Alan Scherstuhl

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L.A. Weekly, Village Voice
For 727 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Alan Scherstuhl's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
Lowest review score: 0 Saving Lincoln
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 447 out of 727
  2. Mixed: 233 out of 727
  3. Negative: 47 out of 727
727 movie reviews
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    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    In those days after the misbegotten verdict in the trial of the four police officers who kicked and beat Rodney King, these Angelenos discovered what they and their neighbors were capable of. Ridley’s patient, humane approach allows us, over his film’s 145 minutes, to discover it, too.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    El Mar La Mar
    Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Split
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Nico, 1988
    Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    [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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Miss Kiet's Children
    Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Gavagai
    Gavagai offers moments of sublimity unlike anything you’ll see in most contemporary movies. It also tests the patience. In that key respect, it’s much like life: You have to throw yourself into it to reap its rewards.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Great Expectations
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Lady in the Van
    It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    God Loves Uganda
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    I Give It a Year
    The funny stuff outweighs the cock-ups, and supporting performances from Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver kick the movie toward something grander.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Radio Dreams
    The film examines, with wit and patience, the hard work of community-building — and the toll on someone far from home, doing work that’s not his calling.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Clip
    Milos's film pulses with f#*!-it-all abandon and chintzy eastern-Euro club beats.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Last Witch Hunter
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Sembene!
    Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The King's Choice
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    On Her Shoulders
    Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Ant-Man
    Ant-Man is spry and often funny, despite its familiarity.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    I Declare War
    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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    7 Boxes
    The film surges by, powered by high spirits, well-plotted surprises, and the directors' admirable attention to both the real and romantic.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Vikingdom
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Next Goal Wins
    If you find other people worth your time and attention, Next Goal Wins will stir you.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Truth
    Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of Zodiac, here making his debut as a director, masters the heady pulse of high-end, high-stakes journalism.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Founder
    The Founder slowly reveals itself as a don't-let-the-devil-into-your-house parable, one that uses all the techniques of inspirational moviemaking to disguise that devil's intentions, even from the devil himself.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Don't Breathe
    Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    In the Basement
    Seidl's study reminds us, with each new basement, that the places where we're most ourselves might as well have grown off us like the shells of mollusks.
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