Owen Gleiberman

It’s far from a masterpiece, yet it holds you, it adds up, and it’s something to see.

A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play.

Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.

Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.

The Father is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt.

It’s a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama. Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama. But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party.c

Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.

Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.

Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.

Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.

What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.

It makes sense that L'Enfant has been hailed as a masterpiece, since a masterpiece is what it's trying, in every unvarnished frame, to be. If you wandered unknowingly into the film, however, you would see this: a stark, fascinating, and naggingly detached character study.

Lively, confessional, and entertaining.

It was only with the advent of digital technology that the notion of an entire film done in a single take became possible. Mike Figgis got there first with ''Time Code,'' and now the Russian director Alexander Sokurov has brought off a comparably startling feat with Russian Ark.

Crassly enjoyable.

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.

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

Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.

Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.

Each elegantly framed shot, every deftly observed moment expresses something organic and moving.

The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.

Rolling Thunder Revue celebrates the let’s-try-it-on, let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the era, and as a time capsule the film is a gift that keeps on giving.

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.

This is Robert Redford doing what too many stars should do and don't: taking a chance. And reinventing his art. It's an extraordinary thing to see.

Ari Aster directs slowly, meditatively, purging the film of any of the usual horror-video razzmatazz. Instead, he creates scary coherent spaces for the audience to sink into.

The Fugitive is hardly Hitchcock — it never taps our emotions in a way that threatens to transcend the action — but it’s a mainstream thriller made with conviction, intelligence, and heat. In Hollywood, that used to be called professionalism. These days, it’s rare enough to look like artistry.

The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

It shows you, through the ironic empathy summoned by Washington’s performance, just how fast the human race can slip off the tracks. And it brings that drama into ravishing deep focus.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.

Watching the movie is like staring at a blurred image of the past that gradually, over 86 minutes, comes into terrifying focus.

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.

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.

A glimpse into a society that has grown more open, more free, and also more casually selfish in its interpersonal aggression.

What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.

Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.

It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.

With its cowlike Cinderella heroine pining for forbidden love while she slaves over her bewitching recipes (and knits a shawl as long as a city block), Like Water for Chocolate offers old-fashioned romantic masochism-Harlequin pulp-dressed up in a magical-realist veneer. It makes being a happy homemaker seem wondrous again.

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?).

If the pleaures of Heavenly Creatures remain defiantly on the surface, on that level the movie is a dazzler.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

It would be tempting to describe the Up movies as a miracle in the history of nonfiction filmmaking, if they didn't also represent one of the cinema's most singularly squandered opportunities.

The remarkable thing is that the movie acquires the quality of a time machine. You don’t just watch “Dawson City.” You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.

Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."

Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon.

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.

One of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be.

You walk out of Chasing Coral feeling that Richard Vevers is correct: The more that people see, and understand, the death of our coral, the more they’ll realize that climate change isn’t just about wrecking the planet, it’s about humanity destroying itself.

The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.

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

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.

The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.

Mesmerizing.

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

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

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.

Argo is never less than wildly entertaining, but a major part of its power is that it so ominously captures the kickoff to the world we're in now.

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.

It's Swank, however, who's the revelation. By the end, her Brandon/Teena is beyond male or female. It's as if we were simply glimpsing the character's soul, in all its yearning and conflicted beauty.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

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.

It’s a moving film, but it leaves a hole in one’s outrage.

Jaglom's scruffy style doesn't carry it through. He puts enough toxic insincerity on screen to singe, though.

In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.

"Andy Warhol" makes you see that beneath the gargoyle hipster mask, he filled that emptiness with an art of transcendent sincerity.

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

A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.

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

As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

Athlete A is a testament to their perseverance, and to the courage of all those who stood up in court to face the man who had violated their humanity. But it’s also a testament to the obsession that gave cover to their abuse — to a culture that wanted winners at any cost.

For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.

There are scenes in Spielberg’s version that will melt you, scenes that will make your pulse race, and scenes where you simply sit back and revel in the big-spirited grandeur of it all.

Hopping from Germany to Turkey and back again, Akin is out to capture the ways that a globalized world can tear up our hearts, and repair them, too.

Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

By the end of I Am Another You, what starts off as a celebration of reckless freedom turns into a revelation of a broken yet soaring soul: the story of a life that resists being judged as much as it does being pigeonholed.

An exhilarating hall-of-mirrors look at what happens when global art fame turns anonymous, artists become objects, fans turn into artists, and the whole what's-sincere-and-what's-a-sham spectacle is more fun than art was ever supposed to be.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

Isabelle Fuhrman infuses Dall with an ambiguous glower of ambition that’s scary and human.

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.

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 triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.

A puzzle of a highly rarefied order. At times it's enthrallingly clever and subtle; at others it's borderline incomprehensible.

A good but far from great movie because it portrays truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.

Wiseman reveals the victims of domestic abuse in all of their pity and terror.

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.

Young, wizened yet valiant, his voice still braying at the moon, delivers these songs of aging and loss as if caught in a beautiful dream of what lies waiting for him on the other side.

The film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.

As enjoyable as most of Unforgiven is, Eastwood's shades-of-gray moralism feels like a whitewash.

At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. It's a ride for the gut AND the brain.

It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.