Owen Gleiberman

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.

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.

By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.

Becoming Madonna, in other words, does not live up to the basic concept that it’s about Madonna becoming Madonna. Yet the strange thing about the movie is that it convinces itself it is about that by treating the glory days of her career as if she were still “becoming” who she was.

It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.

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.

Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.

It’s a handsome and watchable indie art Western, set in 1882, that turns into a sentimental cross-generational buddy film. Yet I can’t say that the movie, in the end, is especially good. It’s got a bare-bones plot, it lopes along more than it takes wing, and for no good reason it’s two hours and 19 minutes long.

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.

Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.

Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.

A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.

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.

It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.

A Minecraft Movie never stops goofing on itself, and that’s appealing.

It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.

The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.

As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.

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.

You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.

These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of The Age of Disclosure is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.

The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.

The Simple Favor films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.

“CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.

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.

It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.

It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.

It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.

The rare rock doc that’s a must-see.

The whole thing is oppressive and, in an odd way, not very interesting.

Ricky is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.

A tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time.

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.

Audiences should have fun with Together, a body-horror movie about a serious thing — love — that never takes itself too seriously.

I was touched, at moments, by O’Connor’s woeful countenance, but as written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, Rebuilding has no motor.

In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.

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.

Midas Man is never less than watchable, and it does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting.

The two actors are appealing; they’ve got marriage-as-domestic-fight-club chemistry. And when Glenn Close shows up as Emily’s British mother, a former superspy herself, the film calms down for a bit ­— and perks up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The action in Kraven the Hunter is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you.

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.

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.

It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely.

You watch Our Little Secret, seeing through the paper-thin contrivances, tittering at the imbecilities, and somehow that all becomes part of the experience. It’s mainstream fodder as downgraded camp. It’s pablum so numbing it makes you feel good.

Moana 2 is an okay movie, an above-average kiddie roller-coaster, and a piece of pure product in a way that the first “Moana,” at its best, transcended.

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.

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.

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.

It’s better to let us imagine what we can’t see. But what we do see in “Endurance” is quietly staggering.

The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served.

As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film obliterates any distinction between shooting the works and jumping the shark and just saying, “WTF, let’s do it!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.

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.

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.

While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.

Joker: Folie à Deux may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but in a basic way it’s an overly cautious sequel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What The Order accomplishes that’s most haunting, and perceptive, is that it shows us how white supremacy in America can be two things at once, two sides of the same coin: the legal and “presentable” side, and the underlying violent side.

Babygirl takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.

Maria bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor.

The movie is just a lightweight riff on “Beetlejuice” — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

[Kravitz] composes the movie out of vibrant close-ups, using each shot (a cocktail, a glance, a social-media cutaway) to tell a story, drawing us into the center of an encounter, so that we’re staring at it and experiencing it at the same time. Her technique is riveting; this is the work of a born filmmaker.

This is closer to a grandly efficient greatest-hits thrill ride, packaged like a video game. Yet on that level it’s a confidently spooky, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-jangling piece of entertainment.

Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.

When I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel (the script is by Christy Hall) and directed by Justin Baldoni (who is one of the film’s costars), it’s an avid and emotional movie that pulls you right along. If you go in not knowing what it’s about, and are therefore all the more surprised by where it goes, it may be even more effective.

Asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.

The film ends with an overly spelled-out plea for the value of “imagination,” but about the only thing the filmmakers are drawing with their purple crayon is algorithms.

As “Faye” presents it, Dunaway was too volcanic and troubled a personality not to pour herself into her roles. That’s part of what made her great. Yet the film also wants to cue us to the gossipy and reductive way that this kind of thinking has too often been applied to her.

The film is light enough without being funny enough, most of it staged, by director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy,” “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”), in a kind of generic action overdrive.

Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.

With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!

Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.

The darker the movie gets, the less there is at stake, and the more that Crowe seems to be going through the motions of trying to save not his soul but his career.

Inside Out 2 is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that’s, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit (be prepared for it to help save summer at the box office), it may also be the most poignantly perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since “Eighth Grade.”

For a while, The Watchers is a reasonably well-made lost-in-the-woods horror movie, one that draws you in like a puzzle whose rules you need to learn (just as the characters do).

Let the Canary Sing does an excellent job of tracing how Cyndi Lauper came to be…Cyndi Lauper. Yet it’s sort of an idiosyncratic movie, because that’s all it does.

These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.

Taking Venice is a very good documentary, though with a hint of pearl-clutching. There’s a “We were shocked, shocked…” undercurrent to the whole thing.

The underlying integrity of “Ezra,” what makes it an honest film despite some formula devices, is that its message about how to help children with special needs is that there’s no magic way. Beyond celebrating them for who they are and showing them who you are.

The movie, while elegantly photographed, is mostly a shambles. It keeps throwing things at you in an oblique and random way, and it’s constructed like a puzzle with no solution.

As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening.

For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.