Alan Scherstuhl

Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.

As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.

This patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.

Vital and vigorous even when its characters feel scraped of vigor/vitality, Philippe Garrel's latest finds boho Parisians facing the ends of marriages, affairs, and the feasibility of bohemian existence itself.

Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.

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.

Anderson distinguishes himself as the rare action director who shows us real bodies in real space in real reaction to each other, who prizes legibility over quick-cut dazzlement, who stages his fights with comic-book zeal rather than puffed-up graphic-novel miserableness.

What director Knight excels at is continually inventive framing and composition, at suggesting, through layers of window and reflected traffic, the mental state of Locke, the hero.

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.

Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.

The film is gently thrilling, often revealing, alive with talk and scenic beauty and well-observed vignettes.

Lang is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, capturing her scenes in fluid master takes, rarely cutting from one character to the next, letting things unfold at the pace of in-the-moment human feeling.

It’s a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how’d-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium.

Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint.

[A] studious, rigorous, and surprisingly tender documentary.

Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.

The comic scenes arc into bleakness, and the bleak ones often collapse back into comedy.

It's sweaty, disorienting, thrilling. Rarely has a narrative feature so marvelously integrated a sequence of experimental filmmaking, and that sequence alone guarantees A Field in England should thrive on the midnight circuit.

The movie is revealing, wrenching, and important, a reminder that what feels wrong in our gut—the effort to turn free-roaming and unknowable beasts into caged vaudevillians—is always worth investigating.

If you can work up interest in such meager material, the film is a chilling, stirring, experiential immersion in what life-and-death drama might actually feel like.

Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.

What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy.

Matter-of-fact in its scenecraft but searing in its content, Sami Blood is about girlhood and racism, passing and escape.

It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.

Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.

Dano’s film is shrewd and exacting, composed with rigor yet alert to the rhythms of its performers.

There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.

This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.