Alan Scherstuhl

Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.

Jackman occasionally wins a laugh, when he manages to impose himself over the movie's restless clamor.

Beneath the clichés of prestige filmmaking beat the hearts of a couple it's a privilege to get to know.

It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.

There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.

The film, a hard jewel of beauty and reportage, demands and rewards that second viewing.

Stonewall aspires to be a sweeping tale of social change and hardscrabble street life, but at every moment it feels like a musical whose numbers have been cut.

The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.

It's dispiriting that a film about a humor magazine that broke and rebuilt the forms of both humor and magazines is itself so staid — and so lacking in sociologic sweep.

The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.

Ultimately, the film's wearying qualities pay off both as verisimilitude — you do feel like you've been through something — and as awe-inspiring history, making visceral art out of a global migration.

Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.

The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.

Rather than pioneering into the frontiers of the mind, Listening slogs through the most well-traveled pits of screenwriting.

The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.

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.

Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.

This is a haunting puzzle of a movie, one to pick at, to unpeel, to see a second time through eyes that have adjusted to it. It's also alive with tender, tremulous feeling.

The film, with its traditional mix of talking heads and vintage footage, does not try to hide the Panthers' advocacy of violence.

For all its heart and strong performances, there's little new here. Still, the ending is perfect, triumphant and heartbreaking all at once, demonstrating that Quemada-Diez gets the reality of U.S. life.

A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.

No Escape, while cruel, is often uncommonly suspenseful. And by pitting its white leads against the citizen hordes of Southeast Asia, No Escape is also uncommonly honest about the fears and assumptions that fuel adventure fiction — here, the Other is not abstracted away to orcs or aliens.

It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.

It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.

The filmmakers' hearts might be in the right place, but the film's doesn't kick in until well after you might already have declared it dead.

He may not be likable, but he remains fascinating. The film is on firm ground when examining Knievel's actual measurable impact: the action/extreme sports that have flourished since his retirement.

Walking Dead isn't the model, here — it's Lost, specifically the business involving that buried bunker with the outdated tech and the mystery button that must be mashed every time a Rolodex-style flip-clock counts down to zero. All of that has been copy-pasted into Air, which, sadly, doesn't even improve on Lost's resolutions.

This is a crowd-pleaser, and it's no surprise it snagged the audience award for documentaries at Sundance last winter. Getting to these moments is a bit of a climb itself, though.