Alan Scherstuhl

This is squirmy, hilarious fun.

By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.

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

The whole never makes much sense, and there's entirely too much screaming, but the directors stage the shocks with wicked aplomb.

You know that moment about fifteen minutes before the end of most American narrative features, when the protagonist is brought to his or her low point, and it looks as if there’s no possible way things could get better? Something has probably gone wrong if viewers are cheering that.

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.

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.

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.

Director Dito Montiel aspires to sensitive drama, but Douglas Soesbe's script too often mires Williams in pat situations.

Jesus, meanwhile, exhibits all of Lee's weaknesses — clashing tones, careless pacing, the straightest dude's hand-in-pants idea of lesbianism — but also just enough of his might and madness that the Lee-minded shouldn't miss it.

Every time a story thread seems to be getting somewhere, Winter in the Blood vaults to something else, with little regard for the tale’s rhythms — the movie doesn’t feel like a puzzle to solve; it’s a puzzle to assemble.

Lead Mia Wasikowska looks convincingly miserable in the role of a young wife who's driven to seek her pleasures outside the marital bed, but whatever complexities roil in the character's heart and head are nowhere to be found on her face.

Meyers allows takes to run long, staging naturalistic conversations on sidewalks and in apartments. The result is hit or miss: We may not know what the characters feel, but we're way up to speed on how many steps it takes them to walk to a bar.

What’s lost in comedy is not matched by a gain in emotional engagement.

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

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

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.

The good intentions it carries out to the plains don’t make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist’s clear vision.

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

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

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.

Fortunately, Live From New York! isn't all overblown hagiography.

[An] intense and dazzling new documentary.

I almost admire the laziness of the scripting. In this overworked, underpaid country of ours, why begrudge a screenwriter seizing the chance to knock off early?

The movie is glazed in flop sweat, moist with the producers’ fear that if the wildness lets up for a heartbeat, we’ll be bored.

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.

Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.

Some of the movie isn't bad.

Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.

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

The series’ borrowings often have about them a whiff of playful improvisation, the logic of kids with action figures saying, “And what if then they had to drive into that tunnel from The Stand and it was full of zombies?” As The Death Cure grinds on, though, they become less inspired.

Hathaway's performance is brave, strong, wistful, and misty, and she's especially affecting when being wooed, gently, by Flynn, playing an indie-folkstar.

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

It’s hard to appreciate the hero’s crafty planning when we can’t really make out what he’s crafted.

The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.

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.

Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.

Sympathetic audiences may be diverted by Space Station 76's period design and skilled performances, and by the mystery of what exactly the filmmakers are going for. (The less sympathetic may just ask what the point is.)

An energetic, well-acted, handsomely mounted b&w literary tell-all whose script would be laughed out of the room by its famous subjects.

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).

The film plays too safe with its narrative. Fortunately, like its characters, it's most daring when it's in motion.

Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab.

Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.

On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.

Curiously drab and airless, tinted to a distracting bluish miasma that suggests an advertisement for antidepressants, Peter Landesman’s Mark Felt is the wrong movie at the right time.

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.

The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.

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

I admire the seriousness with which everyone involved treats these characters, and the smart ways that the script (from Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) on several occasions dashes expectations to the rocks. I have hopes for a sequel.

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.

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

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.

It's not for nothing that generation and generic share a root; the characters scan as vague, of-their-age types, despite having each been dressed up with superficial quirks.

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.

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 remake grows less interesting as it goes, with final scares dipping into surprising lameness.

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.

In his second feature, McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?

Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.

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

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

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

The camerawork in Allen’s customary long takes is fluid, even arresting, but Winslet’s performance would benefit from the kind of editing these long takes don’t allow. Rather than loose, the ensemble often seems underrehearsed, and too many of Winslet’s lines have little impact.

Reynolds never appears in full command of his body, and at times the performance is painful to watch, not simply because the one-time golden boy has aged but because the role demands that he act as if aging is a betrayal, as if he has nothing to offer the world without his youthful vigor.

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

Even if, like me, you agree with the points that it's fumbling toward, The True Cost will likely read as dopey and insulting.

Turteltaub is too buoyant for horror — the deaths and danger never sink in.

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

It’s stuck between earnest examination of a case and exploitative hustle — and is unlikely to please the audiences interested in either.

Occasionally, the film rouses into something thoughtful, even daring.

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

Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.

Dylan Baker's film bests larger-budgeted fare like When the Game Stands Tall thanks to ace acting, a humble spirit, and all-around sturdy craftsmanship.

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.

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.

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.

[A] muted, sometimes arresting drama.

The movie, directed by Charles Stone III — who gave us 2002's likable Drumline — runs hot and cold, suspenseful and well observed, well acted and often affecting, but somewhat tiresome and implausible by the end.

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 fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.

Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.

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.

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

It’s less the story of a woman taking a year off from city life and her husband than it is a pleasant revue of sketches and scenarios on that topic.

It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.

What Gustafson has achieved is certainly artful, and sometimes, through montage and smart camerawork, suggests correspondences between these century-crossing assignations that the stage show could not. But even at its best, this Hello Again struck me as an uncertain, even ancillary work.

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.

Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.

Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.

Double-stuffed with kill squads, killer ’80s couture and mood-killing howlers, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo is more a greatest hits than a story, the kind of radically compressed life-of-a-legend movie where everything happens in a giddy, ridiculous gush — except for when it slows down to dwell on horrors.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s cheeringly low-key debut, Home Again, offers proof that someone making movies understands what Hollywood has in Reese Witherspoon. I hope this star and this new writer-director make a habit of pairing up.

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.

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

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

A stubbornly not-bad character study.

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.

The movie is more effective as sports fantasy than as theology.

The sequel is so profound a buzzkill they could sell it at GNC as a detox kit. No high can survive it. It slays fun dead, grinds cannabinoids to dust, and maybe even wipes the mind of the warmth you might hold for the original Super Troopers.

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?

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

The director invites us in, to play and dream.

Everything you would expect happens, but little of it is funny or affecting.

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.

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.

Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire.

The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.

Overstuffed and distractible, this episodic redo feels like a couple episodes of some Showtime series stitched into a feature.

The movie's a fascinating mess, grand and gaudy, often hilarious.

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.

Too much of the last hour is a muddle of unconvincing, hard-to-read nighttime action scenes.

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 real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.

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.

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.

Yuh Nelson proves adept with her young actors, drawing out relaxed and detailed performances while carefully managing the space between them in the frame.

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 proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.

Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.

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

No Escape, while cruel, is often uncommonly suspenseful. And by pitting its white leads against the citizen hordes of Southeast Asia, No Escape is also uncommonly honest about the fears and assumptions that fuel adventure fiction — here, the Other is not abstracted away to orcs or aliens.

As far as escapist fluff laced with totally unnecessary real-world horror goes, The November Man isn't wretched.

Occasionally, Noah, who wrote and directed, hits onto something that feels like life.

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.

All My Children's Brittany Allen proves herself a big-screen presence as the lead earthling; her commitment to each scene's emotional truth is all the more impressive considering that the schoolboyish Vicious Brothers introduce her character ass-first.

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.

Dante took what could have been B-movie exploitation, and he turned it into jokes Charlie Sheen would shoot down.

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 directors demonstrate confident technique in most of the scare scenes, but their uncertain touch with actors and dialogue makes a cock-up of the climax.

Greutert's savvy enough to sprinkle some white folks among his houngans and mambos, but Jessabelle still plays out as Haitian traditions ruining the life of a nice-ish white lady.

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

The Assassin's Creed movie is about all the parts you might skip in the games.

This paranormal cops-versus-serial-killer procedural is never not ridiculous, but it's often entertaining as well.

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.

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.

Rather than pioneering into the frontiers of the mind, Listening slogs through the most well-traveled pits of screenwriting.

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.

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.

Hart rants, Gad fidgets, and together this pair barrels through the plot, shaping between them a surprisingly potent friendship.

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.

Walking Dead isn't the model, here — it's Lost, specifically the business involving that buried bunker with the outdated tech and the mystery button that must be mashed every time a Rolodex-style flip-clock counts down to zero. All of that has been copy-pasted into Air, which, sadly, doesn't even improve on Lost's resolutions.

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.

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.

Passion is pretty good.

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.

[A] goof/stunt of a movie.

Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.

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

Watching it is something like watching a play’s first full dress rehearsal or a gangly baby deer’s initial efforts to stand, where it’s the effort that’s more engaging than the achievement itself.

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.

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

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.

A shapeless, uncritical documentary.

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

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.

Found-footage horror flicks laboriously source the provenance of every shot, letting us know which camera each image comes from, but they demand that we never wonder who has edited those images together — and to what purpose.

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.

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.

Some viewers, perhaps, might be shocked at the association of Mr. Rainbow Connection with scenes set in porno shops, strip clubs, and drug dens. What jolted me, though, was seeing the Henson name all over a project that’s so often bland and listless, so tame in its designs, so limited in its imagination, so joyless in its execution.

The model here isn't adventure pulp. It's dystopian Y.A., junked up with scenes of medical horror too scary for kids and too unpleasant to be enjoyed by anyone.

This movie's got everything except gravity or a sense of emotional coherence.

The acting is stiff, the pacing sluggish, the framing uncertain, the music an intrusive mush and the scenario schematic. But it’s an interesting schematic, at least, complete with thoughtful/exhaustive discussion of the difference between justice, revenge and forgiveness.

The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.

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

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

Hilary Brougher's YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn's novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody spook-out images, and a movie-wrecking hypoglycemic listlessness.

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

The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.

Maybe you'll be at a dinner. Maybe nobody will believe you. Or maybe they will, and someone will say, "Hollywood is terrible at making movies about trauma.”

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

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

Mathew Cullen’s calamitous film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields plays like the hazy recollection of someone who hated the book, an incomprehensible jumble of misogynistic claptrap. It dashes joylessly through dense material, too quickly for individual moments to register, much less resonate.

The movie's so slipshod and half-assed that I almost feel for Rand, whose ideas have proved enduring enough that they at least deserve a fair representation, if only for the sake of refutation.

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 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.

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

A dismal road trip saga.

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.

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

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.

A 45-minute proto-hip-hop bliss-out, a masterpiece of train- and tag-spotting dedicated to memorializing the extravagant graffiti on its era's MTA trains and how those trains rumbled across Brooklyn and the Bronx, bearing not just exhausted New Yorkers but gifted artists' urgent personal expression.

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.

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

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.

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

Can't-miss viewing for culture heads.

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.

Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.