Alan Scherstuhl

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.

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.

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 longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits.

It's not bad, but it feels rote, as if the film's events are just an excuse for us to hang with the film's people.

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

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.

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

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.

The filmmakers' hearts might be in the right place, but the film's doesn't kick in until well after you might already have declared it dead.

Director Levan Gabriadze is adept at the sinking something's not right creepiness too few horror films dig into. His techniques are certain to be copy-pasted by imitators.

The story demands journalism rather than hagiography.

The material is often weak, but the stars earn their paychecks.

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

Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another movie.

Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.

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

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.

The drama is mostly interior, and Washington’s quiet performance tends to reveal the jittery surface rather than the tortured soul. Neither it nor the script is incisive enough to make Israel’s abandonment of his principles fascinating.

Exciting and thoughtful, scraped free of the empty provocations of the wicked-pixie Hit-Girl scenes in Kick-Ass, I Declare War offers movie thrills—smartly plotted betrayals and escapes—as well as its share of disappointments.

The film's heady buzz is invigorating, and there are substantial pleasures—and laughs—to be found in all its real-life-just-gone-sour strangeness.

Here, as Berry warns, the imagination is limited by the camera. In a world in which I couldn’t buy Berry’s New Collected Poems, I might make an effort to see this again someday, with my eyes shut.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Letourneur captures film fests' buzz of self-congratulatory promiscuity but never makes the many parties and mishaps compelling.

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.

The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.

Tender, humane, and searing, How I Live Now stands as something all too rare: a movie about young people that young people may love — but not one that lies to them, and not one built for them alone.

As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.

Vikingdom trembles with great dumb joy even before we meet the apparently handcrafted hell-dragon that looks like a set of windup chattering teeth combined with a homecoming float.

The Mule proves a tough sit, but by the end you might be satisfied you gritted through it.

Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.

There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.

Since the movie is in such a hurry, we’re not given much chance to soak in this strangeness. Making up for it: Black is paired with Blanchett, who plays a neighboring witch in smashing violet skirt ensembles; the two rat-a-tat insults at each other like a vaudevillian comedy duo.

Liman, for all his action acuity, struggles to make lying behind a wall exciting. He manages some tense and rousing sequences, but between them yawn scenes of the killer jabbering bullshit and the hero passing in and out of consciousness.

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

The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.

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

ACORN and the Firestorm fumbles with the media story, offering cable-news talking heads in montage but not digging deeply into how the story spread — or why elected Democrats believed they had to shut Acorn down. That sense of fumbling shapes the film.

This is one of the greatest missed opportunities in recent cinema history: Del Toro looms more impressively on camera than he does in the marketing material, embodying a wicked man's perverse sense of family, honor, and self-interest.

If the filmmakers had been more daring with perspectives and narrative structure, and afforded their Indian characters the screentime and agency JB enjoys on his adventure, Million Dollar Arm might have distinguished itself.

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

Even if you've read the novel, and are prepared for the long running time and haphazard structure, this isn't a movie you should expect to feel or even closely follow. See it if Midnight's Children is a novel you always wanted the gist of.

As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.

The doc is only about as revealing as a middling magazine article on the subject.

While mostly well made, and certain to serve as a handy précis for the J-school set, A Fragile Trust is more a soiling reminder than a revelation for anyone already familiar with Blair's case.

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.

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 performance and filmmaking are invigorating.

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

"I wanted to make something energetic, optimistic, universal, and real," Bailey announces in voiceover as the movie begins. She's certainly accomplished that, but it's too bad she didn't also aim for vital, illuminating, or consistently compelling.

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.

The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.

In the end, all NOW reveals is that talented people did a difficult thing in far-off places — and that now they have a video scrapbook.

Any 30 minutes of Summer of Blood might have me in hysterics. But the sputtering torrent of Eric's yakking proves wearying over 90: Dude's built for speed-dating.

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

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.

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 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.

Michael Winterbottom's wise and involving Everyday specializes in unscripted-feeling moments that ache of life.

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.

The D Train has one great idea, a couple strong jokes, and a void at its center — a man who is only believable when he briefly becomes specific.

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.

Passion is pretty good.

The story feels shapeless, un-tailored, defiantly off the rack.

While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.

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.

Fuglsig is adept at showing choppers and peaks, caves and campfires, at suggesting the great silence at the roof of the world. He’s also a sure hand with the geography of battle, with ensuring we understand why the bullets fly in the direction they’re flying — and both where they come from and where they hit. That said, the firefights do wear on.

LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.

Milos's film pulses with f#*!-it-all abandon and chintzy eastern-Euro club beats.

The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance against grandeur...Which brings us to Tom Cruise, the not-necessarily-good news. However engaging its end-times mysteries, Oblivion is still a Tom Cruise movie.

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.

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.

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 more an on-the-fly glimpse of the scene than a deep-dive exploration, but that doesn't make it any less electric.

The persuasive power of individual moments suggests that director William Eubank has a bright future — and could push himself harder when writing his scripts.