Alan Scherstuhl

Even if, like me, you agree with the points that it's fumbling toward, The True Cost will likely read as dopey and insulting.

The performances are strong, the imaginary visions are suggestive and fleeting, and the film as a whole is swoony, tender, skittish, a little scary — in short, this is what young love feels like. More Meyerhoff, please!

Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.

The remake grows less interesting as it goes, with final scares dipping into surprising lameness.

What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.

The film is fascinating, even if you're resistant to this dark star's gravity.

It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.

Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut.

For all the ways the movie feels singular and impossible, like something the studio suits couldn't possibly have signed off on, Fury Road also feels entirely of its era.

The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.

I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.

The D Train has one great idea, a couple strong jokes, and a void at its center — a man who is only believable when he briefly becomes specific.

This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.

Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.

Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.

Director Levan Gabriadze is adept at the sinking something's not right creepiness too few horror films dig into. His techniques are certain to be copy-pasted by imitators.

Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre

The moment-to-moment inventions are great fun, but the larger narrative inventions are less inspired.

It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.

The film plays too safe with its narrative. Fortunately, like its characters, it's most daring when it's in motion.

This superb, suspenseful film, completed in 2009, opens as a playful comedy of vacationing couples and awkward romance, one that might be set in the French countryside, but by the end has become a moral drama likely to corrode your certainties.

That Guy Dick Miller is a cheery and likable film, one that bops along the surface of its story with lots of interviews, too-quick film clips, and spazzy-quirky-tootling music meant to let us know how fun all this is.

It's not news, of course, that it's a terrible thing to extinguish a life, but it's a relief, when the shoot-'em-ups of Summer Movie Season are bearing down on us, to see a film that regards killing with pained awe. Wladyka's hands are clean.

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 suspense and pleasure of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's talking-and-tentacles horror romance Spring lies in discovering what shape the film is going to take.

Marquardt works many threads... but, while individually interesting, they're never woven into a truly compelling whole.

The crew's recollections and occasional demonstrations, on their instruments, are revealing and delightful, but the film itself could use more of their professionalism and chops; the editing's haphazard, and it's not always clear why one segment follows another.

Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.