Alan Scherstuhl

Select another critic »
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
view
per page
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Eating Animals
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Bernard and Huey
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Ocean's 8
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    American Animals
    Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    Rodin
    The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Upgrade
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    Mary Shelley
    Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Misandrists
    As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    First Reformed
    The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Deadpool 2
    Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    One October
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Seagull
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Mountain
    The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Beast
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    Revenge
    Fargeat is thoughtful about the elements of her genre, flagrant in her inversions of them but also ferocious in her commitment to them. She has an eye for landscape, a love of light — relish the infernal glare of the dust whenever a driver here hits the brakes at night — and an all-too-rare mastery of geography in an action scene.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    Backstabbing for Beginners
    The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Devil and Father Amorth
    It’s stuck between earnest examination of a case and exploitative hustle — and is unlikely to please the audiences interested in either.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Alan Scherstuhl
    Super Troopers 2
    The sequel is so profound a buzzkill they could sell it at GNC as a detox kit. No high can survive it. It slays fun dead, grinds cannabinoids to dust, and maybe even wipes the mind of the warmth you might hold for the original Super Troopers.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Borg vs. McEnroe
    The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Beirut
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    ACORN and the Firestorm
    ACORN and the Firestorm fumbles with the media story, offering cable-news talking heads in montage but not digging deeply into how the story spread — or why elected Democrats believed they had to shut Acorn down. That sense of fumbling shapes the film.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    Lean on Pete
    Writer-director Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) dashes expectations in almost every scene. Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Good Luck
    As often in Russell’s films, Good Luck splits the interest between observer and observed, between the lives that Russell and crew capture in their painstaking long takes and the very process of composing and shooting those takes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Last Movie Star
    Reynolds never appears in full command of his body, and at times the performance is painful to watch, not simply because the one-time golden boy has aged but because the role demands that he act as if aging is a betrayal, as if he has nothing to offer the world without his youthful vigor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    The China Hustle
    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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Tomb Raider
    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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Ismael's Ghosts
    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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »