Documentary
Rod Lott
All the love audiences have for the Oscar-nominated Searching for Sugar Man (which I wasn't crazy about) is what I feel for Paul Williams: Still Alive.

Drama
Phil Bacharach
John Hughes, for all the love people heap on his ’80s teen movies, was far too easy on high school. Maybe your high school experience was different than mine — and, if so, congrats. For many of us, however, those years were a marathon of self-pity, heartache, passion and anything else you’d find on an album by The Smiths.

Drama
Rod Lott
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is my least favorite of the director’s half-dozen films. That said, he has yet to make a bad one.

Drama
Rod Lott
In a short career largely dominated with genre films — from Final Destination 3 to this past summer’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — Mary Elizabeth Winstead always has exuded a certain something. But nothing that ever suggested the level of performance she delivers in Smashed.

Nonfiction
Rod Lott
When Tom Folsom terms his new nonfiction work, Hopper, as “a rebel biography,” he’s not kidding. Not only is his subject a rebel, but so is his approach. A you-are-there POV, fonts that interrupt the narrative — you’ve never read a celebrity bio quite like it, and that’s certainly befitting of its star.