Owen Gleiberman

For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.

Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?

Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.

The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.

A symbol of the lost father, it looms, protects, and also wreaks havoc when a big branch collapses onto the house. Mostly, it's the expression of a movie that's content to stand still.

Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.

Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.

At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.

The new Arthur is a feathery screwball satire, competent on its own terms, yet as the movie went on I found it increasingly hard to separate the character's self-indulgence from that of the actor playing him.

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.

The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.

Pucci proves to be one of the most charismatic male ingenues since Johnny Depp.

Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.

It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

Second Best might have made a good stage monologue, but as a film it's overstated and barely baked.