Alan Scherstuhl

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

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

Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.

This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.

Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.

It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.

As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.

It's smart in surprising ways, daring in a few minor ones, moving in the right ones.

As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.

Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.

At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.

The story spins out in painful directions that feel surprising yet inevitable.

It's a work of community portraiture that slowly develops into collective drama

Seidl's study reminds us, with each new basement, that the places where we're most ourselves might as well have grown off us like the shells of mollusks.

Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.

The film fails as a portrait, and it's not much better at drama.

What's surprising — even wondrous — is how often Schulz's precisely crooked line work informs the big-budget gloss.

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.

The couplings have an artful intensity lacking in pornography, which favors athleticism and disconnectedness, and the lighting — well, the best thing in the movie is the look of it all, which in a tony sex-flick counts for a lot.

The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.

Chu and screenwriter Ryan Landels's take on fame is more fascinating than most of the film's drab, slow drama.

The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.

The film often plays like everyone making it agreed that some on-set idea was so funny it had to be included, whether or not it suited the story.

Jason and Shirley is imprecise, even maddening history, but it's hair-raising as historicity: Exposed here is the longstanding and somewhat vampiric process of white artists extracting for their work minority perspectives and experiences.

Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.

Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of Zodiac, here making his debut as a director, masters the heady pulse of high-end, high-stakes journalism.

Especially in its superior first hour, Goosebumps has a loose comic rhythm at odds with what we see in effects-heavy would-be blockbuster junk like Pan.

All this history and critical appreciation is lightened by Lizzani's genial goofiness.