Owen Gleiberman

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Entertainment Weekly, Variety
For 3,921 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 36% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Owen Gleiberman's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Invite
Lowest review score: 0 The Men Who Stare at Goats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,324 out of 3921
  2. Mixed: 1,186 out of 3921
  3. Negative: 411 out of 3921
3921 movie reviews
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Beloved
    It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Fatherland
    Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Swapped
    On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Faces of Death
    Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Drama
    You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In The Drama he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Power Ballad
    What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel
    "The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    I Love Boosters
    It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Midwinter Break
    Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Our Hero, Balthazar
    It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Hoppers
    Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Joe's College Road Trip
    In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    How to Make a Killing
    It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Crime 101
    Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    GOAT
    In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
    Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    The Invite
    The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Mercy
    The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not
    If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Primate
    The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Housemaid
    The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    Newport & the Great Folk Dream
    Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    The Alabama Solution
    The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Song Sung Blue
    Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Köln 75
    You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    It turns out to be a very good film — canny and honest and unexpectedly moving. But it’s layered with a thick and sugary frosting of adoration.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Is This Thing On?
    It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Senior
    It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    One Battle After Another
    The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. “One Battle After Another” is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is an enticingly clever and droll, nearly pitch-perfect piece of murder-mystery fun — a whodunit that lives up to the expectations set six years ago by “Knives Out,” which offered its own perfect revival of the Agatha Christie spirit, with a tasty frosting of meta cheekiness.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Christy
    It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Cover-Up
    As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Dead Man's Wire
    There’s no doubt that Dead Man’s Wire holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    The Smashing Machine
    The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Late Fame
    Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote May December.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Bugonia
    As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    La Grazia
    The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Nobody 2
    For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” like “Nobody” before it, unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Freakier Friday
    The bottom line is that none of these characters, after the swap, seem different enough from themselves to allow the comedy to detonate. That said, the double swap lends “Freakier Friday” a juggling-balls-in-the-air quality that gives off a pleasant hum. It’s fun to ride the film’s complications.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Happy Gilmore 2
    Happy Gilmore 2 is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Bad Guys 2
    If you let yourself get on that wavelength of frisky innocence, The Bad Guys 2 exerts a wholesome and slightly mischievous appeal.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Sovereign
    The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Superman
    The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
    Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Materialists
    It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we’ve always lived. And there’s a dark side to it. It’s “Sex and the City” filtered through a sobering reality check.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Karate Kid: Legends
    It’s a movie that’s unapologetically basic and wholesome and, at 94 minutes, refreshingly stripped down. In its formulaic way, it works as an antidote to the bloat and clutter of your average “high-powered” teenage/kiddie flick.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Honey Don't!
    Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Phoenician Scheme
    The dense but undeniably enjoyable saga doubles as a moving father-daughter tale and ultimately seems far more interested in exploring the robber baron spirit of 20th-century capitalism than its consequences.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    Nouvelle Vague
    The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Bono: Stories of Surrender
    While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    The Chronology of Water
    The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Eddington
    [Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Bring Her Back
    The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Cheech and Chong's Last Movie
    I’d never spent a minute thinking about how these two put their act together, but the evolution of their career, which took shape with not much more calculation than the comedy bits they often improvised, turns out to be a story at once fascinating and enchanting.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Drop Dead City
    Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Sacramento
    Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Sinners
    Sinners works more than it doesn’t, even if it doesn’t always gel, but it’s a commanding demonstration of how lavishly spirited and “serious” a popcorn movie can be.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Snow White
    As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Rivals of Amziah King
    The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    The Accountant 2
    The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Last Breath
    Last Breath delivers every incident with so much specificity that it’s like a cinematic piece of journalism. Yet it leaves you with a minor tingle of the uncanny.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Captain America: Brave New World
    It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    One to One: John & Yoko
    The rare rock doc that’s a must-see.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    Ricky
    Ricky is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Lurker
    A tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
    I defy you to see It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley and not fall in love with Jeff Buckley’s voice. By the time the film is over, you want to find a way to go back and rescue him to let him live the life he should have.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Together
    Audiences should have fun with Together, a body-horror movie about a serious thing — love — that never takes itself too seriously.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Peter Hujar's Day
    In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Owen Gleiberman
    Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    One Of Them Days
    Palmer, though she has the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA, in her film debut, simply sizzles. She’s a volcano of camp fury. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a helmer of hip-hop videos making his feature-film directing debut, and while it might seem his main task is to keep the comedy crackling, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he imparts to it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
    Gudegast, for all his casualness toward plausibility, is an energizing filmmaker. He keeps the mano-a-mano standoffs humming, and he’s got a sixth sense for how to showcase Butler as a glamorously disheveled schlock version of Dirty Harry–meets–Popeye Doyle-meets– “Lethal Weapon”-gone-lone-wolf.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Riefenstahl
    It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is wired-up synthetic fun. It’s a trivial kiddie flick that moves at the speed of your mind playing video games.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Bibi Files
    The Bibi Files is an important documentary, because it takes in the big picture of how Benjamin Netanyahu became so entrenched that he remade Israel in his own image, in much the same way that Trump has done in the U.S. and will now try to do even more.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    A Complete Unknown
    A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Martha
    It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Beatles '64
    It takes this fabled, high-swoon moment of pop-music history, almost all of which we now view through a mythological lens, and humanizes it in an exhilarating way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Owen Gleiberman
    Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, yet the place it lands lifts you up. More than a great photographer, Ernest Cole captured something essential. By the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Gladiator II
    The movie is a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn — a serviceable epic of brutal warfare, Colosseum duels featuring lavish decapitations and beasts both animal and human, along with the middlebrow “decadence” of palace intrigue.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Endurance
    It’s better to let us imagine what we can’t see. But what we do see in “Endurance” is quietly staggering.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Smile 2
    The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Terrifier 3
    Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Blitz
    McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Elton John: Never Too Late
    The portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At the end, Bruce, speaking to us in voiceover, says that he plans to just keep going, to play in concert “until the wheels come off.” Watching Road Diary, you hope they never do.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Unstoppable
    It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    Queer
    The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Room Next Door
    The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Owen Gleiberman
    Wolfs
    In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt revel in the crack timing, in the I-truly-do-not-like-you obscene banter, that makes even the most casual insult take wing.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Owen Gleiberman
    The Brutalist
    It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.
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