Alan Scherstuhl

In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.

The movie gets wilder and weirder as it goes.... But then, at some point, it all gets ponderous, especially all the vague political machinations.

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.

When it slows down, when it gives you time to think, Popstar reveals its weaknesses.

It's a mistake, I think, that the movie never addresses the fact that a camera crew is following Shaw around.

Will Allen's sunny gut-punch cult exposé Holy Hell plays like a thriller, all right, with a darkness edging slowly over its swimsuit revelry, but Allen never cheats in the interest of suspense.

The film is restful and exhausting, inviting us into contemplation: of Tibet's epic-scale natural beauty, which has rarely been filmed with such you-are-there patience and intimacy, each new horizon these pilgrims reach a reward for their perseverance — and yours.

It's all shocking, of course, but it also often looks staged and performed rather than merely observed.

As an action comedy, R-rated division, The Nice Guys is hard to beat. Black knows how to pace and escalate a fight and a film, and he springs wicked surprises all along — scene after scene dances around trapdoors that the audience falls into.

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.

With the plotting and the epigrams taken care of, Stillman seems liberated as a craftsman: Never before has one of his films been so crisp, so tart, so laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.

Bateman is nimble in handling a tricky mix of flashbacks and pranks, genres and tones. As you might expect from such a gifted ensemble performer, he's also an actor's director.

The filmmakers have denied us their subject's voice and then sunk their lead by adding distancing layers between the audience and her chief instrument, her face. Even the script exhibits little confidence in this Nina's ability to communicate to us what matters.

Outside of Shannon's performance, Elvis & Nixon is enough to make you long for the nuance of Kissin' Cousins.

A feat of workplace naturalism.

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

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

Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse senses of the phrase. It's often kind of awful but also weirdly effervescent, a movie that salves, with its stars' radiance and charisma, even as it grates.

No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its action might be, Neon Bull always honors the chaotic looseness of everyday living — the way that, unlike in the movies, few of the moments we inhabit seem to be about just one thing.

[A] studious, rigorous, and surprisingly tender documentary.

Skipping across ages and genres, this cine-essay beguilement from Russian Ark director Alexander Sokurov considers the Louvre — and the miracle of the transmission of art and culture across its history.

Cheadle's tender eyes and scraped-raw whisper prove reason enough for Davis fans to give Miles Ahead a go: Just often enough, I thought, "Holy shit, this is what a day with Miles might feel like."

I Saw the Light ignores Williams's composing, denies us his voice, and is too spooked by sentimentality to show us just what his music touches off in people.

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.

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.

Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.

The movie's not just good but moving, funny and true to the way people actually live in hard-times America.

Can't-miss viewing for culture heads.

Field can't make it all make sense, but she does make it diverting, even pleasurable.

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.

As a look at geopolitics, the film is limited, but as a musical doc it's strong — and it's best as the movie to recommend old white Americans go see as a reminder that people everywhere remain people.

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

The story isn't complex, but its telling is tangled, often willfully so.

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.

Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is a legitimate stunner, a river-trip that will mesmerize and jack with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day.

Perhaps the best film yet set against the mess of the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, Tobias Lindholm's latest is a scrupulous, unglamorized examination of battlefield decision-making — and its potentially devastating impacts, both there and back home.

With high spirits and great tenderness, Dalio and his actors stir up what might be the greatest of youthful feelings: that as you get to know someone new, someone whose thinking rhymes with yours, you're also becoming ever more yourself.

Deadpool might even stand as one of the strongest and most inventive films of the high-early-late superhero baroque — if we could just turn off its built-in commentary track.

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

Call it parody, pastiche, remix, whatever — for some thirty minutes of its running time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transcends its goof of a premise to become something fresh and full-blooded.

It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.

The movie, wry and melancholy, doesn't linger over its artistry.

Just as Pine's Bernie Webber grits his teeth and pilots his 36-foot Coast Guard boat into seas that rise up like angry gods, Gillespie steers head-on into clichés, powering through. They never quite capsize his film, but it does take on some water.

The movie undercuts its own undercutting.

It's no news that a filmmaker's debut is mostly 90 minutes of a couple kids gabbing on the streets of Brooklyn. But writer/director Jay Dockendorf's buoyant, tragic, richly textured walking-and-talking job Naz & Maalik exhibits none of the shambling narcissism that so often characterizes such projects.

An admirably complex tale of time travel, corporate espionage, and high emotions you'll just have to take everyone's word on, Jacob Gentry's science fiction puzzler Synchronicity is so ambitious — and so canny, on occasion — that you might be willing to forgive its indie infelicities.

Is Mojave's twisty purposelessness showing how producers ruin the work of screenwriters, or is it evidence that screenwriters often need another set of eyes?

Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.

Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.

The film is most illuminating on the prehistory of Land Art.

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.

Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.

The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.

The filmmakers aren't arguing that mass-media tech leads to fascism, but they suggest, with some lightness, that our interconnectedness certainly facilitates it. But Dreams Rewired is no polemic, and it never mocks the past.

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

The film's chatty, ingratiating, and then howlingly mean.

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.

Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way.

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

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

Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.

This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.

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.

It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.

As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.

It's smart in surprising ways, daring in a few minor ones, moving in the right ones.

As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.

Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.

At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.

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

It's a work of community portraiture that slowly develops into collective drama

Seidl's study reminds us, with each new basement, that the places where we're most ourselves might as well have grown off us like the shells of mollusks.

Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.

The film fails as a portrait, and it's not much better at drama.

What's surprising — even wondrous — is how often Schulz's precisely crooked line work informs the big-budget gloss.

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.

The couplings have an artful intensity lacking in pornography, which favors athleticism and disconnectedness, and the lighting — well, the best thing in the movie is the look of it all, which in a tony sex-flick counts for a lot.

The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.

Chu and screenwriter Ryan Landels's take on fame is more fascinating than most of the film's drab, slow drama.

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.

The film often plays like everyone making it agreed that some on-set idea was so funny it had to be included, whether or not it suited the story.

Jason and Shirley is imprecise, even maddening history, but it's hair-raising as historicity: Exposed here is the longstanding and somewhat vampiric process of white artists extracting for their work minority perspectives and experiences.

Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.

Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of Zodiac, here making his debut as a director, masters the heady pulse of high-end, high-stakes journalism.

Especially in its superior first hour, Goosebumps has a loose comic rhythm at odds with what we see in effects-heavy would-be blockbuster junk like Pan.

All this history and critical appreciation is lightened by Lizzani's genial goofiness.

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

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.

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.

Jackman occasionally wins a laugh, when he manages to impose himself over the movie's restless clamor.

Beneath the clichés of prestige filmmaking beat the hearts of a couple it's a privilege to get to know.

It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.

There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.

The film, a hard jewel of beauty and reportage, demands and rewards that second viewing.

Stonewall aspires to be a sweeping tale of social change and hardscrabble street life, but at every moment it feels like a musical whose numbers have been cut.

The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.