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.

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]

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

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

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.

Under the direction of Susan Seidelman—who first focused on a lost woman with identity issues in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan—the leads in The Hot Flashes come across as one-dimensional, pseudo-feminist clichés whose conversations seem contrived and whose jokes land with the thud of airballs clunking on hardwood.

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.

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

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

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.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.

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.

Animated in form but completely listless in content.

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.

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.

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.

This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

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

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.

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.

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.

As illuminating as that article may have been, though, Emptying The Skies, a documentary based on Franzen’s story that borrows its headline as its title, ultimately makes a more searing imprint on the psyche.

It’s a perfectly pleasant cinema-studies seminar, but one that stops just short of teaching its students anything truly insightful.

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.

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.

It doesn’t provide enough rigorously reported context about what happened in 1991 to feel like anything close to a definitive portrait of the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas saga.

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.