Alan Scherstuhl

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

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

Sure, all the studios offer anymore are big, dumb adventure spectacles, but that's not a knock against the achievement of this one, which at least parades wonders before us, not the least being the greatest dragon in the history of movies.

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.

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

Some of the surprise works, but the final gotcha won't getcha.

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.

Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.

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

The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.

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.

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.

Ultimately, the film's wearying qualities pay off both as verisimilitude — you do feel like you've been through something — and as awe-inspiring history, making visceral art out of a global migration.

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

Cutter Hodierne's gorgeous, harrowing debut feature, Fishing Without Nets, doesn't just ask you to feel a bit for Somali pirates, as Captain Phillips did -- Hodierne puts you in their shoes.

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.

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.

The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.

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

Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.

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

Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.

Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.

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.

Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre

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

We Are Mari Pepa is a sweaty, urgent, beautifully honest bliss out.

The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.

Thorpe offers charming, intimate glimpses of his life, including memorable chats with friends and experts, and he's adept at drawing winning quotes from interview subjects — one of the most moving moments comes from George Takei.

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

Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.

Disconnect might play better a decade from now, when it's more clearly a compendium of contemporary fears rather than some dire expression of them.

The film is handsomely mounted, traditional in its scenecraft, superbly acted, and much less ham-handed than you might expect from a historical drama about a great man’s great moment.

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

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.

The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.

This stellar, incisive slice-of-life doc centers on the kind of crowd-pleasing competition story that lures in audiences and then lays bare heartsick truths about small-town America today.

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

Demme has crafted yet another superb document of musicians at work, one as much about creation—and the sources of inspiration—as it is about performance. A wonderful film, as in, it's full of wonders.

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.

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

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."

Ant-Man is spry and often funny, despite its familiarity.

Serge Bozon's smart, surprising, marvelously realized French crime-and-sex police drama/comedy distinguishes itself with trenchant plotting, inspired framing, and performances that honor true human feeling even as they lunge into the screwball.

Some moments still work after the movie grows mawkish.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?

That Guy Dick Miller is a cheery and likable film, one that bops along the surface of its story with lots of interviews, too-quick film clips, and spazzy-quirky-tootling music meant to let us know how fun all this is.

The biggest suspense: As everything gets worse for everyone, will this consummate director's outraged worldview afford anyone any pity? At first you'll seethe — then your heart will ache.

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.

The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.

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

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 comic scenes arc into bleakness, and the bleak ones often collapse back into comedy.

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.

There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.

Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.

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 movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.

The horror's a long time coming, but Goldthwait and company make the waiting worth it.

All that prickly inner conflict Ruffalo is so adept at suggesting? Cheery Begin Again wants none of it, offering instead lots of scenes of two characters we don't believe could ever exist arguing about authenticity in pop music.

For all its familiarity and rote nastiness, the film's sharply crafted and quite promising.

It's part caper comedy, part revenge tale, and part glorious whopper.

Far from a film about sharks sharking and love not working out, this About Last Night revels in friendship, fidelity, and something too rarely seen in the movies today: the idea that being young and black in Los Angeles can be glorious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.

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.

Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey's debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off.

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.

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.

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit.

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.

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

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

Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What's beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great contradiction of superheroic fantasy: jolly do-goodism and its brutalizing sadism.

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

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

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

Newell's film doesn't supplant Lean's, of course. The yearning is more vague, the gloom less consummate. But it's the best since, rich in feeling and dark beauty, alive with the superior scenecraft, chatter, and imagination of the most beloved of novelists.

Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.

It works, kind of, despite its broadness, its obviousness, and its howlingly awful opening.

Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.

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.

That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.

The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.

It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.

The comedy's too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story about anxious waiting.