Alan Scherstuhl is film editor at The Village Voice. He also covers books, music, and other matters for the Voice, in addition to writing Studies in Crap, his ongoing humor column about bizarre books and ephemera found at junkshops.
Director Laura Poitras's Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe... More >>
Here's a priceless chunk of dialogue, spoken between a pair of friends/rivals on 23 Blast's high school football team: "It is so... More >>
Kids may not know "Wichita Lineman," and boomers may have forgotten his hot-shit 12-string flurries, but singer/songwriter/TV star Glen... More >>
Each week new movies open in New York (and online) by the dozen. The Voice reviews all of 'em. Here's some you might not have heard about that got our critics excited, for better or worse:Chris Packha... More >>
Lumbering, skronking, and wondrously paint-bombed, Manfred Kirchheimer's Stations of the Elevated (1981) is a 45-minute... More >>
Each week new movies open in New York (and online) by the dozen. The Voice reviews all of 'em. Here are some you might not have heard about that got our critics excited, for better or worse. Horror-ho... More >>
Let's get this out of the way now: Kristen Stewart is fine in Camp X-Ray, the tough-minded/soft-hearted drama that packs America's... More >>
The tasteful white-on-black title text suggests that this motor-mouthed vampire-in-Brooklyn comedy is meant to suggest the best of Woody... More >>
The greatest lie of the last 80 years: “Never again.” At this moment, Omar al-Bashir, the world's wickedest despot,... More >>
For all its corpse-soldiers and intergalactic assassination attempts, Ann Leckie's Hugo/Nebula-winning 2013 novel Ancillary Justice... More >>
What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy. Newcomer Teodora... More >>
Vital, thoughtful, and deeply personal, first-timer Darius Clark Monroe's autobiographical doc stands as a testament to the power of movies to... More >>
Each week new movies open in New York (and online) by the dozen. The Voice reviews all of 'em. Here's some you might not have heard about that got our critics excited. Critic Diana Clarke relishes -... More >>
This Dracula Begins–style sword-and-fangs curio plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a... More >>
Since 2008, your Crap Archivist has brought you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets. Perhaps the most amusing and dispiriting of th... More >>
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi's too-familiar ain't-he-irascible... More >>
The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior... More >>
Perhaps the most frightening thing about blockbuster thrillers and action films is their purposeful lack of empathy, their reliance on faceless... More >>
Mathieu Amalric's brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple murders -- or does it? -- but rather... More >>
Seeing a living legend laid up in an oxygen tent shouldn't be fun. But in Alan Hicks’s doc Keep On Keepin’ On, it somehow is.... More >>
Each week, new movies open in New York (and online) by the dozen. The Voice reviews all of 'em. Here's some you might not have heard about that got our critics excited.The critics were cranky this w... More >>
Sadly, the singular element intended to differentiate this Somali pirate flick from the clutch of other Somali pirate flicks... More >>
Before its regular-joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who's sort of the Rain Man of puncturing... More >>
Even the subject of the slight, likable doc This Ain't No Mouse Music would admit that he's not the most fascinating person in the... More >>
Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary... More >>