Alan Scherstuhl

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.

Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.

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

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

The Kindergarten Teacher dares us to work out for ourselves, from moment to moment, whether Lisa is a hero, a monster or something in-between

Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.

McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.

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.

The first scenes are hilarious, all sharp surprises and adeptly staged physical comedy. But then the story turns, the way that milk does, curdling into tragedy.

By having their actors lip-sync along to Hull and his family's own voices, the staged re-creations that so often pad nonfiction films here achieve a peculiar formalist beauty.

The villagers, excitable everyday folks, make for capital interview subjects, and the filmmakers wring poignancy from re-enactments your brain knows are a little much but your heart may thrum to anyway.

Greg "Freddy" Camalier's engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the coastal Alabama studio, musicians, and engineers who laid down some of the greatest pop tracks of the late '60s and early '70s.

Gomis’s handheld cameras work to keep up with the actors, who seem to move with rare freedom, but he also stages some exquisite and complex flourishes.

The film unfolds as a sort of first-person procedural, a vivid step-by-step account of a reporting trip to hell.

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.

Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.

The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.

The usual doc mix of interviews and vintage photos is moving and surprisingly funny.

Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.

That patience of Reichardt's, and her dedication to showing us exclusively the things that we must see, makes the scenes of preparation — boat parking, fertilizer buying — hypnotic and suspenseful and practical all at once.

It’s wild and singular, often beautiful, a feast and feat of self-definition through verbal dexterity. It’s shaking with laughter, teeming with insights and tense as hell when the police roll up.

Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.

Intent to Destroy sometimes plays like a DVD extra that might have accompanied The Promise, but it does have value of its own in its interviews with historians, philosophers, and filmmakers and its vintage photos and footage.

The film is sometimes too sentimental, too predictable in its drift, but electric in individual moments.

Working with Lyle Vincent as director of photography, Finley continually offers up striking, emotionally resonant compositions, including a wide variety of inventive two shots in which the leads talk at or simply regard each other. Either actress could command the frame; when they share it, the air between them trembles.

Life,Animated is rich with insight about the role our popular culture plays in child development, but it's richer still in love.

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.

When the Nighthawks light into an arrangement, they're not aping a record you could spin or download at home — they're attempting to discover what it might have been like to hear those bands of back then blowing the doors off a joint.