Owen Gleiberman

At once spectacular and inert -- a mosaic impersonating a movie; an empty-shell epic.

In execution, it is charming...and also a little monotonous.

The movie ends with a rebel gesture that feels too much like…a gesture. It’s the perfect sign-off for a drama that cares, but maybe not enough to see that this kind of caring actually became part of the problem

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.

Plan B is a girls-behaving-badly all-night-long road-trip comedy that’s built on a formula chassis, but it’s fast and funny, with a scandalous spirit, and it’s got a couple of lead performances that, if there’s any justice, should have the town talking.

If Take My Eyes explored how a woman could still feel for a man who abused her, it might have gripped us with its difficult truths. But the movie presents Pilar and Antonio's marriage as a stale, neurotic dead end.

A movie in which the easy socio-racial paradoxes have been diagrammed with more care than the relationships

Too chicly depressive -- and, for the most part, too dull -- to bear.

Becoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus’s ardent and transporting documentary, is one of those movies that puts a life together so beautifully that you feel it heightening your awareness of everyday things.

With all of that going for it, it's hard to see how In the Line of Fire could be anything less than rock-solid entertainment-and, indeed, it is. Yet it's never more than that.

The stab at sublimity-by-proxy doesn't take.

Love, Gilda is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.

The appeal of “Eno” — like the appeal of Brian Eno himself — is that the film conjures a wholehearted and accessible experience within an experimental veneer.

Assassins is a terrific true-crime story, but it’s also a documentary thriller about the new world disorder.

Zenovich, the director of “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” offers just what you want from a documentary like this one: She brings us closer to events that have been covered many times, deepening — or overturning — what we think we know about them.

It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.

What makes Val a good and heartfelt movie, rather than just some glorified movie-star-as-trashed-parody-of-himself piece of reality-show exploitation, is that Kilmer brings the film an incredible sense of self-awareness.

Higher Ground breaks crucial, sacred ground in American moviemaking.

Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.

Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick

A singular and haunting experience.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

Director Ole Christian Madsen combines sharp scenes of moral inquiry with a few too many functional, oldfangled espionage twists.

The one truly thrilling movie I've seen so far this year.

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.

The film has the same moral design as "Dead Man Walking," but since it never gets inside the darkness of the killers' minds, it's really just a rambling episode of "A Current Affair."

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.

The whole movie is pat -- very pleased with itself for being so up front about the ways of a 21st-century man-whore.

There's always something to look at (an octopus holding his eyeballs aloft, the petulant Jane assaulted by pixie dust), but the story is weak tea.

Washington immerses himself, even more than he did in "Malcolm X," in a stare of unforgiving outrage.

Even as the director, Stephen Daldry, places his star front and center, he doesn't know how to highlight him.

As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick.

A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.

Just because a scenario turns dark doesn't mean that it's convincing. House of Sand and Fog is artful until it lunges for Art.

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

Nine Lives is a lot like a cat: It occasionally bestirs itself, and it would like to be stroked with love, but mostly it just sits there. It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin” comedies.

The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.

Light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are lickety-split mad fun.

The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.

Hercules, like Aladdin, zips Disney’s house animation style past sentimentality and into an age of ironic media-wise overload. That’s not a bad place for it to be.

So what is The Ghost of Peter Sellers? It’s a record of what it was like to shoot an empty shambolic piece of junk that drained the coffers of everyone involved. It’s a record of the kind of damage that a debonair misfit like Peter Sellers could cause when he put his mischievous (and maybe, in some ways, unstable) mind to it.

How is Invictus as a sports movie? Let's just say that its lump-in-the-throat climax is predictable, but that doesn't mean it's less than earned.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.

James Gray's Two Lovers really is a '70s movie, in the mode of such raw, unfiltered character studies as "The Panic in Needle Park," "Wanda," and "Fat City."

What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.

If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.

Though the events have a rambling overfamiliarity, there's a real story between the lines: the resentment over the U.S. occupation on the part of non-insurgent Iraqis.

Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.

One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.

After watching Jay Myself, you yourself may begin to see the world in a whole new way, as if you’d woken up to all the images that might have been invisible before, but only because you passed them by.

After Parkland has its gun politics, and its aching heart, in the right place, but we need more from a movie about this subject. We need to ask how where the contemporary American heart of darkness is coming from.

The film is Arnold trying to have the integrity of her severity and eat it too. Bird is a feel-bad movie that turns into a feel-good movie. What it never feels like is a totally authentic movie.

Now Ray has directed his second film, the abysmally titled Breach, and it's a bona fide companion piece, another true-life tale of duplicity gone secretly insane.

A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.

On the Rocks turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whisky brand of world-weary deviltry.

With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.

Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.

Palm Trees and Power Lines finds a truth, one it wrenches out of an experience.

The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he's running TO.

In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.

As a documentary, “Olympic Pride” is a little on the staid side. The film’s writer-producer-director, Deborah Riley Draper, works in a variation on the Ken Burns style.... Yet she does an absorbing job of capturing a historical moment that was even more fraught than it’s generally imagined to be.

A perfect movie for this moment.

Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.

Pictorial but oddly muffled three-hour saga of romance and capitalism, not necessarily in that order.

Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.

It’s a fractious, blood-soaked drama about the will to survive that feels like “Earthquake” crossed with “Lord of the Flies.” What’s gripping is that you watch it and think, “If I were in this movie, what would I do?”

A documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving.

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.

Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.

The key to the film’s potential success isn’t just that it’s made in a commercial genre. It’s that Fair Play, while full of sex, money, corporate backstabbing, and a lot of other things that are fun to watch, really is a good little movie.

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

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

Lyrical, stirring, and beautifully acted — a seamless adaptation of a novel many will recall with almost too much familiarity.

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.”

Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity.

It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment.

Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.

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.

At least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.

Creed III is a sports drama that feels like a thriller with an urgent conscience.

Essential and absorbing documentary.

The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.

Mesmerizing.

The film doesn't turn its issues into a glorified essay, but it does use them to give the audience a vital emotional workout.

Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.

In a strange way, the movie, as doggedly made as it is, remains stubbornly uncompelling. That, I think, is because Gibney’s own connection to the subject, while it charges him with righteous passion, has resulted in a rare loss of perspective.

It's not enough for the film to show us a child's corpse wrapped in cardboard; we've got to step back to see Kiarostami himself shooting the sad sight, so that it becomes a Godardian ironic statement.

Wind River adds up, and skillfully, but in the end it’s not all that exciting. It’s a vision of the new American despair — not an inner-city movie, but an inner-wilderness movie — and it could have used another twist or two.

“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.

A canny franchise escapade; it gets the job done. But it also leaves you hungry for something more, and I don't necessarily mean the next episode.

I do wish that Evans were a better storyteller. When he isn't turning mad-dog violence into visual rock & roll, The Raid shreds narrative coherence to ribbons.

A lot of thrillers have asked us to identify with assassins -- but I'd be hard-pressed to name one that makes a hitman as sympathetic, if not sentimental, as The Memory of a Killer.

A nimble and fascinating documentary.

A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.

Levine, who wrote the script, knows how to stage an energized intellectual battle, but adapting “The Blue Angel” to a 21st-century setting turns out to be a distinctly musty and unrewarding idea.

The Daytrippers has some of the wacky dysfunctional chic that made David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster such a grating experience, but writer-director Greg Mottola has a lighter, warmer touch; his characters don’t have to act like pigs in order to prove they’re human.

This is one nowhere boy who commands your attention.

Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.

Minghella's adaptation of the 1997 Charles Frazier novel is emotionally detached and almost too studiously carpentered: a willed exercise in mythmaking.

As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.

Emergency, in its racially aware way, turns into something that feels not unlike an ’80s comedy. It has winning flashes of wit, of observation, of telling satire. But it’s fundamentally about the situation.

Has so little fire that Welles himself would have wondered out loud what he was doing stuck in the middle of it.

Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since "Ed Wood": a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

The film's argument against overly literal Bible readings may not preach to anyone but the converted, and when For the Bible Tells Me So strays from scripture, its ardent plea for sexual freedom within modern Christian life grows a bit too late-night PBS generic.

One of those terminally annoying, depressive-yet-coy Sundance faves in which the tale of a mopey teen misfit unfolds behind a hard candy shell of irony.

It has the sprawl and generosity of a good Dead show, yet there’s nothing indulgent about it — it’s an ardent piece of documentary classicism.

What is doesn’t have, oddly, is any sort of bone-deep reality factor. Almost nothing that happens in Funny Pages is particularly believable.

You know you're in the hands of a born filmmaker when he floods a scene with danger and excitement and, at the same time, tempers it with something more delicate -- a languor of the everyday.

It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.

The last act of Tiny Tim: King for a Day is about Tiny’s descent, which the film portrays with a haunted majesty worthy of a Larry Karaszewski/Scott Alexander biopic.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man with his old-movie charisma and reserve, but the film, despite a few splendid fights, is a biohistorical muddle that never finds its center. Maybe that's because — big mistake! — it never gets to Bruce Lee.

Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is such an elaborate and satisfying structure of deceit and salaciousness that every attempt I have seen to adapt it on film -- "Dangerous Liaisons," "Cruel Intentions," even the trashy 1959 Roger Vadim version -- has resulted in an entertainment of agreeable nasty elegance. Until now.

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.

Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.

In The Killer, David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.

There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.

Slay the Dragon is an incisively made and morally suspenseful film, at once chilling and stirring.

Roberts, in her most forceful dramatic performance, allows us to take in every moment through fresh, impassioned eyes.

The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.

A thriller that wheezes along on bits and pieces of ''character.''

That Griffin tells some of the most intolerant jokes since Andrew Dice Clay should hardly obscure his talent, even if it does tarnish it.

Overall it's more amusing than hilarious.

Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.

In a strange way the Williamson of "Dawson's Creek" is now at odds with the sophisticated joker who wrote "Scream."

“Dream Is Destiny” is a pleasurably crafted career snapshot that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.

Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they're brought off with such casual aplomb that they're funny, too.

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

The key to The Company is the quiet, focused rapture of Neve Campbell, who formally trained in ballet and performed all of her on-screen dances. The tranquil delight she takes in her body becomes its own eloquent form of acting.

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

Olsen, moody and apple-cheeked and intellectually avid, proves a true star: She turns being wiser than her years into an authentic generational state.

The movie also captures Thompson's tragedy: the haze of drugs and bad writing that consumed him for no less than his last 30 years.

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is watchable but also stiff and remote.

Both actresses are quite fine. The role of Odessa is somewhat underwritten, but Goldberg, playing her as a modest, God-fearing woman, acts with a deep-buried determination. If she’d been allowed to show some of her humor, the character might have soared. Spacek gives a beautifully modulated performance. 

Disciplined script -- bitingly funny.

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.

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.

Hello, Bookstore is a salute to the sacramental qualities of art that are threaded through everyday life.

The routines are charged, even between jokes, with anticipatory hilarity.

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.

An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.

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

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.

A tangy raw stew of history, even if it never begins to confront the contradictions that bedeviled black militancy.

Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows.

Gripping in its intimacy.

The movie, for all its sincerity, becomes clinical and repetitious, though its unsparing vision of the fragility of identity can give you a shudder.

Thérese unfolds with the sunlight-and-daffodils piety of a Sunday school slide show.

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.

It’s a lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie about a bank robbery gone wrong.

The movie is Mike's story, and Channing Tatum proves himself a true movie star. His Mike glides through the world with the ease of a god, and on stage he's electrifying.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

As a documentary, Milli Vanilli brings off something at once strategic, artful, and humane: It presents what happened to Milli Vanilli so that we empathize directly with these two young men who were drawn, like sacrificial virgins, into the pop maelstrom.

The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.

This makes for a modestly touching journey, but New York Doll, in its wafer-thin way, is an oxymoron: a hagiographic tribute to a rocker with more passion than talent.

It was originally called ''Animal Husbandry,'' and while the producers were throwing away that title, they might have done well to chuck the movie along with it.

What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.

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.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

Watching this film, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that Hitchens' obsession with Kissinger is, at bottom, a sophisticated flower child's desire to purge the world of the tooth and claw of human power. The movie isn't, finally, an argument. It's a long angry ''Boo!''

Harper Lee hasn't been interviewed in 47 years, but this meditation on her only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," puts you inside her skin.

The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.

[Stone's] filmmaking is so supple and alive, his obsession with the visual aspect of history so electrifying, that JFK practically roots itself in your imagination.

Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.

Like Christina’s dance, the movie is a gorgeous tease, an artful promise of something that never quite arrives.

A romp of romantic larceny built out of spare parts we've seen in countless other films.

The film is a bit too chronological, but its historical reverence is true to gospel's joyful insistence on locating the spiritual in the everyday.

Berlin is far from the lost masterpiece the movie wants it to be.

M3GAN, as you may have gathered, is overly steeped in pop-culture role models, but in its trivial way it’s a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.

In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.

God Grew Tired of Us never brings us half as close to its subjects as the far more penetrating "Lost Boys of Sudan" did in 2004.

It took long enough, but Disney has finally come up with an animated heroine who's a good role model and a funky, arresting personality at the same time.

3-Iron is like a Raymond Carver story that slowly, inexorably takes on the dimensions of a ghostly fairy tale.

“Blow the Man Down” has a few contrivances ... Yet Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe invest the embattled but loyal Connolly sisters with a desperate resonance, and the movie is clever enough to hold you, even when you wish it had taken the extra step and gone full Patricia Highsmith.

The surprise of The Ringer is that the movie is pretty damn funny.

The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.

It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.

The surprise of Superman Returns is that it isn't a funky, ambitious conceptual reimagining, like last summer's "Batman Begins." This really IS your father's Superman; it re-creates - and updates, though just barely - the universe Donner invented.

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

Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power.

The movie's freakazoid intensity gets to you, but there's something at once cramped and show-offy in Aronofsky's refusal to even slighty vary its atmosphere of shock-corridor burnout.

The movie is so busy turning the Sioux characters into photogenic saints that it never quite allows them the complications of human beings.

The convolutions of Turow’s plot remain absorbing, and Presumed Innocent is certainly as watchable as a lot of other courtoom-investigative thrillers. Yet almost everything in the picture feels sterile and posed. Pakula is good at laying out an intricate, almost mathematical series of events (his best film remains All the President’s Men), but he’s not big on atmosphere. The movie could have used some of the bowels-of-the-city grit Sidney Lumet brought to Q & A.

On its own unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal terms, The Outrun is competent and even stylishly made, yet I have to confess: I found the movie overwhelmingly drab.

The cutting and camera work in Sign ‘O’ the Times are too intrusive, and the somewhat discordant songs worked better as a magnificent hodgepodge on the album. Still, this concert movie (which barely made it to theaters) is a feisty, engaging show.

The movie is fascinating, though it smacks its own lips a bit too much at the tackiness of freak '70s stardom.

“Fireball” is a documentary about meteorites, but what makes it a Herzog film is that it’s in love with meteorites.

Beneath its exploration of fatherly distance, this is really a portrait of why cranks make better artists than earnest nice guys.

Directed by Guillermo del Toro with a colorfully kinetic visual imagination that seldom lets up.

The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.

The finest rock doc since "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, is a 40ish indie-rock star who carries himself like a hip lawyer.

Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a fable of ''redemption,'' and it's too tidy by half, but it is also very sweetly told.

Into Darkness is a sleek, thrilling epic that's also a triumphantly witty popcorn morality play. It's everything you could want in a Star Trek movie.

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.

As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.

Being Julia flirts too heavily with soap opera clichés, but it has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.

Déjà Vu is watchable trash, meticulously edited in Scott's skip-stutter style, but there's something ultimately unsatisfying about a thriller that more or less makes up its rules as it goes along.

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.

Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

A madcap gem.

Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).

The Aristocrats has a lot of laughs, but as it giggles and blasphemes its way into areas not so far removed from the scandalous landscape of the Marquis de Sade, the movie, funny as it is, becomes exhausting and a bit depressing.

Easy A has some agreeable fast banter, but it's so self-consciously stylized that it wears you out.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

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

The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.

It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.

It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.

Gimme Danger has an ironic tone for a Stooges portrait: dutiful and engrossing, but not electric or crazy.

Reilly, in his 70s, takes us through his hilariously awful childhood: Eugene O'Neill as toxic high camp.

Big Miracle is harmless enough, but what's annoying about it is its aura of fake activism. The movie doesn't seem to get that it's exactly when the news media began to devote more time to subjects like whales that it started to turn into news not for activists but for couch potatoes.

You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.

Lee's performance is by far the best thing about The Crow. Unfortunately, he's just good enough to make you wish that the movie had had a whisper of storytelling invention to go along with its showy visual design.

The funniest moments in Groundhog Day come when Phil takes sneaky advantage of his predicament-by, say, pumping a sexy woman in the local coffee shop for facts about her past and then, ''the next day,'' using the information to lure her into bed. What the movie lacks is the ingenious, lapidary comic structure that could have made these moments fuse into something tricky and wild.

Worth seeing for Bacon's lived-in minimalist purgatory, but the movie soft-pedals the nature of the desires he's at war with: the fact that they will never go away.

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

It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.

Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.

The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.

When C-Diddy (a.k.a. David Jung), in his samurai superman suit, does his note-perfect, lip-twisting, belly-jiggling manic mime of Extreme's ''Play With Me,'' it's hard not to grin and admit that, yes, this is almost an art form.

A big, juicy, enjoyable wide-canvas biography with a handful of indelible moments.

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

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.

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.

People Like Us demonstrates how a drama can be heartfelt and bogus at the same time.

To call Match Point Woody Allen's comeback would be an understatement - it's the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made "The Player."

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.

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.

The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.

A love poem to the New York City of the '50s and '60s, when Smith, the visionary of camp (Andy Warhol stole from him), more or less invented performance art.

Even from the safety of a movie seat, you can just about feel the stinging hardness of the surf. Blue crush? This is more like white smash.

As long as the MPAA is issuing its cavalier decrees, though, they're the ones acting like bullies.

I will say that it's been a while since a romantic comedy mustered this much charm by looking this much like life.

David Simon, creator of "The Wire," who argues that the targeting of minorities, fused with mandatory sentencing, has turned the war on drugs into ''a holocaust in slow motion.''

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.

A terrific, small, funny, sad movie.

Has none of the crisp passion or suspense of the 1957 Sidney Lumet version; it's bloated, heavy-handed, and lugubrious.

This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something.

Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting.

Penna works in what you might call a gratifyingly prosaic style. He doesn’t wow you (though the film, in its level way, is elegantly shot). But he doesn’t cheat you, either, so you come to trust the gravity of his nuts-and-bolts storytelling.

For a documentary that's almost engineered to lift your heart, Undefeated is very well done.

In Land of the Dead there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired.

Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.

This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.

A marvelous movie.

Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?

Elegant yet surprisingly remote royal-court drama.

The animation in Lilo & Stitch has an engaging retro-simple vivacity, and it's nice to see a movie for tots make use of Elvis Presley, but the story is witless and oddly defanged.

Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.

The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.

This modern slice of neorealism has been made with a skill, and humanity, that suggests Bahrani may have a "Bicycle Thief" in him yet.

It's Alan Cumming who takes over the movie as the impish mastermind Fegan Floop.

Luca, set in Italy in the ’50s, is modest to a fault, and at times it feels generic enough to be an animated feature from almost any studio. But it’s a visually beguiling small-town nostalgia trip, as well as a perfectly pleasant fish-out-of-water fable — literally, since it’s about a boy sea monster who longs to go ashore.

As an alien-attack thriller, Prey is competent and well-paced, though with little in the way of surprise. But the journey of Naru lends it a semblance of emotional coherence that most of the “Predator” films have lacked.

Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.

What’s novel about Ema is that Pablo Larraín has made a movie that, in its form, is every bit as warped and jagged and jarring and difficult to cuddle up to as its heroine.

It's too bad that the film was directed by the Norwegian minimalist Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories), who makes a fetish of building scenes around silence.

Enchantingly witty.

As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.

Stuffed--indeed, overstuffed--with heart, soul, audacity, and blarney. You may not believe a minute of it, but you don't necessarily want to stop watching.

Mad Dog and Glory turns out to be a light-spirited urban fairy tale. Despite occasional flashes of violence, its atmosphere is one of moonstruck romanticism.

That's Trumbo's message -- that the true victim was America.

The (mild) intrigue of Travellers & Magicians is that its central figure, Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), rolls his eyes at Buddhist karma.

The movie is a veritable scrapbook of tropes from the heyday of art film. Maybe that's why it feels gauzy and quaint. Yet time passes pleasantly.

A gory, pulpy wink of an action thriller, was spun out of a parody trailer Rodriguez directed for the '70s-trash homage "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was sublime. As a feature, Machete is more fun than it isn't, but its deadpan mockery of exploitation clichés often slips a bit too close to being the real, schlocky thing.

Skillfully made, yet the film would have been better if it had tapped a bit of that Walken madness.

In Superstar in a Housedress, Curtis remains frozen in his flamboyance. The most resonant parts of the movie are, oddly, the interviews with his fellow glam bohemians.

Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.

Hacksaw Ridge is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

In the piercing and perceptive documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, it’s fascinating, in an outrageous and distressing way, to witness the moment when Ailes transformed the nation’s political landscape virtually overnight.

Full of splendidly shot wonders.

Friendly yet toothless, College musters little energy even as anarchic-party-movie nostalgia.

No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.