Alan Scherstuhl

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.

Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.

What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.

It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.

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.

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.

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

It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.

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.

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

Art itself should seek a restraining order against anyone who insists, “Here is the one thing that Mother! means!”

Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.

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.

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.

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.

The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.

As an introduction to its arresting, charismatic subjects, Night School is invaluable.

Vital, thoughtful, and deeply personal, first-timer Darius Clark Monroe's autobiographical doc stands as a testament to the power of movies to stir empathy.

The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Field can't make it all make sense, but she does make it diverting, even pleasurable.

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

This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.