Alan Scherstuhl

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L.A. Weekly, Village Voice
For 727 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Alan Scherstuhl's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
Lowest review score: 0 Saving Lincoln
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 447 out of 727
  2. Mixed: 233 out of 727
  3. Negative: 47 out of 727
727 movie reviews
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    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Alan Scherstuhl
    Life on the Line
    The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Love Witch
    Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Oasis: Supersonic
    As a music comedy, this is up there with Popstar, but with better-defined characters. It's thick with tales of brawls, breakups, stage-walkoffs, busted hotel rooms and astonishing rudeness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Doctor Strange
    It's not all that strange, but it's restlessly arresting and always technically impressive. Unlike most studio franchise fantasies, Doctor Strange rewards the eye rather than assaults it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Finding Babel
    This lit-doc travelogue gains in power, insight, and urgency as it journeys.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    The biggest surprise: Older, un-messianic, and mostly eschewing cute stunts, Moore somehow makes his one-man show seem almost humble. It plays less like "I'm still here!" attention-seeking than it does a concerned citizen's act of hope.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Whole Truth
    This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Red Pill
    Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Accountant
    Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Birth of a Nation
    The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    Newtown
    Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    13th
    Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a surprise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Denial
    The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Passage to Mars
    Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    Sand Storm
    In short, Zexer's film — scraped of sentiment but still coursing with feeling — is an ethnographic melodrama, rich in cultural specifics but also universal longings.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    Storks
    In between Storks' bumptious best and worst are its uncertain quiet patches.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Magnificent Seven
    You get enough of a sense of this place and these men — and that widow! — that it's a disappointment when, in the end, we just have to watch it all blow to hell.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith
    The film is a treasury of photographs and anecdotes, of fleeting peeks at the celebrities (Carla Bley, Steve Reich, Jimmy Giuffre, Dalí) who passed through, but it too rarely slows down and really lets us listen — Fishko is always on to the next striking image that will too quickly pass.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Lovers and the Despot
    The film is brisk and fascinating, ultimately moving, but also less rich than it might have been.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Operation Avalanche
    It's often more The Office than le Carré, and none of it's anywhere as interesting as the great counter-historical gag at the film's heart.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Come What May
    Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Alan Scherstuhl
    Max Rose
    Occasionally, Noah, who wrote and directed, hits onto something that feels like life.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    Don't Breathe
    Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alan Scherstuhl
    When Two Worlds Collide
    The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Alan Scherstuhl
    Ixcanul
    Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Alan Scherstuhl
    Anthropoid
    It's all sickeningly accomplished, with incidents so tense and audacious that you might not have the headspace to wonder until afterwards, "Hey, wait, what was the point in grinding us through so many terrifying minutes of that?"
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Alan Scherstuhl
    Little Men
    Sachs, a clear-eyed humanist, honors all his characters' pained perspectives.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Alan Scherstuhl
    The Land
    The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.
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