Alan Scherstuhl

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

The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.

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.

Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.

This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.

Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.

Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.

The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged.

Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.

A real-life absurdist thriller that, in its electric coverage of one Russian scandal, can’t help but illuminate another ongoing one.

Despite some cutesiness, the film’s a fascinating portrait of loneliness, of talent undirected toward purpose, of the mysteries of the mind.

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

Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.

The film's chatty, ingratiating, and then howlingly mean.

Few horror debuts unnerve and fascinate as much as this one.

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

Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.

When it slows down, when it gives you time to think, Popstar reveals its weaknesses.

It’s not always effective drama, but as an example for thousands of struggling American families, it’s a serious breakthrough.

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

The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.

The film creates a conflicting impression: Here’s a committed wonk and public servant seizing every opportunity he can to combat what appears to be the greatest danger facing our planet. But here’s also a man who would sign off on a movie that so often sets aside his message so that we might admire him and his work.

Active Measures is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the mind. By coming on so strong, so fevered, Bryan achieves the dubious feat of making his host of documented facts, reasonable inferences, and alarming subjects for further research all seem seem less persuasive than if they had been presented more soberly.

The ending's a touch too cute, but the best scenes here stand as potent, empathetic, well-observed broadsides against fundamentalism.

The tense final act...investigates its moral quandaries with a rigor this kind of bad-seed street-teen movie usually can’t manage.

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.

Becker and Mehrer’s film is more about place and silence than it is about tension or psychology.

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.