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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Transformer
    The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Bluebird
    For all its piteousness, [it's] often moving, always well acted, and distinguished by rare stillness and beauty.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Harlem Street Singer
    Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary tribute performances.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Seasons
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Summer of 84
    If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Touched With Fire
    With high spirits and great tenderness, Dalio and his actors stir up what might be the greatest of youthful feelings: that as you get to know someone new, someone whose thinking rhymes with yours, you're also becoming ever more yourself.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    La La Land
    La La Land...reaches for the stars, doesn't quite grab them all, and then is still kind of OK in the end.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Santoalla
    Becker and Mehrer’s film is more about place and silence than it is about tension or psychology.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Promise
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Goosebumps
    Especially in its superior first hour, Goosebumps has a loose comic rhythm at odds with what we see in effects-heavy would-be blockbuster junk like Pan.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Whole Truth
    This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    An Honest Liar
    The film's heart, like Randi's, is in the penetration of illusion, rather than its manufacture.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    The ending has a surfeit of sugar, but writer-director Arvin Chen's story jaunts along, a cheery rom-com tinged with dream visions and a somewhat daring conceit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Even in its longueurs Young Bodies yields beauty and surprise, and there are inklings of some grand conception, even among scenes that feel haphazardly chosen.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Dreams Rewired
    The filmmakers aren't arguing that mass-media tech leads to fascism, but they suggest, with some lightness, that our interconnectedness certainly facilitates it. But Dreams Rewired is no polemic, and it never mocks the past.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Legend
    Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    11/8/16
    This minute-by-minute rundown is priceless history, alive with the anxious textures of American life right then, a film that in twenty years will reward attentive viewing. It’s also, for many of us alive in the now, probably too much too soon, the tearing open of wounds that only are just starting to scab over.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Fast & Furious 6
    Everyone involved at last seems to understand that the mode here is comic. Previous entries suffered from self-important glumness that gummed up the fun whenever the cars weren’t racing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Visitor
    The Visitor is a mess, but a revelatory one, both a ripe, bizarre thriller and a fascinating example of how filmmakers first responded to the interstellar millions stirred up by Spielberg and George Lucas: by thieving the good bits.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    It's All So Quiet
    The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Bokeh
    Toward the end, the filmmakers relent on all the grieving sightseeing and offers up a couple plot developments, plus colloquies on matters geo- and theological. None of this proves as arresting as Iceland’s cliffs and horses, or those first moments of a city depopulated.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Avengers: Infinity War
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Mohawk
    Mohawk takes its time revealing all its generic elements, but at its high point dares to vault toward something grander and more mythic than action-adventure realism.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Doctor Strange
    It's not all that strange, but it's restlessly arresting and always technically impressive. Unlike most studio franchise fantasies, Doctor Strange rewards the eye rather than assaults it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Naz & Maalik
    It's no news that a filmmaker's debut is mostly 90 minutes of a couple kids gabbing on the streets of Brooklyn. But writer/director Jay Dockendorf's buoyant, tragic, richly textured walking-and-talking job Naz & Maalik exhibits none of the shambling narcissism that so often characterizes such projects.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Gangs of Wasseypur
    The killing is bloody, the power struggles involving, the history-class examinations of the relations between mines and unions and gangsters fascinating, and the tough-guy routines, while sometimes tiresome, never less than credible.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Breathe
    The film lives up to its own characters’ thesis: that disability need not define a person — or even the film about that person.
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