Alan Scherstuhl

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.

The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.

The movie's not just good but moving, funny and true to the way people actually live in hard-times America.

Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.

Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.

Well observed and sometimes hilarious, Punching Henry stands as a better film than The Comedian, but many fewer people will see it. That might be its truest punch line.

Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre

The film is most illuminating on the prehistory of Land Art.

We Are Mari Pepa is a sweaty, urgent, beautifully honest bliss out.

The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.

Thorpe offers charming, intimate glimpses of his life, including memorable chats with friends and experts, and he's adept at drawing winning quotes from interview subjects — one of the most moving moments comes from George Takei.

The film is brisk and fascinating, ultimately moving, but also less rich than it might have been.

Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.

Disconnect might play better a decade from now, when it's more clearly a compendium of contemporary fears rather than some dire expression of them.

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.

Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.

The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.

The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.

This stellar, incisive slice-of-life doc centers on the kind of crowd-pleasing competition story that lures in audiences and then lays bare heartsick truths about small-town America today.

Sorrentino, as always, invests his scenarios with a feeling and beauty that transcends the dreary specifics

Demme has crafted yet another superb document of musicians at work, one as much about creation—and the sources of inspiration—as it is about performance. A wonderful film, as in, it's full of wonders.

Will Allen's sunny gut-punch cult exposé Holy Hell plays like a thriller, all right, with a darkness edging slowly over its swimsuit revelry, but Allen never cheats in the interest of suspense.

What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?

The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.

Cheadle's tender eyes and scraped-raw whisper prove reason enough for Davis fans to give Miles Ahead a go: Just often enough, I thought, "Holy shit, this is what a day with Miles might feel like."

Ant-Man is spry and often funny, despite its familiarity.

Serge Bozon's smart, surprising, marvelously realized French crime-and-sex police drama/comedy distinguishes itself with trenchant plotting, inspired framing, and performances that honor true human feeling even as they lunge into the screwball.

Some moments still work after the movie grows mawkish.