Alan Scherstuhl

In those days after the misbegotten verdict in the trial of the four police officers who kicked and beat Rodney King, these Angelenos discovered what they and their neighbors were capable of. Ridley’s patient, humane approach allows us, over his film’s 145 minutes, to discover it, too.

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

As drama and spectacle, it’s not quite first-rate — I rarely feared for these characters or believed that I knew their souls, and George is too much of a humanist to wring real-life tragedy for cineplex suspense. But as a moral corrective and a call to decency it moved me.

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

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.

Marczak has captured the specifics of these young folks as they reel through a city that’s been born again, but the film should stir something true in the chest of anyone who ever was lucky enough to run free in their youth, even if only for a night.

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.

Few horror debuts unnerve and fascinate as much as this one.

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.

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.

Toward the end, the filmmakers relent on all the grieving sightseeing and offers up a couple plot developments, plus colloquies on matters geo- and theological. None of this proves as arresting as Iceland’s cliffs and horses, or those first moments of a city depopulated.

Collin and company are after climate, not weather. They steep us in our awareness that Morgan and his New York have been lost, that our glimpses of it must either be through memory or hazed-up photography — or the music itself.

Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.

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.

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

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

Everything you would expect happens, but little of it is funny or affecting.

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

Well observed and sometimes hilarious, Punching Henry stands as a better film than The Comedian, but many fewer people will see it. That might be its truest punch line.

Get Out is fully surprising in both concept and craft, with the scares never coming just when you expect them and the secrets more audacious than you might be guessing.

The film beguiles more than it thrills, its plotting never quite measuring up to its atmosphere or its suggestions of deeper meanings.

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

Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.

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

The world needs to see this spare, revelatory film and hear these girls' pained and sometimes proud confessions.

McAvoy is impressive as he switches personalities, but never scary or moving; the script gives him many chances to exhibit virtuosity but too few for soulfulness.

The Founder slowly reveals itself as a don't-let-the-devil-into-your-house parable, one that uses all the techniques of inspirational moviemaking to disguise that devil's intentions, even from the devil himself.

When the Nighthawks light into an arrangement, they're not aping a record you could spin or download at home — they're attempting to discover what it might have been like to hear those bands of back then blowing the doors off a joint.

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.

Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), is a canny and necessary crowd-pleaser in which not one moment feels like life itself. But, together, in their superb Hollywood falseness, they accrete into a portrait of our best idea of our national character while still exposing bitter truths about who was allowed to be what back in that age of presumed "greatness."

The Assassin's Creed movie is about all the parts you might skip in the games.

This paranormal cops-versus-serial-killer procedural is never not ridiculous, but it's often entertaining as well.

Maybe you'll be at a dinner. Maybe nobody will believe you. Or maybe they will, and someone will say, "Hollywood is terrible at making movies about trauma.”

The movie — at first scrappy and strange but an increasingly tough sit as it goes — never fixes its gaze on any singularly compelling idea.

La La Land...reaches for the stars, doesn't quite grab them all, and then is still kind of OK in the end.

The movie starts in an ice age, as I've said, so you can guess where it's all heading, but what you'll remember from it is the vision of a plump ol' bear snoozing in a tree in the rain.

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.

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.

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 country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.

Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love.

It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.

As a music comedy, this is up there with Popstar, but with better-defined characters. It's thick with tales of brawls, breakups, stage-walkoffs, busted hotel rooms and astonishing rudeness.

It's not all that strange, but it's restlessly arresting and always technically impressive. Unlike most studio franchise fantasies, Doctor Strange rewards the eye rather than assaults it.

This lit-doc travelogue gains in power, insight, and urgency as it journeys.

Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.

The biggest surprise: Older, un-messianic, and mostly eschewing cute stunts, Moore somehow makes his one-man show seem almost humble. It plays less like "I'm still here!" attention-seeking than it does a concerned citizen's act of hope.

This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.

Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.

Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.

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.

Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.

Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a surprise.

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.

Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.

In short, Zexer's film — scraped of sentiment but still coursing with feeling — is an ethnographic melodrama, rich in cultural specifics but also universal longings.

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

You get enough of a sense of this place and these men — and that widow! — that it's a disappointment when, in the end, we just have to watch it all blow to hell.

The film is a treasury of photographs and anecdotes, of fleeting peeks at the celebrities (Carla Bley, Steve Reich, Jimmy Giuffre, Dalí) who passed through, but it too rarely slows down and really lets us listen — Fishko is always on to the next striking image that will too quickly pass.

The film is brisk and fascinating, ultimately moving, but also less rich than it might have been.

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.

Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.

Occasionally, Noah, who wrote and directed, hits onto something that feels like life.

Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.

The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.

Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.

It's all sickeningly accomplished, with incidents so tense and audacious that you might not have the headspace to wonder until afterwards, "Hey, wait, what was the point in grinding us through so many terrifying minutes of that?"

Sachs, a clear-eyed humanist, honors all his characters' pained perspectives.

The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.

The city and the plot points wheel right by, the leads fetchingly entranced with each other. If one patch of dares disappoints, there's another coming right up, and the directors stage and shoot them with swooning neon kinecticism.

Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.

Mike Birbiglia's Don't Think Twice stands as the best, most revealing film about comedy people and one of the best about artistic collaboration. It's a boisterous and sensitive work of many facets.

Meyers allows takes to run long, staging naturalistic conversations on sidewalks and in apartments. The result is hit or miss: We may not know what the characters feel, but we're way up to speed on how many steps it takes them to walk to a bar.

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

[An] intense and dazzling new documentary.

This isn't a film about the Civil War; it's about the minds of white folks so removed from plantation life that they feel they have no stake in it at all. It's not about back then — it's about being.

Life,Animated is rich with insight about the role our popular culture plays in child development, but it's richer still in love.

The fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.

As in Ant-Man, there's lots of shopworn redemption-plotting to get through here, and a sense that the filmmakers find the kind of jobs actually available to Americans a little beneath someone as twinkly-cute as Paul Rudd. But — also like in Ant-Man — the pleasures of Rudd overpower the programmatic elements.