Owen Gleiberman

It’s a commercial comedy that has a delirious good time poking fun at Nicolas Cage, celebrating everything that makes him Nicolas Cage — and, in the end, actually becoming a Nicolas Cage movie, which turns out to be both a cheesy thing and a special thing.

Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.

Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip.

Though the film gets a bit repetitive, in its moving climax Lior does more than just have his bar mitzvah -- he earns it.

Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.

The trouble with all this is that it's thin movie tinsel that, while lovingly polished, never becomes more than tinsel. The Good Thief has a glib stylishness (the rapid freeze-frames at the end of scenes signify...nothing), yet it lacks a blast of reality to balance its fable.

Shutter Island holds you, but it doesn't grip you. It's as if Scorsese had put his filmmaking fever on psychotropic drugs.

The double role suits Rockwell perfectly -- in fact, it suits him a little too well.

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

There’s no doubt that Dead Man’s Wire holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger.

At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in "The Way of Water," remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.

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

The Blackening is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere.

Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.

A big, square, rousing political thriller docudrama.

Cameron wants to take the audience ''back to 'Titanic,''' but the journey's magic is hemmed in, paradoxically, by the transcendence of his previous effort; surely he must know that a lot of us never left.

At times, Kung Fu Panda 2 suggests "Bambi" redone as an episode of Oprah. Yet it's a more-than-worthy sequel.

Robot & Frank is sentimental high-concept fluff that works.

Ford is a true moviemaker — a social observer who’s a junkie for sensation and narrative. He has structured Nocturnal Animals beautifully, so that the past feeds into the present, and fiction into reality.

Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male.

An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.

The Well-Digger's Daughter pushes a number of nostalgia buttons at once, most of them pleasing.

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

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

Sound of My Voice doesn't follow through on everything it sets up, yet it has a hushed and revealing psycho-intensity. It also has an oh-wow Twilight Zone ending that truly made me go, ''Oh, wow.''

Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.

The highest praise I can give to Mondovino is that it makes you want to sample every vintage it shows you.

It's a messy, entertaining documentary rooted in -- though not limited to -- the iconically indulgent years of Fellini's later career.

Offers tricky fragmentation without mystery or mood; it's a mosaic of fear that grows less and less unsettling as it comes together.

Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.

A number of scenes have been staged with satisfying kinetic flair, and Willis once again makes an appealing superhero. Yet without that great big booby-trapped skyscraper to hold the action together, the suspense dissipates.

I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.

It's all about a likable scoundrel who discovers what it means to act out of conviction. The film's underlying twist, though, is tartly ironic.

Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn't see him.

Despite a brief action interlude here or there, The Last Duel turns out to be a lavishly convoluted and, at times, rather interesting medieval soap opera.

Delpy wrote and directed this study of a relationship heading (it would seem) for the rocks. She stages it with a funny and diverting improv-y flow.

It’s a winsome screwball love story that grows on you and takes you somewhere charming.

There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. Last Days mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be.

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

Lin works with a rhythmic observational flair that outweighs the movie's flaws. It's a long way from Long Duk Dong.

Depp portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.

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.

As satire, Psycho Goreman is no “Planet Terror,” but it’s a droll enough schlock-in-quote-marks diversion, and part of its appeal is just how damn cheap it is. In the omni-tech era, it’s fun to see a filmmaker build an FX fantasy out of scraps, from the ground up.

Even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.

It's set at a beach house, but we see only gray skies, and though Efron has a wary and cutting intelligence (it matches that of the fine actor Ricardo Darin, who plays her father), the effect is tepid and damp.

The great strength of The New Radical is that it’s not on its subjects’ side (or totally against them either). It’s the rare documentary that lets you decide.

The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.

The movie is avidly told and often suspenseful, but it’s really a fascinating study of how corruption in America works. It sears you with its relevance.

As skewed, prismatic, and free of fluff as the man himself.

There's nothing corny, however, about the climactic shoot-out, which Costner has staged superbly as an extended logistical mini-war that surges and rifle-cracks with bloody abandon through what feels like every building in town. Call it dances with guns.

A haunting and incandescent work of art.

In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.

It has a chillingly matter-of-fact cynicism that is very au courant.

If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.

“Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.

Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.

The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.

Clooney certainly brings out the best in his actors, but his driving trait as a filmmaker is that he knows what plays - he has an uncanny sense of how to uncork a scene and let it bubble and flow.

Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.

Privacy issues aside (and I’m second to none in my concern about them), the movie, in its ham-fisted fashion, is trying to come up with some way to regulate what it despises.

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

The Myth of the American Sleepover has fresh, lovely moments, but it could have used more psychological heft.

Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.

The film isn’t a dud — it “delivers the goods” in a certain reductive, baseline action-fanboy way. Yet Upgrade is the sort of movie that thinks it’s more ingenious than it is, starting with the premise, which is a semi-catchy, semi-stupido hoot in a way that the movie couldn’t have completely intended.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme.

Shot for shot, line and line, it’s an extravagant and witty follow-up, made with the same friendly virtuosic dazzle. Yet this time you can sense just how hard the series’ wizard of a director, James Gunn (now taking off from a script he wrote solo), is working to entertain you. Maybe a little too hard.

Benoît Jacquot's film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism.

Duke is out to blend the commercial, gut-wrenching pleasures of an inner- city shoot-’em-up with the complex moral rage that marked such black-cinema touchstones as Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971).

Ryder, good as she was in The Age of Innocence, gives her first true star performance here. Beneath her crisp, postfeminist manner, Lelaina is bristling with confusion, and Ryder lets you read every crosscurrent of temptation and anxiety, the way her tentative search for love slowly grows into a restless hunger. Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul.

An eminently easy-to-watch piece of one-joke pop japery, is a movie that mimics the I'm-a-character-in-my-own-life metaphysical playfulness of "The Truman Show."

Cairo Time is affectingly gentle, with Juliette slowing down to open up -- a gossamer transformation that Clarkson makes tangible.

Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge. 

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

“Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.

If I respect Downfall more than I was enthralled by it, that's because its portayal stops short of revelation. Once you witness Hitler's denial, the film has little more to say about him.

By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.

The movie's musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful.

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

Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.

The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.

It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.

Soderbergh, in essence, has come up with a plodding and far less psychologically arresting version of ''Ghost.''

Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.

A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

Posey, her attention divided up into slivers, is funny as hell, but she's also terrifying in her evocation of a kind of moment-to-moment PowerPoint existence.

This Is It offers a raw and endearing sketch of a genius at work.

The film keeps throwing things at you, like a colorful ape pirate (Peter Dinklage) and a fun hallucination sequence. That said, the laughs are starting to feel prehistoric.

The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.

The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.

Highlights Gaskin's down-home gumption as an advocate for the glory of natural childbirth.

In Lost Girls, Liz Garbus takes the serial-killer thriller and turns it on its head, insisting that we see the victims as larger than the crimes that destroyed them.

Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin.

Ruby Sparks is a romantic comedy that takes off from a premise so fanciful it needs every bit of the freshness that Dano brings it.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Rock School, Don Argott's amusing and spirited documentary, would seem a heck of a lot niftier if its fire hadn't already been stolen by "School of Rock."

Assayas can't resist turning Demonlover into an overcalculatedly irrational rabbit-hole-to-the-dark-side thriller. The movie morphs into a ''dream,'' all right, but I confess that all I wanted to do was wake up from it and return to the slithery intrigue of corporate depravity.

If you want a whiff of how unironic the 1970s were, consider bowling, a sport that on any given weekend was broadcast (usually on ABC) with the hushed solemnity of a moon launch.

What holds The Eclipse together is Hinds' sorrowful and moving performance as a man haunted in more ways than one.

It's all very sub-Tarantino showy and empty - at least, until the head-scratching climax, which tries to be "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Wicker Man," and "The Twilight Zone" all at once, but only makes you wish that you were watching one of them instead.

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

It's no insult to Tupac to say that he was gangsta rap's greatest matinee idol, or that he lived the part only too well.

The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.

Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.

The British director Ken Loach can be a master of working-class realism, but not in this cranky, rudderless shambles.

A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.

It’s a very tasteful heart-tugger — a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace, and has something touching and resonant to say about the current climate of American bullying.

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

I found The Girl Who Played With Fire more gripping than "Dragon Tattoo," because this one doesn't just play with thriller conventions -- it puts them to work.

The film gets a little ''We can fix this!'' inspirational for a chronicle of such staggering darkness.

That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.

The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.

It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.

On the Outs parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power.

The Lost Arcade is an engaging minor movie, but it touches on something that’s being lost in the age of technology that’s much bigger than video-game arcades: the feeling that there’s a reason — driving and inescapable and romantic — to leave home.

There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.

It hooks you up, happily, to your inner top chef.

Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.

The relentless flow of manufactured scandal and over-the-top lies in Our New President, all packaged with “authentic” video footage and flash-cut techniques, is sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing.... But mostly it’s scary.

Andy Garcia reminds you of what a cunning, likable actor he can be.

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

It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.

The thing you want from a documentary about his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the chance to get right up close to him, in the way that movies can do. You want the chance to bask in his presence and come out with a heightened sense of what he’s about. The Last Dalai Lama? accomplishes that, and with an offhand eloquence, though it’s a sketchy, catch-as-catch-can movie.

Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.

White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer’s instinct, not to mention his modesty.

Very much a kiddie ride, Stuart Little 2 is lively without being hyperactive -- it's a bouncy mouse caper with a wee bit of soul.

Fourteen years after "Happiness," why is director Todd Solondz still mucking around with the sort of idiot neurotic dweeb who makes George Costanza look like George Clooney?

Dinesh D'Souza's documentary is no mere screed: 2016: Obama's America is a nonsensically unsubstantiated act of character assassination.

Creed II has been made with heart and skill, and Jordan invests each moment with such fierce conviction that he makes it all seem like it matters.

Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the Oscar-winning coproducer of Driving Miss Daisy (it’s her first time behind the camera), Rush has a raw surface authenticity. But that’s about all it has.

The trouble is, nothing about this couple is particularly rooted in Los Angeles. The love affair has a bland, generic feel. What's more, the picture lacks verve.

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

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

Is Arquette a has-been actor trumping up his biggest failure so that he can exploit it? Or is he a lionhearted wrestler who finds triumph by going the distance? The weird thing is that there’s no difference.

The movie is simply Lumet and his films, which turns out to be an astonishingly satisfying experience, because he’s an incredible talker, with the same earthy electric push that powers his work.

High-octane trash, but you will go "Ohhhhhh!"

It's nifty to behold, but about the only drama in Steamboy lies in waiting for this colossal hovering machine-monster to blow a gasket.

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.

For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.

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

Causeway is a drama of redemption that’s both touching and a little arduous. Just because your characters are suffering doesn’t mean they have to mostly stop talking.

The fascination of You Don’t Nomi is that it doesn’t find some fatal contradiction among the three views. “Showgirls,” it says, is a bad movie that also is a tasty slice of kitsch that also is a flawed but honestly bracing drama.

What do you call a movie about a midlife non-crisis? How about tame, competent, mildly touching, and a little dull — except for Catherine Deneuve's fearless turn as a boozing, ailing wreck.

Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.

A hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum.

Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.

A Woman, a Part knows how to hold an audience, and it’s got a fresh, if commercially limited, subject: What happens when hipsters get old.

Nureyev delivers Nureyev’s life in all its ecstasy and tragedy. As a documentary, it’s not definitive, but it’s good enough to leave you thrilled and haunted by this man who, at the height of his artistry, seemed to leap off the earth and leave it behind.

The movie manipulates its audience in cunning and puckish ways. It’s no big whoop, but you’re happy to have been played.

Gordon-Levitt proves a natural filmmaker, nimbly staging Jon's highly amusing Catholic confessions, along with porn montages that mimic the dopamine-charged editing of "Requiem for a Dream." He also gets a terrific performance out of Tony Danza as Jon's hilariously blinkered brute of a dad.

Spader and Sarandon make White Palace worth seeing, but too often they’re fighting the movie’s smugness.

The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.

The Prestige isn't art, but it reaps a lot of fun out of the question, How did they do that?

I.Q. is easy enough to sit through, but it’s all surface come-on-the romantic-comedy equivalent of a shallow young Hollywood star who puts on fake glasses so that it will look like he, too, has brains.

“Wonka” makes you feel good, but it never makes you levitate.

Well acted.

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

Worth seeing.

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

Landline is a dramatic comedy about a family full of secrets, and what’s mature — and, in its way, reassuring — about the film is that it views this state of affairs as an all-too-natural one.

It's the closest the movies have come in a while to the nudgy, knowing fairy-tale enchantment of "The Princess Bride."

The races are scorchingly shot, and they lend the movie a zest.

For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.

Turns out to be the portrait of a serial yo-yo dieter, an impression enhanced by the 60 year old Berlin, who suggests less a former depraved scenester than a calorie compulsive Martha Stewart grown bored with good taste.

A modest vérité portrait of Wilco, the engagingly melodious, deeply unglam alt-folk rockers.

In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.

The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

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.

A decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon.

The film is at times harrowing to watch, yet it's also wry and delicate and absorbing. It's infused with the messy excitement of imperfect passion.

If anything, Strange Days belongs to the rotters hovering around its edges: Michael Wincott, a vision of Drano-throated malevolence; Tom Sizemore, who, as Lenny’s bikerish pal, suggests Judd Nelson if he’d let the corruption ooze a little further out of his pores; and the wonderfully weaselly Richard Edson as an underground software techie.

Carlito’s Way is perfectly okay entertainment, yet this 2-hour-and-21-minute movie never convinced me it wouldn’t have been every bit as good (if not better) as a lean and mean Miami Vice episode.

The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on "Let the Right One In."

Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.

As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.

Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It's the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

Director Abel Ferrara stages the violence in electrifying spasms, and Walken, with his undead complexion, his jittery line readings, and his stare of cold rage, mesmerizes the camera.

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is suffused with a rarefied emotional glow, and that's something contemporary audiences may be almost desperate to respond to. Yet the movie is also tentative, rambling, and maddeningly shapeless.

The result is a musical that substitutes irony for pop passion, misanthropic disjointedness for lyrical flow.

But Philadelphia turns out to be a scattershot liberal message movie, one that ties itself in knots trying to render its subject matter acceptable to a mass audience.

[A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.

As entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.

I found Skinamarink to be terrifying, but it’s a film that asks for (and rewards) patience, and can therefore invite revolt (not to mention abysmal grades from Cinemascore). Yet if you go with it, you may feel that you’ve touched the uncanny

Anthology films usually work better in theory than execution, but this feature parade of shorts is a blithe, worldly, and enchanting exception.

The genius of Pavarotti’s voice is that it had the power to heal. The movie pays ample testament to how that voice, for 40 years, poured out of him, rapturous and tragic, soaring on wings of pure emotion, at times wracked with a spiritual pain that was surely his own, but always lifting his audience to the mountaintop of beauty, saying, “This is where I live. And you can too.”

Hurtling and impassioned, driven by some of the greatest popular music ever recorded, this wildly overripe and unkempt biopic is a true experience.

Bilbo, as played by Freeman, suggests a sly-dog Dana Carvey without irony, and he is certainly overmatched, but that doesn't mean he's outplayed. Desolation is now his business.

It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.

Mid90s, though made by a Hollywood star, isn’t a nostalgic indie “fable” in gritty skate-punk drag. It’s something smaller and purer: a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality.

Swimming With Sharks swipes its basic design from Robert Altman’s The Player: It’s yet another black satirical morality play about a yuppie climber who learns to be a killer. But since Guy, for all his ass-kissing resentment, isn’t really filled in as a character, our attention — and, in a curious way, our sympathy — shifts to the monster himself. When Spacey goes ballistic, only to freeze the nitroglycerine in his veins a moment later, you don’t want to look anywhere else.

Premium Rush earns its place as end-of-the-summer escapism, but I can't say that it's more than a well-done formula flick. At this point, it's just one more movie-as-ride. But this one at least lives up to its title.

A movie that’s a loosely structured ramble can work, and about half of “Tommaso” feels more vital than anything Ferrara has made in a while. But the film should have been shapelier and 20 minutes shorter, with a more focused dramatic psychology.

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.

Under the Influence is a very absorbing, very disquieting, very meaningful-for-our-time documentary.

Harriet is a conscientiously uplifting, devoted, rock-solid version of her story. Yet when it comes to putting the audience in touch with what’s extraordinary about Harriet Tubman — not just illustrating what she did but letting us connect with that quest, and with her, on a moment-to-moment level — Harriet is a conventional and rather prosaic piece of filmmaking.

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

Though the movie is too long, I was more gratified than not to sink into its relatively old-fashioned dramatic restraint.

Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent.

In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.

A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.

A gratifyingly clever, booby-trapped thriller that has enough fun and imagination and dash to more than justify its existence.

If Sommersby is finally more pleasant than exciting, that may be because its post-Civil War setting robs the story of much of its exoticism.

This beautiful and urgent eco-doc takes a bite out of the shark mythology made indelible by "Jaws."

Frankie & Johnny does what any true romantic movie should: It makes the mysterious, push-and-pull alchemy of love seem, once again, worth the effort.

The rare case in which a filmmaker's unadulterated worship of his subjects adds force and resonance--and not just luster--to the way that we see them.

For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.

I’d love to see Affleck star in a film about an addict with nothing to explain his addiction but his own flawed, desperate, hungry soul. That’s a movie that could speak to us — the way that Ben Affleck’s real story already does — far more than this modestly well-made Sunday-school lesson.

A sleekly unnerving thriller.

Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.

Without the music, the movie might have been painful, but the songs, Auto-Tuned and processed as they are, generate a hooky bliss. They're the chewy center of this ultra-synthetic hard candy.

It’s a rapturous piece of nostalgia — a film that devotes itself, in every madly obsessive frame, to making you feel happy in the guileless way a movie still could back in 1964.

Star Trek VI is just pleasantly diverting, business-as-usual hokum.

It’s a highly entertaining movie that manages to pack in more or less every important thing you’d want to know about Tom Wolfe.

In spirit, I Am Legend is caught in some abstractly doom-laden sci-fi past. For what it is, though, the film is well-done, a case of suspenseful competence trumping questionable relevance.

It seems pompous and scattershot now -- a tweaking of privileged European smugness that unfolds with a playful daisy-chain logic but has the tone of a quaint, doddering lecture.

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.

Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

A sign of how desperate the series' producers have become is that the big twist here is that Leatherface, the slobby butcher-boy demon in his mask of human skin, is now...the good guy. (That's a ''jump the chainsaw'' concept if ever there was one.)

The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.

“Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.

Perhaps the first sports movie ever made in which the characters talked as good a game as they played.

Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

The film sweeps us up like a thriller, forcing us to at least ask whether terrorism like the ELF's (which targeted property, never human lives) might ever be justified.

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

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.

The technical bravura that Guiraudie summoned in “Stranger” — the subtle manipulation of light, weather, shot language, and temporal cunning — now falls by the wayside in a story that lurches from episode to disconnected episode.

The movie, which has the slightly glum perversity of early Chabrol, is a dream of betrayal, with the squirmiest attack-of-nature tableau since Willard.

The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.

This lone, fallen Nazi's obsessive distance from his actions is enough to give The Specialist a lingering chill.

It’s really one of the very first, very early Gen-X movies (the true first one, to me, is 1978’s terrific Over the Edge), and I was struck all over again by the freshness of what it captured: these four prematurely jaded adolescent girls, led by Jodie Foster as the sensible one, living like baby adults, cut off from their parents and the past, bonded only by attitude, consumerism, and the pop-culture decadence they share.

Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will.

It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.

The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.

The movie keeps you occupied, but in a processed, unexciting way.

You still feel that every delirious allusion, every snidely on-the-mark observational quip, is tickling a different part of your cerebral cortex. Yet the movie lacks the manic highs of the show’s best episodes; it’s a bit too rote and becalmed.

The deceptions and symmetries are standard, but this is the kind of movie that rises or falls on whether the actors can carry the duplicity — and the innocence — aloft. And the actors here are marvelous: tart, stylish, emotionally vibrant, never more knowing than when they’re being duped.

The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no.

The Great Debaters is like one of those sentimentally revved youth-sports-team crowd-pleasers. This time, though, the sport is debating, and the setting is an elite black college in Marshall, Tex., in 1935

Polina is vivid as dance but vague as drama.

Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.

Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.

The film is weightless and super-goofy — a blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia. It zips right along, it makes you smile and chortle, it’s a surprisingly sweet-spirited love story.

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.

The affair itself, in its genteel way, does catch fire, but it's the end of the affair that needs to move us to rapture, and the movie, instead, just drifts away.

The central reason that Last Flag Flying fails to take wing is that its characters don’t ring true. Not really. You never feel, in your bones, that you’re watching battle-scarred veterans.

Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience — of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he’s practically controlling your breathing.

Velvet Goldmine is no masterpiece, but, at its best, it's a ravishing rock dream.

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

In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.

The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.

Sneakers is an agreeably lightweight caper thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Reeboks or basketball.

Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.

There isn't much to the characters in this morose thriller.

Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.

it’s consistently funny and inventive.

The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.

The problem with the movie isn't that it sells out Rocky and Bullwinkle -- it's that it can't keep up with them.

In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.

Walker forged an out-of-time mystique that is vividly captured here.

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

Salt knows how to stay one step ahead of you in devious, if jaw-droppingly contrived, ways. The movie is fun, dammit. So who cares, really, if it's trash?

Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.

More and more independent filmmakers seem to be cobbling together characters and scenes that have surface hook and flash without organic emotional logic.

A crowd-pleaser in the deepest sense, mixes heartbreak and happiness together until you don't even want to see them apart.

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

It’s a lovingly crafted movie, and in many ways a good one, but before that it’s an enraptured piece of old-is-new nostalgia.

"American Heretics" is eye-opening, but it's never explosive.

The difference between The Prince of Tides and a movie like Ordinary People is that Streisand isn’t content with exploring human pain. She had to make it glamorous, too.

It’s still, in the end, a bit of a connect-the-inspirational-dots movie, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be inspired.

Playing Mr. Perfect, Brendan Fraser — yes, Encino Man — proves a smart and likable actor, alive to what’s going on around him. Sidney Poitier proved you could keep your integrity even in a role like this, and Fraser does too.

Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.

Maxed Out, while occasionally muddled in its financial details, presents a more-accurate-than-not vision of a nation that is starting to look like a candidate for rehab, on both an individual and a national level, for its addiction to debt.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is a capricious and touching surrealist kiddie ride that, in its sugar-high way, is as much a celebration of friendship as the “Toy Story” films.

A brutally monotonous thriller.

It doesn't quite wash. Guédiguian has a telling instinct for the buried shame of working-class squalor, but his film is inflated with a doom that feels programmatic rather than earned.

An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.

A voyeur's delight.

Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.

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

A nimble and supple and moving comedy.

A clever rock-world satire, with some lively take-offs on the TMZ-gossip magazine circus, but it's also too long, and by the time of the inevitable Las Vegas sequence, it starts to grow repetitive.

The writer-director, Alice Wu, fudges a lot of the basics -- I never believed the heroine was really a physician -- but the final, proudly public girl-on-girl smooch still jerks a tear.

It's an enjoyable ramble, with a feel for what made the early days of rock as wild as any that followed.

For everything it gets right, Ali, following its superb first hour, begins to lose the vision, clarity, and structure necessary to bring its hero into full focus.

Jordan lets slip virtually every rudiment of drama. He never deigns to develop his characters, he coats the movie in a wet blanket of whimsy, and he lets pop songs do his work for him more lavishly than Cameron Crowe did in "Elizabethtown."

Crooklyn has a warm, nostalgic, spilling-over-the-edges effusiveness that is new to Lee's work. At the same time, the movie often seems every bit as high-strung as the family it's about.

Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.

An agreeable mischievous romp.

Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter.

Unknown White Male is framed as a look at the mystery of identity, but there's a bizarre neutrality to the movie, since it makes Bruce's life just as detached and remote to us as it seems to him.

It’s a horror ride that holds you, and it should have no trouble carving out an audience, but I didn’t find it particularly scary.