Alan Scherstuhl

Rohrwacher’s work unites a passionate interest in social realism, in the hardships faced by people on the streets and in the fields, with a daring refusal to be held by the rules of narrative realism.

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.

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 director invites us in, to play and dream.

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.

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

Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with.

Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.

Jennifer Kent's maternal nightmare The Babadook is the imperial stout of recent fright flicks -- it's the one that will have you walking funny and might rip into your sleep. It's hard to say that you'll enjoy this film, but it's hard not to admire it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.

Sachs, a clear-eyed humanist, honors all his characters' pained perspectives.

The film is a devastating success, moving in its beauty and wrenching when that beauty withers: Acres of coral waste away to chalky ash before our eyes.

[Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.

It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.

Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.

For all its raw pain, Strong Island is also a scrupulously shaped work, one of striking compositions and juxtapositions, its faces and revelations presented with artful, thoughtful rigor.

The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.

We observe moments of living rather than the beats of a story, all that natural lighting and everyday quiet stirring the sense of lives taking shape before our eyes.

Get Out is fully surprising in both concept and craft, with the scares never coming just when you expect them and the secrets more audacious than you might be guessing.

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.

An excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust.

First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.

Raw and insistent, bold and brawling, Girlhood throbs with the global now, illustrating the ways an indifferent society boxes in the people who grow up in project-style boxes.

In his debut feature, Lee has crafted a mature love story centered on an immature man facing the fear of even admitting that he needs love at all. It’s a film to prize.

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 world needs to see this spare, revelatory film and hear these girls' pained and sometimes proud confessions.

Wilson’s film, a quiet wonder, emphasizes the courage it takes to choose the hard work of living.

Accomplishes the nearly impossible trick of updating viewers on the prevalence of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries without rubbing our noses in our failure to stop it.

Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.