor the end, but it is at least a truly heartening middle.

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.

Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.

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.

The film, with its traditional mix of talking heads and vintage footage, does not try to hide the Panthers' advocacy of violence.

What surprises (a little) and fascinates (a lot) are the town-to-town commonalities Counting invites you to appraise.

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

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.

Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.

Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.

At least we have this gem, the rare tease of what could have been that actually proves satisfying enough on its own.

Here's a movie with magic.

As James D. Solomon's compelling and sometimes frustrating doc The Witness makes clear, what the case actually tells us isn't that we live lives of pitilessness or blinkered fear. It's that we're gullible as hell.

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

Sing Street pleases, all right, and even occasionally hits on truth.

The approach is experiential, a you-are-there-and-overwhelmed dazzlement, rather than a definitive record of each squad's big moment.

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.

The Last Man on the Moon puts you there and then asks why in the world we haven't gone back.

There's much in Born to Fly to thrill to, dream with, flinch from: dancers leaping from a great whirling wheel and smacking onto mats far below; dancers ducking and leaping a wickedly spinning I-beam or cinderblock.

[A] heartbreaking doc.

One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.

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

The stirring new documentary The Case Against 8, showcasing the lawyers and plaintiffs who challenged California's 2008 gay marriage ban, is the best kind of popular history, a film that trembles with tears and hope, and I dare you to get through it without bawling some yourself.

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.

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.

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 film is a wonder of desert skies, slick tunnels, bumptious fence- and wall-climbing, and occasional staged reveries.

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.

The scale of the occasional mayhem is heightened, but its spirit and ingenuity doesn't feel wholly at odds with the books.

With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.

For the most part, the narrative here feels generational, representative, rather than invested in the specific incidents of specific lives.

Dencik’s gorgeous, surprising, meditative film opens up one of the world’s last unknown places, and it will also make you want to befriend every Dane you can.

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.

Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.

What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.

It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.

Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.

Lang is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, capturing her scenes in fluid master takes, rarely cutting from one character to the next, letting things unfold at the pace of in-the-moment human feeling.

Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.

It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.

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.

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

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

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.

Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.

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.

The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.

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

Vital, thoughtful, and deeply personal, first-timer Darius Clark Monroe's autobiographical doc stands as a testament to the power of movies to stir empathy.

The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.

Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint.

The film's heart, like Randi's, is in the penetration of illusion, rather than its manufacture.

It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.

If you can work up interest in such meager material, the film is a chilling, stirring, experiential immersion in what life-and-death drama might actually feel like.

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

As a gamelike, simulationist PG-13 horror chamber piece, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a success: well shot and -staged, arrestingly acted, edited with a crisp unpredictability. It's less compelling in terms of character and meaning.

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.

This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.

Nothing in this film (and little in any other movie this year) compares to the scenes of Sandusky's adopted son, Matt, recounting his realization that the charges of pedophilia against Sandusky squared with the ways Sandusky had treated him, too — treatment he'd never been brave enough to admit.

It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.

The documentary is stellar, despite some vague visual-metaphor stuff involving dioramas in an attic. Bring something you can punch, as you will be furious.

Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.

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

What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy.

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

Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.

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

Cooper's interest is in the collaboration between the talent and its managers, in the way the duo urged their charges to begin to conceive of their sound, look, marketing, and live performances as all expressive of a singular vision.

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.

By having their actors lip-sync along to Hull and his family's own voices, the staged re-creations that so often pad nonfiction films here achieve a peculiar formalist beauty.

The villagers, excitable everyday folks, make for capital interview subjects, and the filmmakers wring poignancy from re-enactments your brain knows are a little much but your heart may thrum to anyway.

Greg "Freddy" Camalier's engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the coastal Alabama studio, musicians, and engineers who laid down some of the greatest pop tracks of the late '60s and early '70s.

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.

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

Time Out of Mind is an experiment in empathy, an examination of bureaucracy and streetlife mundanity, and a movie that many will find a tough sit.

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 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.

The usual doc mix of interviews and vintage photos is moving and surprisingly funny.