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
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Stations of the Elevated
    A 45-minute proto-hip-hop bliss-out, a masterpiece of train- and tag-spotting dedicated to memorializing the extravagant graffiti on its era's MTA trains and how those trains rumbled across Brooklyn and the Bronx, bearing not just exhausted New Yorkers but gifted artists' urgent personal expression.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Starless Dreams
    The world needs to see this spare, revelatory film and hear these girls' pained and sometimes proud confessions.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Watchers of the Sky
    Accomplishes the nearly impossible trick of updating viewers on the prevalence of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries without rubbing our noses in our failure to stop it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Time Out of Mind
    Time Out of Mind is an experiment in empathy, an examination of bureaucracy and streetlife mundanity, and a movie that many will find a tough sit.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    All These Sleepless Nights
    Marczak has captured the specifics of these young folks as they reel through a city that’s been born again, but the film should stir something true in the chest of anyone who ever was lucky enough to run free in their youth, even if only for a night.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Leaning Into the Wind
    The film ranges more widely than its predecessor, surveying more landscapes and a greater variety of projects. But it’s still a contemplative beauty, a chance to consider and be moved by a richer sort of connectedness than our lives typically allow.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Skeleton Twins
    What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Being Evel
    He may not be likable, but he remains fascinating. The film is on firm ground when examining Knievel's actual measurable impact: the action/extreme sports that have flourished since his retirement.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Expedition to the End of the World
    Dencik’s gorgeous, surprising, meditative film opens up one of the world’s last unknown places, and it will also make you want to befriend every Dane you can.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Caucus
    Caucus is a lively, hilarious, upsetting crash-course in recent history. It's also revelatory at times, especially as it reframes infamous sound bites in their of-the-moment context.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Everyday
    Michael Winterbottom's wise and involving Everyday specializes in unscripted-feeling moments that ache of life.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Una Noche
    The final, moving, nerve-wracking reels are all sea, sky, and desperation.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Iron Ministry
    It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Lambert & Stamp
    Cooper's interest is in the collaboration between the talent and its managers, in the way the duo urged their charges to begin to conceive of their sound, look, marketing, and live performances as all expressive of a singular vision.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    The film is fascinating, even if you're resistant to this dark star's gravity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Becoming Traviata
    A spare and ravishing doc.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Seven Five
    The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The World Before Her
    With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Blue Room
    Co-writer/director/proudly nude star Amalric cuts everything to the quick: Most shots have the feel of still photos, the camera firmly planted, and the movie always hustles us to the next, back and forward in time, the effect part Resnais and part staccato Kodak slideshow.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming is comics, unapologetically, as close as blockbuster filmmaking gets to cartooning.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Nuts!
    This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Fort Buchanan
    It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Blue Caprice
    The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Quest
    [A] tender, humane, gently probing film.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Kids for Cash
    The documentary is stellar, despite some vague visual-metaphor stuff involving dioramas in an attic. Bring something you can punch, as you will be furious.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »