Alan Scherstuhl

The film is an adventure, a reason to despair, a chance to hang out with a great talker, and an often beautiful portrait of this city's promise and cruelty.

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

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.

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.

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.

[A] heartbreaking doc.

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 kind of movie fans will be quoting for the rest of their lives, Shoot Me, from director-producer Chiemi Karasawa, is as much a playdate as portrait, a jumble of salty highlights attesting to the pleasure of her company.

Despite its moral seriousness, the film's a crowd-pleaser, boasting tense set pieces, a raucous polyglot of voices and accents, beauty-in-poverty streetscapes, and two warm, brawling, big-hearted leads.

In Secret boasts vigor and thematic richness, that feeling of artists expressing something vital.

It's not news, of course, that it's a terrible thing to extinguish a life, but it's a relief, when the shoot-'em-ups of Summer Movie Season are bearing down on us, to see a film that regards killing with pained awe. Wladyka's hands are clean.

If you somehow manage to stay dry-eyed through the concert numbers, the end should set you bawling.

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.

Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.

This isn't hard-times reportage or a deep-dive ethnography. It's a life-as-it's-lived picture, a chance to meet and loiter with the people in the places the interstates zip past.

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.

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

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.

For all the hurtling plot, and its occasional workaday scenecraft, Burning Bush proves an engrossing historical drama, low-key but in its final moments devastating.

Writer-director Sean Mullin gives us some of the usual beats, but he and his performers invest them with rare persuasive power.

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?

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.

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

Credit this spirited, uncommonly effective found-footage thriller for breaking the templates promised by its genre and title.

The story spins out in painful directions that feel surprising yet inevitable.

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.

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

The film stands as a reminder of how much it can mean just to listen.

Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.

Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.

Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.

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.

Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.

The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.

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

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.

[An] intense and dazzling new documentary.

The film is like his life: scabrous, upsetting, kind of moving, funny as hell, alive with hints of how we've become what we are.

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

The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.

Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.

Green's doc — like the case at its center — defies resolution or easy answers.

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.

The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.

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

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

A restless, sunnily shot, one-thing-after-another travelogue of the peculiarities of American worship and belief.

The movie is involving, the romance affecting, the sex sound, and the catch-as-catch-can handheld camerawork smartly appropriate for the scenario.

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.

A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia's splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.

Of Horses and Men is often sprightly, and almost every shot is an eyeful.

The film's brittle and quiet, on occasion touched with the techniques of horror, especially as Helena stalks her store after hours. It's also trenchant, stinging, and acted with great frumping subtlety.

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

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

David M. Rosenthal's sturdy, nasty rural noir, based on Matthew F. Jones's novel, is so sharp and rusted through that, after taking it in, you'll likely need a tetanus shot.

Eastwood may never show us his boys discovering themselves under that street lamp, but he gives us a clutch of moments worth treasuring — and mostly without overdoing it.

Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next?

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.

From moment to moment, this Last Five Years is a robust entertainment, often stirring, sad, and funny.

Directors Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber piece the story together via fresh interviews, vintage footage, and too many iffy reenactments and close-ups of news stories. But the matter here transcends the artlessness.

Sorrentino, as always, invests his scenarios with a feeling and beauty that transcends the dreary specifics

Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie's a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it's underwhelming as argument or cinema.

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.

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.

In Sichel's inspired conceit, the self-reflexive truth-through-fiction ethos of the Iranian New Wave meets a sensitive documentary exploration of trying to live at the ends of life.

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

Liquid Sky has always been caught smack between delirious curio, avant-garde put-on, exploitation cheapie, and naive masterpiece.

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 Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.

That patience of Reichardt's, and her dedication to showing us exclusively the things that we must see, makes the scenes of preparation — boat parking, fertilizer buying — hypnotic and suspenseful and practical all at once.

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.

A feat of workplace naturalism.

Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.

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

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

The result is something like the best science-fair project ever, an inviting performance piece that tasks viewers with the pleasurable, imaginative engagement that more seamless special effects deny.

At first the stakes are as light yet rich as Sentaro's pancakes; then come marvelous cine-essays on bean-soaking and paste-prepping, plus — in the film's tragedy-tinged final third — a change-of-seasons montage for the ages.