Nick Schager

A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008's Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders's latest (written...

Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation's finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,...

Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer's Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson's biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney's documentary Steve Jobs: The...

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, about Indonesia's 1965 genocide of more than half a million alleged "communists," was not only the best documentary of 2012, but one of the finest films of the past decade. In it Oppenheimer persuaded the perpetrators of mass murder to re-enact their crimes on...

A post-Wikipedia biographical documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck finds Brett Morgen constructing a feature-length collage of notebook entries, demo tapes, rehearsal footage, home movies, archival photos, and drawings and artwork by the late Nirvana frontman. It's an impressive, comprehensive assemblage, designed to impart not a point-by-point historical account but,...