Alan Scherstuhl

Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.

McAvoy is impressive as he switches personalities, but never scary or moving; the script gives him many chances to exhibit virtuosity but too few for soulfulness.

Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.

[Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.

Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.

Gavagai offers moments of sublimity unlike anything you’ll see in most contemporary movies. It also tests the patience. In that key respect, it’s much like life: You have to throw yourself into it to reap its rewards.

Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.

Newell's film doesn't supplant Lean's, of course. The yearning is more vague, the gloom less consummate. But it's the best since, rich in feeling and dark beauty, alive with the superior scenecraft, chatter, and imagination of the most beloved of novelists.

Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.

It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.

Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.

The funny stuff outweighs the cock-ups, and supporting performances from Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver kick the movie toward something grander.

Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.

The film examines, with wit and patience, the hard work of community-building — and the toll on someone far from home, doing work that’s not his calling.

Milos's film pulses with f#*!-it-all abandon and chintzy eastern-Euro club beats.

The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.

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

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.

Since the movie is in such a hurry, we’re not given much chance to soak in this strangeness. Making up for it: Black is paired with Blanchett, who plays a neighboring witch in smashing violet skirt ensembles; the two rat-a-tat insults at each other like a vaudevillian comedy duo.

Especially wrenching are scenes of the Yazidi, torn from the land of their birth, separated from one another in camps, confronting the question of how to remain unified when scattered across the globe.

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

Exciting and thoughtful, scraped free of the empty provocations of the wicked-pixie Hit-Girl scenes in Kick-Ass, I Declare War offers movie thrills—smartly plotted betrayals and escapes—as well as its share of disappointments.

The film surges by, powered by high spirits, well-plotted surprises, and the directors' admirable attention to both the real and romantic.

Vikingdom trembles with great dumb joy even before we meet the apparently handcrafted hell-dragon that looks like a set of windup chattering teeth combined with a homecoming float.

If you find other people worth your time and attention, Next Goal Wins will stir you.

Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of Zodiac, here making his debut as a director, masters the heady pulse of high-end, high-stakes journalism.

The Founder slowly reveals itself as a don't-let-the-devil-into-your-house parable, one that uses all the techniques of inspirational moviemaking to disguise that devil's intentions, even from the devil himself.

Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.

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.

Ultimately, the film's wearying qualities pay off both as verisimilitude — you do feel like you've been through something — and as awe-inspiring history, making visceral art out of a global migration.

A flawed, fascinating testament to a time of discovery in Hollywood: of how stories could be told onscreen, of what great actors might find within themselves, of just what in the hell this country had become in the late-'60s crackup.

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

Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.

This engaging and intelligent script could have been more of both if Beirut made room for the experience of anyone besides the Americans. The filmmakers do memorable work examining what it might take to solve this one particular crisis, but do too little examining the city itself. The title promises something the movie doesn’t deliver.

It's smart in surprising ways, daring in a few minor ones, moving in the right ones.

It’s gently comic, a touch naïve, and somewhat moving: These idealists are ready to fight to keep creepy-crawlies farm to table.

Intent to Destroy sometimes plays like a DVD extra that might have accompanied The Promise, but it does have value of its own in its interviews with historians, philosophers, and filmmakers and its vintage photos and footage.

Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.

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.

Person to Person is a gently comic slices-of-life drama, the kind where a variety of people’s conflicting, occasionally overlapping experience of the city comes together into a messy whole.

Yuh Nelson proves adept with her young actors, drawing out relaxed and detailed performances while carefully managing the space between them in the frame.

Beneath the clichés of prestige filmmaking beat the hearts of a couple it's a privilege to get to know.

Shuman’s sprightly, restless film trails the sprightly, restless WFMU host Clay Pigeon through the boroughs as he checks in with the people he meets.

The performance and filmmaking are invigorating.

Any 30 minutes of Summer of Blood might have me in hysterics. But the sputtering torrent of Eric's yakking proves wearying over 90: Dude's built for speed-dating.

Hart rants, Gad fidgets, and together this pair barrels through the plot, shaping between them a surprisingly potent friendship.

The suspense and pleasure of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's talking-and-tentacles horror romance Spring lies in discovering what shape the film is going to take.

As an action comedy, R-rated division, The Nice Guys is hard to beat. Black knows how to pace and escalate a fight and a film, and he springs wicked surprises all along — scene after scene dances around trapdoors that the audience falls into.

Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s cheeringly low-key debut, Home Again, offers proof that someone making movies understands what Hollywood has in Reese Witherspoon. I hope this star and this new writer-director make a habit of pairing up.

Levitt’s film assembles a devastating case against the practices of dog racers and trainers, who often conceive of their animals as tools to be discarded (read: shot) when no longer useful.

There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.

At Gook’s best, Chon captures, with sharply memorable dialogue, both the essence of his particular characters but also the broad drift of generations.

Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.

It’s wild and singular, often beautiful, a feast and feat of self-definition through verbal dexterity. It’s shaking with laughter, teeming with insights and tense as hell when the police roll up.

When the Nighthawks light into an arrangement, they're not aping a record you could spin or download at home — they're attempting to discover what it might have been like to hear those bands of back then blowing the doors off a joint.

Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.

The villagers, excitable everyday folks, make for capital interview subjects, and the filmmakers wring poignancy from re-enactments your brain knows are a little much but your heart may thrum to anyway.

Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.

That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.

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

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.

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

The film's heady buzz is invigorating, and there are substantial pleasures—and laughs—to be found in all its real-life-just-gone-sour strangeness.

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.

I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.

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

Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.

The photography fascinates even when the story flags, and the film bristles with small revelations.

The Hate U Give takes time to focus on the nuances of Starr’s life, on the effort of code-switching, on the layers of self that Starr must sort through in everyday interactions.

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

The drama is mostly interior, and Washington’s quiet performance tends to reveal the jittery surface rather than the tortured soul. Neither it nor the script is incisive enough to make Israel’s abandonment of his principles fascinating.

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

As a whole, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson's wrenching, humane film is as convincing a brief as I can imagine in favor of that most controversial of all pregnancy-terminating procedures.

The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.

An often funny workplace hostage comedy that doesn't demand prior knowledge of the character.

As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.

As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.

This lit-doc travelogue gains in power, insight, and urgency as it journeys.

Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.

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.

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.

Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), is a canny and necessary crowd-pleaser in which not one moment feels like life itself. But, together, in their superb Hollywood falseness, they accrete into a portrait of our best idea of our national character while still exposing bitter truths about who was allowed to be what back in that age of presumed "greatness."

As in so many Hollywood spectacles, the message and medium are at hopeless odds... Still, the set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.

As a gamelike, simulationist PG-13 horror chamber piece, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a success: well shot and -staged, arrestingly acted, edited with a crisp unpredictability. It's less compelling in terms of character and meaning.

The film is more an on-the-fly glimpse of the scene than a deep-dive exploration, but that doesn't make it any less electric.

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.

The pained, textured performances of Sevigny and Malone enrich their scenes, but when it ranges away from its leads, The Wait can seem like an anthology of moments rather than a narrative whole, although those moments do accumulate into a mood of chilly, gently surreal isolation.

Gomis’s handheld cameras work to keep up with the actors, who seem to move with rare freedom, but he also stages some exquisite and complex flourishes.

Deadpool might even stand as one of the strongest and most inventive films of the high-early-late superhero baroque — if we could just turn off its built-in commentary track.

The movie's a fascinating mess, grand and gaudy, often hilarious.

The most welcome change is the tone. Wadlow has decided he's making a straight-up comedy, and he demonstrates a knack for it.

Final Portrait is, in the end, a cheer for craftsmanship.

Can't-miss viewing for culture heads.

Ascher sometimes indulges in jump scares, and there's one unconvincing burst of gore. At first, these horror techniques seemed to me a mistake, but his subjects themselves continually link their experiences to movies they've seen, especially Communion and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

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.

This material might be familiar to Frontline viewers and magazine readers, but Kenner's telling of the stories proves independently dramatic.

Sing Street pleases, all right, and even occasionally hits on truth.

As James D. Solomon's compelling and sometimes frustrating doc The Witness makes clear, what the case actually tells us isn't that we live lives of pitilessness or blinkered fear. It's that we're gullible as hell.

By having their actors lip-sync along to Hull and his family's own voices, the staged re-creations that so often pad nonfiction films here achieve a peculiar formalist beauty.

Far from a film about sharks sharking and love not working out, this About Last Night revels in friendship, fidelity, and something too rarely seen in the movies today: the idea that being young and black in Los Angeles can be glorious.

Despite some frightening (and effective) scenes of slippery slopes and aggravated wildlife, the film’s heart lies in watching these characters discover in themselves and each other the will to press on.

For all its heart and strong performances, there's little new here. Still, the ending is perfect, triumphant and heartbreaking all at once, demonstrating that Quemada-Diez gets the reality of U.S. life.

It's just zombies versus an international research station on the wastes of the Red Planet, with all that such a premise promises.

As in Ant-Man, there's lots of shopworn redemption-plotting to get through here, and a sense that the filmmakers find the kind of jobs actually available to Americans a little beneath someone as twinkly-cute as Paul Rudd. But — also like in Ant-Man — the pleasures of Rudd overpower the programmatic elements.

Brawling yet tender, wild yet rigorously controlled, first-time fiction director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals is an impressionistic swirl of a film about masculinity, about abuse, about growing up queer, about chaotic family life, about the jumble of incidents and stirrings through which a child discovers a self.

There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.

Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a surprise.

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

The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.

Strachwitz's enthusiasm — "This ain't no mouse music!" he's given to shouting — and a brace of choice anecdotes prove compelling on their own.

The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.

The approach is experiential, a you-are-there-and-overwhelmed dazzlement, rather than a definitive record of each squad's big moment.

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

Bauder's film is a diagnosis of a system that is hopelessly sick and not being treated. Bring a stress ball to squish up as you watch.

The film offers a solid précis, but it's a curious fact that a well-made doc like this is still only about half as informative or detailed as a long magazine article on the same subject might be.

Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.

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 battles, occurring every fifteen minutes or so, are brisk and bloody, but in them Northmen leaps too quickly from image to image, sometimes not giving us time to make sense of the mayhem. But the chases, and the Jacksonian sense of an epic journey across a time-lost landscape, will please devotees of the genre, and the flourishes are grand.

With sharper on-the-ground footage, True Son might have been as sharp a doc as it is inspiring a story.

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.

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.

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

Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary tribute performances.

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.

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.

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.

La La Land...reaches for the stars, doesn't quite grab them all, and then is still kind of OK in the end.

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

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.

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.

This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.

The film's heart, like Randi's, is in the penetration of illusion, rather than its manufacture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer.

The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The film lives up to its own characters’ thesis: that disability need not define a person — or even the film about that person.

The biggest surprise: Older, un-messianic, and mostly eschewing cute stunts, Moore somehow makes his one-man show seem almost humble. It plays less like "I'm still here!" attention-seeking than it does a concerned citizen's act of hope.

All this history and critical appreciation is lightened by Lizzani's genial goofiness.

Even in this glossy pulp fictionalization, Marshall is filled above all else with truths that still demand telling.

Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.

The film beguiles more than it thrills, its plotting never quite measuring up to its atmosphere or its suggestions of deeper meanings.

Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.

Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.

The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.

It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s wilder, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus Seventies- and Eighties-style nudity.

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

Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.

The film is a treasury of photographs and anecdotes, of fleeting peeks at the celebrities (Carla Bley, Steve Reich, Jimmy Giuffre, Dalí) who passed through, but it too rarely slows down and really lets us listen — Fishko is always on to the next striking image that will too quickly pass.

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."

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.

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

Complaints that there's too little here about how the Jejune Institute was hatched or what it all may have meant matter little in the face of the one great thing The Institute does offer: a record of the mad invention of the game's masterminds.

It’s almost as if, in their fascination with trauma, the filmmakers have forgotten entirely what everyday life looks like.

The film is admirably committed to simulating the messy experience of life as a real Maisie might live it. But sometimes, as she's tuckered out on her exquisite linens beneath gorgeous exposed brick and shelves of handcrafted toys, Maisie's world feels easier to admire than it is to worry over.

Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.

Once it gets going, it's fine, a somewhat scattered précis of the life and accomplishment of one of the 20th century's towering musicians, activists, and curiosities.

For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.

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 is sometimes too sentimental, too predictable in its drift, but electric in individual moments.

The whole thing has an amiable, gag-to-gag vibe for most of the first hour.

It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.

This is a crowd-pleaser, and it's no surprise it snagged the audience award for documentaries at Sundance last winter. Getting to these moments is a bit of a climb itself, though.

With rasps and desperate eyes, Gugino communicates Jessie’s thinking and planning so powerfully that cutaways to that other Jessie, the chatty vision, egging her on, prove redundant.

The movie's not built for belief. It's built for dumb, shivery, sexed-up pleasure, and it delivers, albeit somewhat modestly.

The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it — and even, at times, its welcoming warmth.

Marquardt works many threads... but, while individually interesting, they're never woven into a truly compelling whole.

The film itself is more a record than a narrative: proof to the future that, yeah, we knew.

Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.

The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd.

Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.

For all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia, even when the story skirts toward sensationalism.

Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.

Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse senses of the phrase. It's often kind of awful but also weirdly effervescent, a movie that salves, with its stars' radiance and charisma, even as it grates.

The filmmakers observe rather than interview or investigate, and much of the film is footage of actual church-sanctioned exorcisms.

The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.

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.

It's too bad...that a movie so attuned to natural currents in the end gets caught up in Hollywood's impossible ones.

Fuqua steadily parades his big moments, and the movie works as unhinged spectacle. As a thriller it's less certain.

An article, a book, and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’s voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism. The movie, though, at least lets us be the witnesses to something unsettling rather than just asking us to take some dude’s word for it. That means these cameramen are journalists.

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 city and the plot points wheel right by, the leads fetchingly entranced with each other. If one patch of dares disappoints, there's another coming right up, and the directors stage and shoot them with swooning neon kinecticism.

The movie — based on Les Standiford’s novel — is pleasantly simpleminded, often assembled from parts of other movies.

Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.

It's heartening to have a tony war film about PTSD and forgiveness; it would be grander still to have one that dedicated itself more fully to examining the courage it would take to offer that forgiveness, rather than dash its energies upon the dreary cowardice of the crime itself.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Walls’s book of the same name just often enough bursts to raucous life.

While mostly well made, and certain to serve as a handy précis for the J-school set, A Fragile Trust is more a soiling reminder than a revelation for anyone already familiar with Blair's case.

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.

Some of the surprise works, but the final gotcha won't getcha.

Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.

It's a mistake, I think, that the movie never addresses the fact that a camera crew is following Shaw around.

Often, the hilarity is indisputably intentional. If you think you'll laugh and clap, try it; if you know you'll hate it, you're right.

That Guy Dick Miller is a cheery and likable film, one that bops along the surface of its story with lots of interviews, too-quick film clips, and spazzy-quirky-tootling music meant to let us know how fun all this is.

The moment-to-moment inventions are great fun, but the larger narrative inventions are less inspired.

Gere jabbers amusingly, and there's something touching in his Norman's persistence.

The story and its violence are deeply silly, but there's something nervy and upsetting that distinguishes the film's incidental excitement.

By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.

Fisher never subordinates his big ideas to the usual chase scenes or manufactured love conflicts less confident filmmakers use to candy up such material. That's great — too bad that, in the final third, the movie also doesn't subordinate those ideas to its own story, or to its earlier elegance of construction.

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.

Jason and Shirley is imprecise, even maddening history, but it's hair-raising as historicity: Exposed here is the longstanding and somewhat vampiric process of white artists extracting for their work minority perspectives and experiences.

It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.

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

Sometimes Citizen Hearst feels as breezy and electric as the newsreels Hearst pioneered; other times it feels like the video they'll make you watch during orientation on your first day at 300 West 57th.

The performances are strong and the scenecraft absorbing.

All My Children's Brittany Allen proves herself a big-screen presence as the lead earthling; her commitment to each scene's emotional truth is all the more impressive considering that the schoolboyish Vicious Brothers introduce her character ass-first.

Director Dito Montiel aspires to sensitive drama, but Douglas Soesbe's script too often mires Williams in pat situations.

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.

The Mule proves a tough sit, but by the end you might be satisfied you gritted through it.

You get enough of a sense of this place and these men — and that widow! — that it's a disappointment when, in the end, we just have to watch it all blow to hell.

Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.

Even if you've read the novel, and are prepared for the long running time and haphazard structure, this isn't a movie you should expect to feel or even closely follow. See it if Midnight's Children is a novel you always wanted the gist of.

Revisiting Beast may prove more satisfying than just visiting once. The first time through, the film simply proves too successful at capturing the listless ennui it’s depicting.

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

The longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits.

This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.

Commercial filmmaking still fumbles interiority and moral complexity. So it’s fortunate for the filmmakers that Brierley's book also is thick with the kinds of things that crowdpleasers ace.

The movie, directed by Charles Stone III — who gave us 2002's likable Drumline — runs hot and cold, suspenseful and well observed, well acted and often affecting, but somewhat tiresome and implausible by the end.

In between Storks' bumptious best and worst are its uncertain quiet patches.

On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.

The fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.

The couplings have an artful intensity lacking in pornography, which favors athleticism and disconnectedness, and the lighting — well, the best thing in the movie is the look of it all, which in a tony sex-flick counts for a lot.

While overstuffed and scattershot, this episodic documentary makes a vital argument: That American popular music, especially the blues and rock ’n’ roll, owe much more to Native Americans than has been commonly credited.

The initial scenes, thick with creep-show ambiance, promise more fulfilling madness than what actually transpires once the out-of-nowhere second guest reveals who she is.

For all its familiarity and rote nastiness, the film's sharply crafted and quite promising.

The key relationships are well drawn, if not especially revealing of anything human, and director Fletcher sometimes dares some welcome absurdity. But if you've seen movies built from the same parts as this one, you'll likely find this too familiar—but energetic, well-acted, and distinguished by artfully artless chatter.

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit.

Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.

Just as Pine's Bernie Webber grits his teeth and pilots his 36-foot Coast Guard boat into seas that rise up like angry gods, Gillespie steers head-on into clichés, powering through. They never quite capsize his film, but it does take on some water.

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.