Paul Schrader is one of those filmmakers that some cinephiles will never stop rooting for, even though a good number of his films (the recent ones especially) are better in concept than execution. Auto Focus, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, Adam Resurrected, the occasionally excellent The Walker and last year s The Canyons had the spiky energy and fascination with fringe-dwellers that ve been Schrader hallmarks since the 1970s, when he rose to fame as an independent writer-director and regular collaborator with Martin Scorsese ( Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ ). At the same time, though, they were stubbornly theoretical in certain ways: filled with good ideas that often felt more illustrated than dramatized.