Alan Scherstuhl

The early scenes, of the couple falling for each other, offer more inspired gorgeous wonder than late Malick films, and the emotions are more piercing.

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

Vital and vigorous even when its characters feel scraped of vigor/vitality, Philippe Garrel's latest finds boho Parisians facing the ends of marriages, affairs, and the feasibility of bohemian existence itself.

Too cartoonish to be cathartic, and too ghoulish to be honest fun, Into the Storm is mostly a somewhat uncomfortable sit enlivened by occasional hilariousness.

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 movie's packed with minor incidents, all fresh, compelling, and funny. It also boasts two lengthy scenes that are touched with something greater.

A Most Wanted Man is simply a complex tale superbly told, with time for nuance and to soak in its mysteries.

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

A time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot.

The film is dismayingly formless, every point is made too many times, and there's too little drama or revelation here.

You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you may not, as Rage offers exactly what you think a Nic Cage movie called Rage would, except maybe for continually inspired lunacy.

Falcone’s film is an unsteady mix of broad comedy and indie heart, asking us first to roar at Tammy’s ignorance and outrageousness and then to be moved at this lovable misfit muddling toward love, maturity, and a better life.

The only true surprise here is D'Souza's haplessness in constructing both film and argument.

The photography fascinates even when the story flags, and the film bristles with small revelations.

The film has its insights, but perhaps its greatest value is in how it offers something of a record of what time with the talkative, tireless Hentoff is like.

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.

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.

[A] strange, singular heartbreaker of a film about life still flourishing in the most inhospitable conditions.

The film, while wrenching and audacious, is crafted with that humane and observational mastery of great Iranian cinema of recent decades.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's scattershot agitprop doc takes the perfidy of the billionaire Koch brothers as its given, offering up montages of Tea Party screamers rather than investigative reporting or rigorous argumentation.

The stirring new documentary The Case Against 8, showcasing the lawyers and plaintiffs who challenged California's 2008 gay marriage ban, is the best kind of popular history, a film that trembles with tears and hope, and I dare you to get through it without bawling some yourself.

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

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.

A pained and gorgeous summoning, Petra Costa's haunted doc Elena dances with death, memory, and family, seducing viewers and then breaking their hearts.

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

Fisher never subordinates his big ideas to the usual chase scenes or manufactured love conflicts less confident filmmakers use to candy up such material. That's great — too bad that, in the final third, the movie also doesn't subordinate those ideas to its own story, or to its earlier elegance of construction.

Patient, observational film demands you surrender to it, that you keep your phone in your pocket, which means that movie theaters now sometimes offer a more unmediated look at the world than modern life itself.

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.

The Double, with its inviting alienation, nails a curious mood that's been too long absent from contemporary film: the anxious admission that the world might be weighted against the plucky individual, and that prickling you feel just before such thoughts make a sweat break out.

Egoyan musters some of the power he brought to The Sweet Hereafter, another lost-children tale, but little of the lyric beauty or sense of a community coming unglued.

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.

It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.

Never a disaster but only fitfully inspired, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 doesn't quite end well, but it does end promisingly.

If you find other people worth your time and attention, Next Goal Wins will stir you.

What director Knight excels at is continually inventive framing and composition, at suggesting, through layers of window and reflected traffic, the mental state of Locke, the hero.

Unlike many of the features targeted to what Hollywood is calling the "faith audience," the movie is well-acted and shot, often thoughtful and (intentionally) funny.

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.

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.

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.

Goldfine and Geller pace and structure The Galapagos Affair like the true-crime tale that it is, its mysteries rich and involving, its characters enduring in the imagination long after the film has ended.

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

An often funny workplace hostage comedy that doesn't demand prior knowledge of the character.

Schimberg, in this debut, demonstrates rare assuredness in shooting and staging scenes, coaxing unexpected but true-feeling flourishes from his cast of mostly amateurs blessed with extraordinary faces.

Too much of the movie feels like notes toward a portrait rather than the portrait itself, and Mock's failure to nail down the Thomas case drains the power from the victory-lap scenes of Hill addressing adoring crowds.

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?

At least we have this gem, the rare tease of what could have been that actually proves satisfying enough on its own.

This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.

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.

This film, a great one, demands a follow-up.

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

Levinson follows the ups and downs of bringing that beast of a collider online, but the movie's deepest thrill lies in what these men and women will theorize next, and how they will test it.

Son of God is a narrative shambles, more thudding than thunderous, shot with no spirit or distinction, always feeling like a sprawling TV miniseries cut up to fit into theatrical running time.

The documentary is stellar, despite some vague visual-metaphor stuff involving dioramas in an attic. Bring something you can punch, as you will be furious.

Anderson distinguishes himself as the rare action director who shows us real bodies in real space in real reaction to each other, who prizes legibility over quick-cut dazzlement, who stages his fights with comic-book zeal rather than puffed-up graphic-novel miserableness.

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

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.

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 sweaty, disorienting, thrilling. Rarely has a narrative feature so marvelously integrated a sequence of experimental filmmaking, and that sequence alone guarantees A Field in England should thrive on the midnight circuit.

The film surges by, powered by high spirits, well-plotted surprises, and the directors' admirable attention to both the real and romantic.

The pained, textured performances of Sevigny and Malone enrich their scenes, but when it ranges away from its leads, The Wait can seem like an anthology of moments rather than a narrative whole, although those moments do accumulate into a mood of chilly, gently surreal isolation.

It doesn't come close to working, but it's sweet that they tried.

Swanberg has made an inspiring career out of rejecting the aesthetic crimes of Hollywood. It's dispiriting, then, that he so doggedly indulges in its tradition of male gazing.

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.

Yet another first-rate film from a Middle East rich with them.

This Hungarian-shot bore is so indistinct it reeks of no place more than Hollywood, where the fascinating specifics of history and legend are ground into universal mush.

Segal's gearbox gets jammed between recession-era sports drama and brainless comedy, especially as Hart hollers pop-culture punch lines like he's the squirrel sidekick in a CGI kiddo flick.

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.

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.

If White Reindeer's satirical elements feel off the rack, that's because what they're satirizing in our real lives is, too.

Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men.

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

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.

A dismal road trip saga.

This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.

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

Caucus is a lively, hilarious, upsetting crash-course in recent history. It's also revelatory at times, especially as it reframes infamous sound bites in their of-the-moment context.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the movie isn't bad.

A stubbornly not-bad character study.

There's something to be said for fiction that, in its form, dares to resemble life as it's lived. Our minor failings and chemical imbalances certainly shape our stories. This troubled yet promising debut gets that much right.

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.

The issues at play here are fascinating, but Condon and Singer never let any argument about journalism or the philosophy of free information last longer than a couple ping-ponged lines between master (Assange) and student (Domscheit-Berg).

This is squirmy, hilarious fun.

A genuine nail-biter, scrupulously made and fully involving, elemental in its simplicity.

It’s all rote, dashed through, and somewhat detestable.

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

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.

Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.

For the most part, the narrative here feels generational, representative, rather than invested in the specific incidents of specific lives.

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.

Even if you know this history already, A.K.A. Doc Pomus is vital and endearing, a celebration of a great artist, a great character, and the universality of great pop.

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

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.

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

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.

As a whole, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson's wrenching, humane film is as convincing a brief as I can imagine in favor of that most controversial of all pregnancy-terminating procedures.

A simple, solid, deeply affecting film.

The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.

What the movie gets hilariously, howlingly wrong is the idea that a life like Salinger's—so extraordinary, yet so willfully humdrum—could somehow be captured by the most shopworn of cinematic techniques.

Passion is pretty good.

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.

Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint.

The final, moving, nerve-wracking reels are all sea, sky, and desperation.

The most welcome change is the tone. Wadlow has decided he's making a straight-up comedy, and he demonstrates a knack for it.

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.

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.

Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.

The funny stuff outweighs the cock-ups, and supporting performances from Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver kick the movie toward something grander.

Before it descends into Percy Jackson and the Things That Happen in Movies Like This, the adventure at times clicks into the inventive groove of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, which at their best are touched with the high strangeness of the ancient tales that inspire them.

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.

Simply put, the care and thoughtfulness that goes into footage-faking has not been applied to the film's script or structure.

Director James Ponsoldt gives us long, loose, single-shot courtship scenes, each a marvel of staging and performance.

Wise, warm, funny, open, and more interested in life as it's actually lived than any other to debut this summer.

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 movie is revealing, wrenching, and important, a reminder that what feels wrong in our gut—the effort to turn free-roaming and unknowable beasts into caged vaudevillians—is always worth investigating.

The Conjuring's problem, beyond its lack of a conjuring, is how its otherworldly hokum is stubbornly of this world.

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

The film is often beautiful and appealingly light. Every clear-eyed insight into why pushy people insist on pushing is matched by loose ensemble humor and lyric reveries.

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

Often, the hilarity is indisputably intentional. If you think you'll laugh and clap, try it; if you know you'll hate it, you're right.

Porter's film is dramatic, unsettling, despairing, and in the end thrilling -- at some point, it grows from a portrait of this country's problems into a celebration of a possible solution.

A final twist stamps this as a companion or corrective to The Shape of Things, this time with the man as the monster. This isn't as bracing as that film, but it's far from the horror show LaBute's detractors often accuse him of writing.

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

The Attack is most avowedly "about" terrorism. But that's a subject, not the subject. The film, an arresting and upsetting one, is also about love, trauma, and trust, both within one particular marriage and within entire cultures.

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.

A marvelous film, stripped of false urgency.

After going this far, both in raunchy bad-boyism and mock-apologetic love-us shamelessness, they've effectively blown up their own formula. That's not a bad thing. This is the end; now it's time to try for more.

The key relationships are well drawn, if not especially revealing of anything human, and director Fletcher sometimes dares some welcome absurdity. But if you've seen movies built from the same parts as this one, you'll likely find this too familiar—but energetic, well-acted, and distinguished by artfully artless chatter.

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.

As in so many Hollywood spectacles, the message and medium are at hopeless odds... Still, the set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.

Jaden is fine at running, jumping, fearful trembling, and affecting steely resolution. He doesn't yet have his father's charisma; perhaps to help him out, dad opted not to bring that charisma to the set.

For all its stellar nature photography, its low hum of suspense, and Gedeck's raw and affecting performance, the film often feels like an illustrated audiobook rather than narrative drama.

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

A shapeless, uncritical documentary.

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 story and its violence are deeply silly, but there's something nervy and upsetting that distinguishes the film's incidental excitement.

A spare and ravishing doc.

An hour of these repetitive, predictable disasters should wear down all but the most bailout-hating viewers.

With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.

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.

The photography is beautiful, the scenes of crowds and their signs arresting, and the interviews with individual protesters...are often inspiring.

The initial scenes, thick with creep-show ambiance, promise more fulfilling madness than what actually transpires once the out-of-nowhere second guest reveals who she is.

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.

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

Here's a movie with magic.

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.

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

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.

As with the Twilight series, The Host's infelicities—drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than there is story—are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities.

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.

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.

The performance and filmmaking are invigorating.

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.

Well-shot and sometimes briefly affecting, especially when Mortimer is given a scene that lasts longer then thirty seconds, the film moves too quickly for its many incidents to have much impact, and what limited power it builds is dissipated by mortifying narration.

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

The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.

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.

Too much of the movie is just people being crabby (or, later, dumb!) in fascinating places, which is less enthralling than the places themselves.

Sometimes Citizen Hearst feels as breezy and electric as the newsreels Hearst pioneered; other times it feels like the video they'll make you watch during orientation on your first day at 300 West 57th.

The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together.

The tragic ending the material demands precludes viewers from complaining that the movie is the most unpleasant thing that could happen in a theater.

Director Richard LaGravenese, who also adapted the novel, lavishes the material with greater wit than its demographic demands, and the central love story feels warm-blooded—the air prickles between the leads.

Christopher Felver's stumbling hagiography Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder does no wrong by its celebrated subject-- but it never illuminates him, either.

A flawed, fascinating testament to a time of discovery in Hollywood: of how stories could be told onscreen, of what great actors might find within themselves, of just what in the hell this country had become in the late-'60s crackup.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down what precisely Shakespeare Wallah is, it becomes something else before your eyes.

Stick with it. There are shocking acts that rupture the stillness, and then there’s one of cinema’s great endings,

The movie’s bleak, but it’s funnier than most comedies, and it suggests that life’s toughness doesn’t preclude joyfulness.

California Split has never been heralded as one of the key Altmans. But the few things it does — friendship and disappointment and the drab and desperate thrill of the gambler’s life — it does superbly.

One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.

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