Alan Scherstuhl

The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.

Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.

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

The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.

The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.

The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.

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

A restless, sunnily shot, one-thing-after-another travelogue of the peculiarities of American worship and belief.

The movie is involving, the romance affecting, the sex sound, and the catch-as-catch-can handheld camerawork smartly appropriate for the scenario.

While watching the film, I not only laughed a lot and gasped oh, shit! in the right places. I somehow never once found myself tempted to sneak a peek at my phone to check in on our real American hellscape.

A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia's splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.

Of Horses and Men is often sprightly, and almost every shot is an eyeful.

The film's brittle and quiet, on occasion touched with the techniques of horror, especially as Helena stalks her store after hours. It's also trenchant, stinging, and acted with great frumping subtlety.

Lynch has crafted an almost proudly minor work, a hangout movie whose reason for being is Stanton’s presence.

When Jared finally erupts, Hedges nimbly navigates the character’s hurt, fear and burgeoning pride — his relief at having at last found his voice.

David M. Rosenthal's sturdy, nasty rural noir, based on Matthew F. Jones's novel, is so sharp and rusted through that, after taking it in, you'll likely need a tetanus shot.

Eastwood may never show us his boys discovering themselves under that street lamp, but he gives us a clutch of moments worth treasuring — and mostly without overdoing it.

Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next?

The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.

From moment to moment, this Last Five Years is a robust entertainment, often stirring, sad, and funny.

Directors Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber piece the story together via fresh interviews, vintage footage, and too many iffy reenactments and close-ups of news stories. But the matter here transcends the artlessness.

Sorrentino, as always, invests his scenarios with a feeling and beauty that transcends the dreary specifics

Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie's a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it's underwhelming as argument or cinema.

Friends, family, and reporters offer invaluable insight in interviews, making this the somewhat rare documentary that’s actually as illuminating as good print reporting on the same case.

It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show.

In Sichel's inspired conceit, the self-reflexive truth-through-fiction ethos of the Iranian New Wave meets a sensitive documentary exploration of trying to live at the ends of life.

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