Alan Scherstuhl

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.

For all its heart and strong performances, there's little new here. Still, the ending is perfect, triumphant and heartbreaking all at once, demonstrating that Quemada-Diez gets the reality of U.S. life.

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

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.

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.

There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.

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

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

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

Strachwitz's enthusiasm — "This ain't no mouse music!" he's given to shouting — and a brace of choice anecdotes prove compelling on their own.

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

Despite some cutesiness, the film’s a fascinating portrait of loneliness, of talent undirected toward purpose, of the mysteries of the mind.

Bauder's film is a diagnosis of a system that is hopelessly sick and not being treated. Bring a stress ball to squish up as you watch.

The film offers a solid précis, but it's a curious fact that a well-made doc like this is still only about half as informative or detailed as a long magazine article on the same subject might be.

Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.

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 battles, occurring every fifteen minutes or so, are brisk and bloody, but in them Northmen leaps too quickly from image to image, sometimes not giving us time to make sense of the mayhem. But the chases, and the Jacksonian sense of an epic journey across a time-lost landscape, will please devotees of the genre, and the flourishes are grand.

With sharper on-the-ground footage, True Son might have been as sharp a doc as it is inspiring a story.

Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.

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.

For all its piteousness, [it's] often moving, always well acted, and distinguished by rare stillness and beauty.

Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary tribute performances.

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.

If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The ending has a surfeit of sugar, but writer-director Arvin Chen's story jaunts along, a cheery rom-com tinged with dream visions and a somewhat daring conceit.

Even in its longueurs Young Bodies yields beauty and surprise, and there are inklings of some grand conception, even among scenes that feel haphazardly chosen.

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.

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.

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.

It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are.

Everyone involved at last seems to understand that the mode here is comic. Previous entries suffered from self-important glumness that gummed up the fun whenever the cars weren’t racing.

The Visitor is a mess, but a revelatory one, both a ripe, bizarre thriller and a fascinating example of how filmmakers first responded to the interstellar millions stirred up by Spielberg and George Lucas: by thieving the good bits.

Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer.

The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.

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.

The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.

Mohawk takes its time revealing all its generic elements, but at its high point dares to vault toward something grander and more mythic than action-adventure realism.

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.

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.

The killing is bloody, the power struggles involving, the history-class examinations of the relations between mines and unions and gangsters fascinating, and the tough-guy routines, while sometimes tiresome, never less than credible.

The film lives up to its own characters’ thesis: that disability need not define a person — or even the film about that person.

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.

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

Even in this glossy pulp fictionalization, Marshall is filled above all else with truths that still demand telling.

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

Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.

Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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."

The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.

It’s not always effective drama, but as an example for thousands of struggling American families, it’s a serious breakthrough.

Complaints that there's too little here about how the Jejune Institute was hatched or what it all may have meant matter little in the face of the one great thing The Institute does offer: a record of the mad invention of the game's masterminds.

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

The film is admirably committed to simulating the messy experience of life as a real Maisie might live it. But sometimes, as she's tuckered out on her exquisite linens beneath gorgeous exposed brick and shelves of handcrafted toys, Maisie's world feels easier to admire than it is to worry over.

Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.

Once it gets going, it's fine, a somewhat scattered précis of the life and accomplishment of one of the 20th century's towering musicians, activists, and curiosities.

For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.

What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?

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

The whole thing has an amiable, gag-to-gag vibe for most of the first hour.

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.

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.

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.

The movie's not built for belief. It's built for dumb, shivery, sexed-up pleasure, and it delivers, albeit somewhat modestly.

The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it — and even, at times, its welcoming warmth.

Marquardt works many threads... but, while individually interesting, they're never woven into a truly compelling whole.

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

Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.

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.

Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.

For all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia, even when the story skirts toward sensationalism.

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.

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.

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

The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.

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.

It's too bad...that a movie so attuned to natural currents in the end gets caught up in Hollywood's impossible ones.

Fuqua steadily parades his big moments, and the movie works as unhinged spectacle. As a thriller it's less certain.

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 film soars early as a fantasy steeped in life and crashes into a drag of a crime drama, one ripped from the movies rather than anyone's idea of small-town Colorado.

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.

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

Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.

It's heartening to have a tony war film about PTSD and forgiveness; it would be grander still to have one that dedicated itself more fully to examining the courage it would take to offer that forgiveness, rather than dash its energies upon the dreary cowardice of the crime itself.

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