Alan Scherstuhl

Rather than reveal a showman, The Reagan Show in the end imitates one.

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

Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.

The movie is glazed in flop sweat, moist with the producers’ fear that if the wildness lets up for a heartbeat, we’ll be bored.

The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.

Raising Bertie charts nothing less than what it’s like to try to grow up free in the prison capital of the world.

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

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

The film examines, with wit and patience, the hard work of community-building — and the toll on someone far from home, doing work that’s not his calling.

The proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.

No matter her influences, Tamblyn has filmed for us something singular.

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.

On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.

Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.

Liman, for all his action acuity, struggles to make lying behind a wall exciting. He manages some tense and rousing sequences, but between them yawn scenes of the killer jabbering bullshit and the hero passing in and out of consciousness.

The ending is a joy and a heartbreaker, but what lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.

It's not for nothing that generation and generic share a root; the characters scan as vague, of-their-age types, despite having each been dressed up with superficial quirks.

Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.

Green's doc — like the case at its center — defies resolution or easy answers.

The performances are strong and the scenecraft absorbing.

In those days after the misbegotten verdict in the trial of the four police officers who kicked and beat Rodney King, these Angelenos discovered what they and their neighbors were capable of. Ridley’s patient, humane approach allows us, over his film’s 145 minutes, to discover it, too.

LA 92 is about what this all looked like on TV, a sort of Los Angeles Burns Itself.

As drama and spectacle, it’s not quite first-rate — I rarely feared for these characters or believed that I knew their souls, and George is too much of a humanist to wring real-life tragedy for cineplex suspense. But as a moral corrective and a call to decency it moved me.

Gere jabbers amusingly, and there's something touching in his Norman's persistence.

It’s hard not to wish, as Scheinfeld's restless film hustles along to touch its next base, that we could just sit and listen to more from Shorter, who actually has insight to share. Lord knows the movie won’t make time to let us hear some John Coltrane.

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.

The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.

Few horror debuts unnerve and fascinate as much as this one.