David Edelstein

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

Director Dennis Dugan knows his way around shin-whacking slapstick, and Sandler is mesmerizing.

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

It’s our sense of adventure that matters in the end. We must cultivate confusion and dare to be disoriented.

It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.

Gives off the same vapor of impending tragedy—of a fate neither just nor unjust but ineffably, wrenchingly right.

The movie has so much texture that once it gets you, you're good and got.

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece.

A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.

In dramatic terms, Osama couldn't be much simpler. The director is aiming for a sort of tone poem of repression, the girl robbed first of her childhood, then of her burgeoning womanhood.

I hate to damage so fragile a work with overpraise, but, gay or straight, if you don't see yourself in this movie, you need to get a life.

I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured. Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

In spite of its standard biopic gaps and simplifications, Walk the Line gets the big things right.

Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only concentrated and heightened.

Part of the movie’s fun — and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms — is how it forces you to share Lazarro’s go-along-to-get-along ebullience.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

It’s romantic, tragic, and inexorably strange.

The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

After warming up with "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," Malick has succeeded in fully creating his own film syntax, his own temporal reality, and lo, it is … kind of goofy. But riveting.

It’s quite a mix: Far From the Tree throws so much at you that you’ll want to pick up the book and read (or reread) it. You might be surprised that one of Solomon’s subjects is the accomplished composer Nico Muhly, who’s on the spectrum. Muhly (along with Yo La Tengo) composed the movie’s music, which, like the film and book, doesn’t settle for easy harmonies.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

Belongs to that most promiscuous of genres -- the go-for-it sports melodrama -- but transcends it and then some.

In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games.

A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.