Alan Scherstuhl

An excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust.

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.

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

Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.

For all its raw pain, Strong Island is also a scrupulously shaped work, one of striking compositions and juxtapositions, its faces and revelations presented with artful, thoughtful rigor.

It’s less the story of a woman taking a year off from city life and her husband than it is a pleasant revue of sketches and scenarios on that topic.

There’s nothing fussy about any shot of Nobody’s Watching, but there’s also no shot wasted, and no shot that doesn’t communicate something vital about the city or her protagonist.

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.

Here adolescent wanderlust, powered by the characters’ persistent and confused arousal, continually edges against comedy and terror. Scariest as an examination of what fascinates us, this debut feature will annoy and alienate many, but it’s the work of a dynamic new talent.

The tense final act...investigates its moral quandaries with a rigor this kind of bad-seed street-teen movie usually can’t manage.

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

[A] muted, sometimes arresting drama.

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.

It is at once a desperate echo of long-gone glories and a glory itself.

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

A real-life absurdist thriller that, in its electric coverage of one Russian scandal, can’t help but illuminate another ongoing one.

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.

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.

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.

The film creates a conflicting impression: Here’s a committed wonk and public servant seizing every opportunity he can to combat what appears to be the greatest danger facing our planet. But here’s also a man who would sign off on a movie that so often sets aside his message so that we might admire him and his work.

It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.

Few period pieces get our dynamic relationship with the now so right, or chart so smartly how the present shifts even under the feet of the youngish.

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

Yates’s films, like the world itself, have no template — they’re messy, rich with feeling, liberated from simple theatrical structures, always honest about what is possible. That one of hers ends with hope is a gift.

The film is a devastating success, moving in its beauty and wrenching when that beauty withers: Acres of coral waste away to chalky ash before our eyes.

First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.

Here, as Berry warns, the imagination is limited by the camera. In a world in which I couldn’t buy Berry’s New Collected Poems, I might make an effort to see this again someday, with my eyes shut.