Owen Gleiberman

Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.

Sensational and accomplished.

A madcap gem.

Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.

Munich, Steven Spielberg's spectacularly gripping and unsettling new movie, is a grave and haunted film, yet its power lies in its willingness to be a work of brutal excitement.

Fincher has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can't see.

A spooky, heartbreaking documentary.

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

Fast, convulsive, and densely exciting new British gangster thriller.

The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.

A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.

David Gordon Green's captivating winter-chill tragedy, is a tale that encompasses murder, divorce, adultery, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, and the disappearance of a small child. In other words, it's downbeat enough to make the recent Oscar-nominated films look like party games.

A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.

The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.

A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.

A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.

The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.

The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.

Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.

It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.

Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

This story of a 12-year-old boy who drops through the net of middle-class life invites us-in each shimmering frame-to gaze upon the world with a child's freshly awakening vision.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.

It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.

It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.

I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

Oren Moverman's Rampart is a terrific film: tense, shocking, complex, mesmerizing.

It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.

The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places the audience right up there in space along with them.

With an authenticity that is tender and merciless, the movie shows you what it looks like when youth rebellion becomes a form of fascism.

Potent and eye-opening documentary.

A marvelous movie.

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.

The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned.

A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.

It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

In its minimalist quotidian way, Showing Up is a movie made by someone in masterly control of her medium.

In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world.

A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.

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.

Presents Glass as a masterfully corrupt fabulist who convinced himself of the ultimate seductive lie, which is that there can't be anything wrong with telling people what they want to hear.

They’ve done it. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).

An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.

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.

The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.

Burns, by trusting the audience, has created a darkly authentic political thriller that does exactly what a movie like this one should do. It leaves you chastened and inspired.

It's hard to think of the last time a Pixar film made you go ''Wow!'' That's part of why The LEGO Movie is such outrageous and intoxicating fun.

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made.

The Wizard of Oz remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's-really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood.

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary.

Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.

A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life.

Bold and brilliant.

To see Gone With the Wind on a big screen again is to weep for the fearlessness with which Hollywood once believed the sublime was possible.

Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.

The movie is so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that at times it appears to take in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese.

This documentary about the triumph of the New Hollywood employs a treasure trove of interviews and clips to create a rich understanding of the many forces -- cultural undertows, really -- that flowed together to fill the void left by the dying studio system.

If you see only one movie this year about a twisted, cuddly, courageous, fatally diseased, self-mutilating love slave, make sure that movie is Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.

I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever.

The movie is grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln's presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as though by time machine.

A gripping documentary that uses voluminous period evidence — unedited news footage, tape recordings of SLA leader Cinque's rants — to brilliantly reconstruct the entire freak event.

In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.

It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest.

Voluptuously engrossing.

A candy store for film buffs.

Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.

Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.

There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.

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

Maggie Gyllenhaal is such a miracle of an actress that she makes you respond to the innocence of Sherry's desperate, selfish destruction.

Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear.

It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there.

Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.

Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

At 88 minutes, Tabloid is short and sweet (it's pure movie candy), but by the end we've forged an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her unapologetic fearless/nutty valor. And that's what really makes a great tabloid story: It's a vortex that's also a mirror.

The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.

Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high.

It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

The effect is ecstatic; she sounds like the holiest of trumpets, with every note piercingly bright yet as soft as velvet. Listening to Franklin, you feel like you could ride that voice into the heavens. She’s not just a singer, she’s a human chariot.

He (Spurlock) takes Comic-Con seriously. He talks to Kevin Smith, Harry Knowles, and other famous grown-up geeks, but mostly he follows a handful of people whose dream it is to pass through the fan/professional looking glass and carve out a place for themselves in the industry of fantasy.

The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star, and it doesn't let Charlie off the hook for his cruelty or self-pity.

The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.