Alan Scherstuhl

Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary tribute performances.

Cutter Hodierne's gorgeous, harrowing debut feature, Fishing Without Nets, doesn't just ask you to feel a bit for Somali pirates, as Captain Phillips did -- Hodierne puts you in their shoes.

Fuqua steadily parades his big moments, and the movie works as unhinged spectacle. As a thriller it's less certain.

It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.

Sympathetic audiences may be diverted by Space Station 76's period design and skilled performances, and by the mystery of what exactly the filmmakers are going for. (The less sympathetic may just ask what the point is.)

Despite some cutesiness, the film’s a fascinating portrait of loneliness, of talent undirected toward purpose, of the mysteries of the mind.

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

The movie's so slipshod and half-assed that I almost feel for Rand, whose ideas have proved enduring enough that they at least deserve a fair representation, if only for the sake of refutation.

In his second feature, McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?

There's much in Born to Fly to thrill to, dream with, flinch from: dancers leaping from a great whirling wheel and smacking onto mats far below; dancers ducking and leaping a wickedly spinning I-beam or cinderblock.

"I wanted to make something energetic, optimistic, universal, and real," Bailey announces in voiceover as the movie begins. She's certainly accomplished that, but it's too bad she didn't also aim for vital, illuminating, or consistently compelling.

What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.

Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.

Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.

Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with.

Hilary Brougher's YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn's novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody spook-out images, and a movie-wrecking hypoglycemic listlessness.

The comedy's too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story about anxious waiting.

As far as escapist fluff laced with totally unnecessary real-world horror goes, The November Man isn't wretched.

The movie is more effective as sports fantasy than as theology.

Every time a story thread seems to be getting somewhere, Winter in the Blood vaults to something else, with little regard for the tale’s rhythms — the movie doesn’t feel like a puzzle to solve; it’s a puzzle to assemble.

Some of the surprise works, but the final gotcha won't getcha.