Alan Scherstuhl

The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance against grandeur...Which brings us to Tom Cruise, the not-necessarily-good news. However engaging its end-times mysteries, Oblivion is still a Tom Cruise movie.

The whole never makes much sense, and there's entirely too much screaming, but the directors stage the shocks with wicked aplomb.

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.

Field can't make it all make sense, but she does make it diverting, even pleasurable.

Dylan Baker's film bests larger-budgeted fare like When the Game Stands Tall thanks to ace acting, a humble spirit, and all-around sturdy craftsmanship.

The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.

Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.

The photography is beautiful, the scenes of crowds and their signs arresting, and the interviews with individual protesters...are often inspiring.

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.

It’s a Rocky movie, just the latest go-round, its story more formulaic, its people less specific, its rhythms as wheezily familiar as a workout you should have changed up weeks ago. It’s a diminishment of Creed, a dumbing down, just as Rocky II was a diminishment of Rocky.

I admire the seriousness with which everyone involved treats these characters, and the smart ways that the script (from Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) on several occasions dashes expectations to the rocks. I have hopes for a sequel.

It works, kind of, despite its broadness, its obviousness, and its howlingly awful opening.

[The] conversation peters out as the film grinds on, the men getting competitive and the camera nosing into their faces. Everyone involved sifts the material a little too hard for clues to Wallace's eventual suicide.

Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?

Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey's debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off.

A final twist stamps this as a companion or corrective to The Shape of Things, this time with the man as the monster. This isn't as bracing as that film, but it's far from the horror show LaBute's detractors often accuse him of writing.

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

It's not bad, but it feels rote, as if the film's events are just an excuse for us to hang with the film's people.

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

This paranormal cops-versus-serial-killer procedural is never not ridiculous, but it's often entertaining as well.

The proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.

As with the Twilight series, The Host's infelicities—drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than there is story—are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities.

Egoyan musters some of the power he brought to The Sweet Hereafter, another lost-children tale, but little of the lyric beauty or sense of a community coming unglued.

As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.

The movie undercuts its own undercutting.