Alan Scherstuhl

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.

For all its piteousness, [it's] often moving, always well acted, and distinguished by rare stillness and beauty.

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.

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.

Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported exposé than it is cliché-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes.

Bateman is nimble in handling a tricky mix of flashbacks and pranks, genres and tones. As you might expect from such a gifted ensemble performer, he's also an actor's director.

Too often, viewers just have to take a movie love story’s word for it that its characters actually belong together. Not so in Carlos Marques-Marcet’s loose, observant Anchor and Hope.

A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.

The doc is often terrific fun. But it is a work of observation and advocacy rather than journalism.

The film is an adventure, a reason to despair, a chance to hang out with a great talker, and an often beautiful portrait of this city's promise and cruelty.

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.

Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.

It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.

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.

What's surprising — even wondrous — is how often Schulz's precisely crooked line work informs the big-budget gloss.

The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.

The movie starts in an ice age, as I've said, so you can guess where it's all heading, but what you'll remember from it is the vision of a plump ol' bear snoozing in a tree in the rain.

The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.

The crew's recollections and occasional demonstrations, on their instruments, are revealing and delightful, but the film itself could use more of their professionalism and chops; the editing's haphazard, and it's not always clear why one segment follows another.

Condon, like this Holmes, can't quite keep everything in his story straight and clear, but he and his film come close just often enough.

As a look at geopolitics, the film is limited, but as a musical doc it's strong — and it's best as the movie to recommend old white Americans go see as a reminder that people everywhere remain people.

The movie undercuts its own undercutting.

LA 92 is about what this all looked like on TV, a sort of Los Angeles Burns Itself.

It is at once a desperate echo of long-gone glories and a glory itself.

The film soars early as a fantasy steeped in life and crashes into a drag of a crime drama, one ripped from the movies rather than anyone's idea of small-town Colorado.

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.

Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.

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.