Alan Scherstuhl

In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.

The movie gets wilder and weirder as it goes.... But then, at some point, it all gets ponderous, especially all the vague political machinations.

As James D. Solomon's compelling and sometimes frustrating doc The Witness makes clear, what the case actually tells us isn't that we live lives of pitilessness or blinkered fear. It's that we're gullible as hell.

When it slows down, when it gives you time to think, Popstar reveals its weaknesses.

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

Will Allen's sunny gut-punch cult exposé Holy Hell plays like a thriller, all right, with a darkness edging slowly over its swimsuit revelry, but Allen never cheats in the interest of suspense.

The film is restful and exhausting, inviting us into contemplation: of Tibet's epic-scale natural beauty, which has rarely been filmed with such you-are-there patience and intimacy, each new horizon these pilgrims reach a reward for their perseverance — and yours.

It's all shocking, of course, but it also often looks staged and performed rather than merely observed.

As an action comedy, R-rated division, The Nice Guys is hard to beat. Black knows how to pace and escalate a fight and a film, and he springs wicked surprises all along — scene after scene dances around trapdoors that the audience falls into.

Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.

With the plotting and the epigrams taken care of, Stillman seems liberated as a craftsman: Never before has one of his films been so crisp, so tart, so laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.

Bateman is nimble in handling a tricky mix of flashbacks and pranks, genres and tones. As you might expect from such a gifted ensemble performer, he's also an actor's director.

The filmmakers have denied us their subject's voice and then sunk their lead by adding distancing layers between the audience and her chief instrument, her face. Even the script exhibits little confidence in this Nina's ability to communicate to us what matters.

Outside of Shannon's performance, Elvis & Nixon is enough to make you long for the nuance of Kissin' Cousins.

A feat of workplace naturalism.

Sing Street pleases, all right, and even occasionally hits on truth.

The film is a wonder of desert skies, slick tunnels, bumptious fence- and wall-climbing, and occasional staged reveries.

Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse senses of the phrase. It's often kind of awful but also weirdly effervescent, a movie that salves, with its stars' radiance and charisma, even as it grates.

No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its action might be, Neon Bull always honors the chaotic looseness of everyday living — the way that, unlike in the movies, few of the moments we inhabit seem to be about just one thing.

[A] studious, rigorous, and surprisingly tender documentary.

Skipping across ages and genres, this cine-essay beguilement from Russian Ark director Alexander Sokurov considers the Louvre — and the miracle of the transmission of art and culture across its history.

Cheadle's tender eyes and scraped-raw whisper prove reason enough for Davis fans to give Miles Ahead a go: Just often enough, I thought, "Holy shit, this is what a day with Miles might feel like."

I Saw the Light ignores Williams's composing, denies us his voice, and is too spooked by sentimentality to show us just what his music touches off in people.

At first the stakes are as light yet rich as Sentaro's pancakes; then come marvelous cine-essays on bean-soaking and paste-prepping, plus — in the film's tragedy-tinged final third — a change-of-seasons montage for the ages.

The result is something like the best science-fair project ever, an inviting performance piece that tasks viewers with the pleasurable, imaginative engagement that more seamless special effects deny.

Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.