Owen Gleiberman

There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

Penn is a true talent, but there's just enough languid pretension to The Pledge to make you wonder if he's ultimately more interested in parading his promise as a director than in fulfilling it.

On the eve of Wuornos' 2002 execution, Broomfield digs deep into her abusive hell of a background (beatings, incest, sleeping homeless in the frozen Michigan woods) as well as her quasi-psychotic defense mechanisms.

A sturdily diverting old fashioned heist thriller that looks like a masterpiece of sheer competence next to the slovenly action fantasy F/X grab bags that have been passing for summer entertainment.

A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.

By the end of Onward, you’ll have chuckled and maybe choked up, and enjoyed a conventional ride.

The documentary tells the fascinating, and moving, tale of how Trejo got off the road to ruin and became the unlikeliest of Hollywood character actors.

This is gripping stuff, to be sure, yet the movie, volatile as it is, lacks a full dramatic center and the momentum that would flow out of it.

A testament to the discipline, humor, and life of kids who swing.

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.

It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.

The Booksellers is a documentary for anyone who can still look at a book and see a dream, a magic teleportation device, an object that contains the world.

The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.

Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi.

You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.

Whether you respond to this movie may come down to the question of how far you think people are willing to go to realize their desires. Damage says that they’ll go all the way — past honor, past rationality, past sin. The movie may not always convince, but when it does it’s a cataclysmic peek into the erotic abyss.

The Australian actress Frances O'Connor is a true find. She's as beautiful as the young Barbara Hershey, with a stare that's pensive yet playful, and she puts us in touch with the quiet battle of emotions in Fanny.

"The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.

Mostly, Warrior is a showcase for its up-and-coming stars. Edgerton, from last year's "Animal Kingdom," and Hardy, who stole scenes as the identity forger in "Inception."

After a lifetime of flogging the demons of cosmic despair, Ingmar Bergman, at 88, comes off as lean and vigorous in this fascinating memoir-interview.

May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.

A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.

Lays on the compassion a little thick, yet its heartfelt squalor stays with you.

Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to.

The Survivor is a Holocaust movie that’s fresh enough to make you laugh between the tears, the gasps of terror, the long road out of the inferno.

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.

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

The plot is clever and absorbing, with one wild Hitchcockian twist (a comic variation on Vertigo). Manhattan Murder Mystery is both a genuine thriller and a cheeky goof on thrillers. It is also, in part, another Woody Allen relationship movie — and I’m afraid that’s the one way in which it falls flat.

Kutcher, who gives his most energized performance to date, and Diaz, darting between the caustic and shrill, look as if they're warming up to groovy hate sex, not love, which may be why the film goes flat the moment it turns friendly.

There's no denying that Washington can play a rococo villain with flip ebullience, but I fervently wish he were doing it in a movie that paid more than lip service to the real world.

It’s the sort of unguarded drama they used to make in the ‘80s — a coming-of-age tale of unabashed earnestness — but it’s also a delirious and romantic rock ‘n’ roll parable.

Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.

A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.

Little Man Tate keeps introducing characters and narrative lines that seem promising, but it doesn’t sustain them. The movie feels like three Afterschool Specials welded together.

The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.

The actors all blend terrifically, making this the film equivalent of great hang time.

There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.

Hamilton, in her movie debut, is a find: the kinkstress next door.

The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.

Fonte, it must be said, gives an expert performance as a saintly scamp who “blooms” into a butterfly of vengeance. I might have bought what he’s doing in a different film, but the one that Garrone has made strains too hard to have it both ways.

As it moves from the drizzly to the overly stormy, Rain freights a young girl's self-destructive eagerness to lose her virginity with so much danger and even horror that it's as if the events were trying to make up for the film's previous lack of drama.

The events may be accurate, but Mesrine is so episodic that it's slightly maddening to watch.

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 Brink is an impeccably crafted verité ramble — an engaging and enraging, disturbing and highly revealing movie.

A light, funny, grounded, engagingly unpretentious sleight-of-hand action comedy.

A fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy.

The whole noisy movie is really just a setup for the climactic duel between renegade cop Danny Glover and the monster. By that point, you’re pathetically grateful for a few stomach-churning special effects.

This makes for a friendly romp, and also a dull one.

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.

Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.

The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.

The thriller that's exciting, cathartic, and powerfully disturbing. Prisoners is that type of movie. It's rooted in 40 years of Hollywood revenge films, yet it also breaks audacious new ground.

Quills bleaches the danger -- and fascination -- out of De Sade, turning him into a kind of mad saint of ''Masterpiece Theatre'' porn.

The gimmicks, in the end, are too arbitrary to tie together in a memorably haunting fashion, though they do culminate in a Big Twist, a nifty one that almost -- but not quite -- makes you want to see the movie again.

Horton's attempt to authenticate the painting in the face of a hostile art establishment becomes a study in forensics, taste, money, and class warfare.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

The Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.

Morris, using a welter of photographs (many of which we haven't seen), constructs a day-to-day sense of how Abu Ghraib descended into a medieval hell.

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

“Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”

I kept wondering how Arcand could have chosen as his generational representative a man not just flawed in his hedonism but one so fundamentally lacking in tenderness for others.

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.

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.

A sleekly unnerving thriller.

Little more than a plodding celebration of global television trumping everything in its midst.

Efficient, uninspired sequel.

It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.

Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.

As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.

The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men.

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.

Rush and Tucci create a captivating portrait of an artist who’s at once elated, haunted, and utterly possessed.

The Nice Guys is an ultra-violent burlesque, the sort of cheerfully hostile buddy bash that’s been a staple since the ’80s, only this one is singularly clever about its own triviality, and it offers the scruffy pleasure of seeing two great actors dial down their gravitas with style.

This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.

Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence.

Rodeo is a movie that’s all surface, all present tense, all too-cool-to-be-anything-but-French-vérité gestures.

The movie just about pulses with contemporary resonance.

Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.

The movie has three extended action sequences, and I would have been happier if it had eight of them — that is, if it had less pretensions and, like the “Wick” films, was more willing to wear its pulp on its sleeve.

This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.

The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.

Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.

The House of Sand's director, Andrucha Waddington, lays on the Awesome Visual Poetry and throws in a welter of story gimmicks, but it's all a bit too fancifully arid.

The creators of Captain America: The Winter ­Soldier have brought off something fresh and bold.

A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.

Gerron's terrible film was never shown in the places it was meant for, but in Prisoner of Paradise it reveals a queasy corner of the Nazi mind that tried to imagine a concentration camp as it fantasized the inmates might have.

The film's crank-case snappishness doesn't break any molds, but it certainly gives you a lift.

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

In theory, A Thousand Words should draw on its star's abilities as a physical comedian, but Murphy, miming his order for a triple latte at Starbucks, comes off like Charlie Chaplin on crystal meth; he's strenuously unfunny to watch.

We never get any sense of how the brothers build their empire, or of how the various supporting characters fit into their lives. Telling this story in a more straightforward fashion would have been far more satisfying. Still, the Kemps are something to see.

Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.

The film's fragmentary structure, though, is suspect. It says that the soldiers find no real meaning in their combat actions, yet Gunner Palace presents the operations we're seeing in so little context, reducing them to a random hash of ''sensational'' moments, that Tucker at times appears to be exploiting the war to create a didactic canvas of manic military unease.

Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's "Hero."

It’s so removed from having a dark side that you know you’re getting the feel-good version of a Tom Petty portrait.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

Jim Carrey entertains himself mightily in Liar Liar, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Rebuilding Paradise is a movie that shows us a great deal without necessarily exploring what it shows.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you angry, and also sad, to live in a country where innovation could be contrived into an enemy.

Potent and eye-opening documentary.

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

The film shows you the club from every angle, and seems to be gawking at every patron. It puts us right inside.

Paradoxically, a movie that loses power the more you perceive what's actually going on in it. Laid end to end, the story is, to put it mildly, overwrought, fusing several cataclysms too many.

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

Good cartoon characters tend to be ageless, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is just clever enough not to feel like an anachronism. The duo’s creator and forever naughty guiding light, the writer-director Mike Judge (who also does their voices), flows the characters into the present day without a hitch in style or a stitch in time.

The film wants to be a puckish media satire and an earnest workplace dramedy about “growing,” and the fusion doesn’t always gel.

It's cleansing to see the facts laid out with intimacy and rigor, and the film earns the comparison it makes to the squelching of due process for some of today's terror suspects.

“Weird,” it turns out, isn’t a real biopic. It’s a movie that does to the biopic form what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” — imitates it, razzes it, throws mud at it, turns it inside out. And all with supreme affection.

I’d call it a deftly sincere and canny portrait, one that works precisely because it takes the time to sweat the small stuff.

Crystal’s ordinariness — his utter lack of glamour — really works for him here. He’s far more pleasureful to watch in this sort of dramatic-comedy role than, say, Robin Williams, because his comfy, urban-shlemiel personality helps ground the jokes.

The atmosphere of gentle communal chaos is authentic enough to become the movie's dramatic center.

The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.

What holds the movie together, apart from Quinto’s dreamy geek mystique and delectable delivery of every line, is the tormented passion that Jim Parsons brings to it.

It’s like an immortal-mercenary hangout movie. Chunks of the picture are logy and formulaic (it dawdles on for two hours), but the director, Gina Prince-Bythewood (making a major lane change after “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees”), stages the fight scenes with ripe executionary finesse, and she teases out a certain soulful quality in her cast.

Herzog's fascinating, rambling, love-hate documentary about their friendship and creative partnership, and in its discursive, anecdotal way it gets at the essence of one of cinema's indelible crackpots.

The quaint racial blinders are really on the eyes of the filmmaker, Peter Hedges, who shoves his characters into the narrowest of sitcom slots and seals them there.

Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.

The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary.

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

It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we’ve always lived. And there’s a dark side to it. It’s “Sex and the City” filtered through a sobering reality check.

If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it.

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.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

Isn't coherent, exactly, but what dripping-ghoul horror movie is these days? The new rule is, It's not hip to make sense when you're raising hell.

Pucci proves to be one of the most charismatic male ingenues since Johnny Depp.

If anything holds Dragon together, it’s Jason Scott Lee’s intensely likable performance.

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.

Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.

The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.

We know in our bones where the movie is going, and it’s a steady enjoyable ride, a touch prosaic at times, one that turns into a kind of minimalist chamber-room version of “Unforgiven,” with a surprisingly touching upshot.

Lee's images of black and white stereotypes are agreeably silly yet altogether too thin and vanilla safe.

Director Gaspar Noé proved a shock poet in "Irreversible" (2003). In Enter the Void, he's a shockingly tedious show-off.

The best thing about Revolutionary Road, a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple, is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there.

An enjoyable pop projection of post-9/11 anxiety.

Traffics in the coyly blasphemous, aren't-we-dysfunctional family-disaster chic that has become the single most annoying trend in independent filmmaking.

Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.

There are fine, fresh observational moments, but the film is much ado about not so much.

Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

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

“Chasing Trane” is a seductive piece of middle-of-the-road documentary filmmaking; it gives you the basics, but beautifully.

Kubrick by Kubrick is most interesting for the ways that it undercuts the Kubrick mythology.

Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.

Fiennes, in his beautifully grave way, slows the poem down for us, speaking the words with rapt deliberation, so that we live in their moment.

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

When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.

To take the playfully convoluted, semi-nonsensical aggression of Rumsfeld's language and make it the whole point of a movie is to fall into the trap of mistaking the spin for the story.

Blockers isn’t really about these girls losing their virginity. It’s about how they seize control of their destinies, one triumphantly lewd zinger at a time.

The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

Barton Fink has an atmosphere of languid comic anxiety (it's like a cross between "Eraserhead" and "Angel Heart"), and it's fun to watch, if only because you have no idea what's coming next.

The Farrellys may well be the new kingpins of adolescent slob comedy, but There's Something About Mary doesn't approach the witty anarchy of movies like "Animal House," "The Naked Gun," or "Hairspray."

The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.

Bodies Bodies Bodies, with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.

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.

In total effect, Prince Caspian feels a lot more earthbound than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

Blue Story is very much a blast of something present tense. Rapman’s scenes boil over with life, as he crafts an opera of innocence infected by gangsta pathology.

Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching.

This moving film explores the trauma of a Holocaust survivor with rare complexity.

Double Team becomes an enjoyably decadent spectacle of gymnastic preposterousness.

It's all way too heavy-handed, though nicely acted by Hirsch, Culkin, and, especially, Jena Malone.

The Trip to Greece marks a spirited and convivial return to form, even if it’s lofty enough to present Coogan and Brydon’s six-day journey through Greece as a retracing of the path of Odysseus.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since "Blair Witch" itself. It's also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

Captain Underpants isn’t out to be more than a trifle; that’s part of its appeal. It’s not so much potty-mouthed as it is a potty-minded kiddie burlesque, one that finds the supreme innocence in naughtiness.

Gremlins 2 is a limited achievement — it’s nothing but the sum of its own whirring pop-culture mechanics. But that’s more than enough to keep you occupied, and occasionally exhilarated.

A lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you.

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.

2+2 = 5 is a movie that very much leans toward chronicling the brutality and violence of despotic regimes, and is less interested in exploring how they toy with your brain.

The director's famously over-deliberate, pause-laden style verges, for the first time, on amateurville, and that gives us too much time to linger on the movie's more bizarre details.

Soderbergh is able to execute his games without pigeonholing his characters. He has made that rare thing, a modern-day noir with feeling.

A perfectly timed, compulsively watchable once-over-lightly documentary. ... After all [the recent] dramatic treatments, it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things.

Who said that an environmental horror film couldn't be didactic and spooky at the same time?

Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above.

Beautifully edited, Go Tigers! is an enthralling look at the drama that can transpire in the autumn of one small town on any given Friday.

Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.

Climax works, at least when it’s willing to be a human drama. But then it sinks in that you’re watching “Fame” directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam.

One of the pleasures of The Bank Job is that it returns us to the days when robbing a bank was a gritty, hole-in-the-wall affair.

The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

The drama of “Narcissister Organ Player” is that Narcissister isn’t layering her demons onto the culture; she’s layering the culture onto herself. That’s why that mask of hers looks more and more like one we’re all capable of hiding behind.

The film taps into the glitz ethos of the age of social-media envy without necessarily scrutinizing what it all means. Kid ‘n Play had put on a party to remember, but the new movie, much like Kevin and Damon themselves, just goes with the flow of the scam.

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.

The key to the new movie’s appeal, apart from the fact that Tom Holland acts with far greater confidence and verve in the title role, is that the entire film is a bit of a fake-out, and I mean that in a very positive way.

Jonathan Nossiter's second feature (after the intricate and haunting ''Sunday'') strikes unnerving chords of mystery and dismay as it fuses the sinister, jump cut dislocations of a metaphysical thriller like ''Don't Look Now'' with a pain soaked meditation on love, guilt, marriage, and adultery.

With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.

Some of this is stirring stuff, and all of it is worth learning about, but as a documentary Citizen Penn is more diligent than riveting.

The movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a lark, a contradiction — a lurid, violent, caught-in-the-gutter movie that’s also a nimble and knowing tall tale for adults.

Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Williams hasn't been this sympathetic in years.

Ebla Mari, the actor who plays Yara, makes Yara’s despair over her missing and possibly murdered father, and her agony at having had to abandon her country, incredibly layered and precise. Her performance doesn’t allow us to phone in our empathy.

“Dreaming Walls” sets out to capture not the history of the Chelsea, or even the experience of the people who’ve lived there, so much as the afterglow of the Chelsea. The aging residents it shows us can check out anytime (or get kicked out), but they can never leave.

As Benny, a small- town Irish teenager in the '50s who goes off to university in Dublin, Minnie Driver has a touchingly awkward prettiness. Her jaw may be as square as a picture frame, but her smile lights her up from within.

The tension that drives Here Before is our curiosity as to whether or not the film is taking place in the world of the uncanny. In a way we want it to be, because that would make it scary fun; in another way we don’t want it to be, because that would make it corny scary fun.

The movie’s message, if it has one, is that you don’t have to be super to be a superhero. Teen Titans GO! is fun in a defiantly unsuper way, and that’s a recommendation.

Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.

Chicago 10 is well worth seeing, if only because a good half of the film is devoted to extraordinary footage of the four days of rage that spawned the trial.

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

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

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

The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.

The Go-Getter travels, but it doesn't go anywhere.

From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.

The movie, in its way, summons something ominous and powerful. It’s not a screed — it’s a warning. It says, quite wisely: Take action now, or you may no longer have the opportunity to do so.

The film is cheeky and blithe and situational, suffused with enough upscale Christmas froth to get the audience high on spiced-cocktail fumes. In a key scene near the end, it’s more than willing to go over-the-top. Yet Happiest Season is also a deft and humane dramedy of manners that’s really about something.

Cha Cha Real Smooth works overtime to be an honest movie, and it also works overtime to ingratiate itself. In a sense, it accomplishes both aims, but I’m not sure that they entirely go together.

The tale itself is so spectacularly perverse, and the film stays so authentically close to the personalities involved, that you don't feel dirty -- you feel cleansed.

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

To say that Eastwood, who directed, has done a first-rate job of adaptation fails to do him justice. What he's brought off is closer to alchemy.

Had ''Boogie Nights'' been the tale of a California dreamer with a really long skateboard, the movie's delirious first half would have been ''Dogtown and Z-Boys,'' and its downbeat conclusion would be Stoked.

The first-time director, Sam Yates, working from a utilitarian script by Tom Bateman, slathers on mood, yet there’s a primitive charge to the film’s no-frills staging.

It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe.

Might have been richer, tougher, more honestly liberal if it had revealed a few more shades of gray among the men.

Overheated yet bizarrely opaque criminal character study from Belgium.

By the end, you may marvel at the film's worldly-wise wink of maturity. You may also think, Is that all?

Roth, there's no denying, creates considerable suspense out of our desire to confront the forbidden.

An experience you won't easily shake.

There's a certain breed of annoying indie movie in which a character's shyness is portrayed in a manner so coy that it becomes a reverse form of exhibitionism. Jump Tomorrow is that kind of movie.

In the end, the movie says that the President's private life matters, all right -- that Shepherd should get the girl and reestablish his leadership by giving in to the noble liberal he always was inside. Even for a modern Capra fable, that's a bit much to swallow.

Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

Welcome to the brave new world of slut-chic cosmetic feminism.

Braveheart features some of the most enthralling combat sequences in years, and the excessive ferocity of the violence is part of the thrill.

Nothing more (or less) than an enchanting light comedy of romantic confusion... It's a movie that understands love because it understands pain.

The documentary captures how Shatner, as he began to make a career out of performing his public legend, merged his very identity with that of the hambone thespian inside him.

The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”

Smile will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie.

A movie overtly designed to win attention (and not to do much else).

Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we're always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can't capture is our hearts.

An exquisitely crafted documentary about the woman who was arguably the greatest movie critic who ever lived.

It's no exaggeration to say that the actors have less personality than the pipes, nail guns, grinding gears, decaying beams, and slowly spreading oil spills that are fused, with a kind of empty-dread technical precision, into Rube Goldberg torture devices.

Just when you're sure that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo can't get any less funny, the movie douses the trailer's best gag, as that prosthetic leg turns out to be attached to Deuce's true love.

The movie is creepy, but it has no texture or depth. It's like "The Omen" directed by Miranda July.

I'm not generally a big fan of tribute concerts, but this is a glorious exception.

Batman Returns offers many jolts of pleasure, yet it’s also a mess — a gilded sketchbook of a movie that keeps falling open to random pages.

A fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study).

A boxing film with no conflictual punch.

Paced a bit too glacially for my taste, yet it's worth sitting through for its trick ending, a twist of events as ominous as the landscape.

Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".

Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.

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.

Frank Serpico is a finely etched and fascinating documentary.

A loopy entertaining WTF lark. ... The fact that it holds you, for 77 minutes, is a testament to the debauched rigor of Dupieux’s filmmaking.

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

Feels cramped and underimagined. I think Judge is capable of making an inspired live-action comedy, but next time he'll have to remember to do what he does in his animated ones--keep the madness popping.

Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?

What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.

Spells out the problem in clear, urgent, prosaic terms.

The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.

Starts out well, but it turns into an almost perversely undramatic legal thriller.

It's slow and pretentious, full of craggy Bavarian snowscapes and dour "mystical" portents that seem to circle back to nothing but themselves.

Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.

It has a few whispers of intrigue, but at the heart of The Bourne Identity lies a dispiriting paradox: The more that Jason Bourne learns about himself, the less arresting he seems.

It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.

Hustle doesn’t rewrite any rules, but the film’s wholesome seduction is that you believe what you’re seeing — in part because of the presence of players from the aging legend Dr. J to Trae Young to Kyle Lowry and several dozen more. But also because Sandler plays Stanley with an inner sadness, a blend of weariness and resilience, and a stubborn faith in the game that leaves you moved, stoked, and utterly convinced.

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.

No film drama can make us “know” PTSD, but by the end of Thank You for Your Service, you feel as if the agony, and bravery, of our soldiers has become less remote and more tangible. Hall’s filmmaking is crisp, assured, and, at times, quietly audacious.

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.

What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive.

I Am Heath Ledger is a catchy and seductive portrait of an extraordinary artist, but it leaves you wanting more, because you know it’s not close to being all of Heath Ledger.

It’s a sleekly witty action opera that’s at once overstuffed and bedazzling.

As an actress, Olivia Wilde has been something of a shape-shifter, but in this movie she seems to be burning through all her previous roles to find something essential. She grabs hold of the spectacle of agonized female anger, and does it with a grace and power that easily matches that of Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

We go into “F1” excited about being excited, and the film makes good on that. It’s nothing if not an adrenaline high. Yet it’s a high that may leave you feeling a bit empty afterwards.

Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does.

Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.

Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.

While it’s not as if the film comes up with some smoking gun that Robert Mueller hasn’t yet, it fills in the Trump-Russia connection in a dogged, rigorously reported, eyebrow-raising way.

When Levinson leaves the older generation behind and concentrates on his immediate family, Avalon becomes suffused with the thrill and anxiety of young, postwar Americans approaching life in a way that’s so new it feels like science fiction.

The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to.

Has an appealing modesty, but director Juan José Campanella works so hard to keep everything soft and winsome and charming that he cushions the understatement into blandness.

The movie, a wayward portrait with surrealist touches, is trying for something genuine. Yet despite some good scenes, some tart lines...and an atmosphere of saintly desperation that suggests “Trainspotting” redone as a darkened YA fable, the movie is wispy and meandering; it doesn’t gather power as it goes along.

As you watch the movie, its central idea — that Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t just born, he was made; that he started off as an actual human being — has a shocking validity that never undercuts the extremity of his crimes.

Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.

My Cousin Vinny is the definition of obvious, and it’s way too long (do films like this really need an hour’s worth of setup?). But Pesci and Tomei make a first-rate team — they’re Punch and Judy gone Brooklyn.

It would be nice to see a sharp, funny, penetrating satire of the new, kicked-up culture of empty media fame, but Tom DiCillo's scattershot buddy movie Delirious isn't it.

With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.

No Time to Die is a terrific movie: an up-to-the-minute, down-to-the-wire James Bond thriller with a satisfying neo-classical edge. It’s an unabashedly conventional Bond film that’s been made with high finesse and just the right touch of soul, as well as enough sleek surprise to keep you on edge.

It's like Woodstock without the mud, and it leaves you feeling clean.

Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton.

Cretton ... finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch.

The movie itself isn’t bad, though I wish it were better.

Hayek’s performance, by the end, grows unexpectedly moving. Yet Beatriz at Dinner is a little tidy. It seizes and charms without soaring.

The one figure in Revenge of the Sith who taps the true spirit of Star Wars is Ewan McGregor: With his beautiful light, clipped delivery, he plays Alec Guinness' playfulness, making Obi-Wan a marvel of benevolent moxie.

There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.

The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.

Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.

Departures is tender and, at times, rather squishy. It's sure to squeeze the tear ducts of anyone who has lost a parent.

Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.

Boils down to a performance film with abysmal sound in which you rarely get to see a good, revealing close-up of the stars.

Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.

There's a fair amount of filler in The Italian Job, but it all boils down to the big heist, which has been staged as if it were Fort Knox being robbed by Evel Knievel.

Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.