Jen Chaney

If your mind has opened even a little by the time American Utopia is over, that is a testament to what publicly presented art can do and why its absence is so deeply felt right now.

The movie is not demanding anyone feel that way nor straining to jerk tears out of its audience. It is matter-of-fact, even when those facts aren’t necessarily flattering to its subject.

Tina is sweeping, fascinating, and, because of Turner’s participation, deeply personal.

Although undeniably a western, Stagecoach transcends the genre, as both a character study of the relationships among a socially mismatched crew of stagecoach passengers and an action movie about their attempts to avoid the dangerous Geronimo and his Apache tribe. And that action, by the way, is impressive, even by today's standards. [28 May 2010, p.WE37]

The genius of Zootopia is that it works on two levels: It’s a timely and clever examination of the prejudices endemic to society, and also an entertaining, funny adventure about furry creatures engaged in solving a mystery.

A 90-minute kid- and grown-up-friendly work of cartoon comedy that’s as consistently delightful and clever as the series always was.

Fyre director Chris Smith (American Movie and The Yes Men) has experience crafting stories about guys with big dreams and the capacity to pull off long cons, and he has a great instinct for finding the most damning anecdotes.

This one is a celebration of Cassandro, and like so many great sports movies before it, it’s an underdog story. But it’s one steeped in the grittiness of reality that avoids leaning too hard into easy sentimentality.

Sunshine Superman, a portrait of BASE jumping founding father Carl Boenish, effectively captures the irrepressible energy of a man who never tired of taking flying leaps. But it also does something even rarer for the documentary genre: It demands to be shown on an IMAX screen.

Thanks to remarkable access to her subject, and a refusal to turn away during even the most personal moments, Karasawa has made something deeper: a portrait of Stritch just as the aging process is beginning to punch holes in her concrete dam of a personality.

I Am Big Bird breezes by a couple of opportunities to dig deeper into thornier subject matter, but those minor oversights don’t hurt the film in any significant way.

This engaging, sturdily guided film from director Alison Ellwood (American Jihad, Laurel Canyon) argues forcefully that there is more depth and value to a group that fought and celebrated, broke up and reconciled, burned out and rocked hard for four decades.

This is a rock documentary that doesn’t just recount a band’s rise, breakup, and successful reunion, though it does do that. It invites its audience to see the band’s success from a deeper, more contextualized point of view.

A quietly delightful new entry in the Fletch series.

With its appealingly conflicted hero and generous sense of humor, Meet the Patels has the breezy touch of a scripted romantic comedy.

One could describe Boseman’s performance in Get on Up as electrifying, and that would not be wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that watching Boseman transform into James Brown, who died in 2006 at 73, is like watching a dude invent electricity while the idea for electricity is still occurring to him.

This movie’s pleasures are less about its villains and more about the interplay between Pegg and Frost.

Riley doesn’t merely make a fine nonfiction film about the life and legacy of the late conflicted artist. He virtually resurrects him.

What is often surprising in this entertaining and fluidly acted portrait of females in flux is the specific way things get messy.

East Side Sushi includes a number of moments that are a little too on-the-nose in their eagerness to convey the obstacles.... But Lucero compensates for such missteps with subtly persuasive visual choices and narrative restraint.

As with other Aardman productions, the greatest delights derive from relishing the details of the clay figures and intricate sets, crafted by the studio’s master model builders.

The whole movie-making story line is the most fun part of A New Era and gives Fellowes, who wrote the script, and director Simon Curtis an opportunity to do what Downton Abbey has always done best: explore class distinctions and how those boundaries are constantly changing.

To Pond and Marcolina’s credit, this isn’t just a character study of an ever-adventurous klepto-gran. The documentary also raises questions about whether a professional liar can ever really stop lying.

After spending time with all nine of these sometimes-gutsy, sometimes-conflicted women and men, it’s impossible not to feel a deeper appreciation for their struggle to feel like the skin they live in is genuinely their home.

As is often the case in documentaries like this, absorbing all those details as part of one, tightly edited story gives them an impact they lack when digested in individual pieces over time.

What Mickle really gets right, and what makes this far and away a more artful and effective work of skin-crawly horror than its predecessor, is atmosphere.

Its ongoing reveal of interconnected, rough-edged characters, as well as a tone that’s a twangy, noirish brew of the Coen brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, and Winter’s Bone, are ultimately what make the movie unsettling and absorbing.

By building the documentary around an ensemble cast, Lears and Blotnick demonstrate, in terms of content as well as filmmaking, that the voices of a few can galvanize the voices of many.