Owen Gleiberman

[Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.

At times too movieish, yet Ashkenazi creates a memorable figure: a spy who operates - admirably - out of the most unyielding nationalist conviction, only to learn that he needs to let some of that conviction go.

A truly titillating and truly convoluted tale of l'amour fou. Perhaps the American remake could be titled ''Hot Fudge Ripple Sky.''

Little more than a lavish, art-directed slasher movie.

Darkman is a thrillingly demented pop spectacular: a grade-B movie made by a grade-A lunatic.

Vincent & Theo looks and feels like a half-baked PBS drama, and at two hours and 20 minutes the movie is hopelessly plodding. Still, see it for Roth, whose warts-and-all portrait of Van Gogh is an offbeat triumph.

Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.

After all the despair, the piling up of glitzy delusion, there’s a feeling of redemption to it connected to what a good movie can do.

Soapdish makes the tackiness of soap operas seem far more desperate than funny.

The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.

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

It's conventional stuff, only executed with a smart, improv-y verve.

Still, just about everything in Goldeneye, from its rote nuclear-weapon-in-space plot to the recitation of lines that sound like they're being read off stone tablets (''Shaken, not stirred!''), has been served up with a thirdhand generic competence that's more wearying than it is exhilarating.

As long as Norton plays Harlan as a modern-day Joe Buck, a kind of four-in-the-afternoon cowboy, we're drawn by his waltz of innocence and vagueness. But Down in the Valley turns out to be one of those films with a thick, gummy overlay of Western ''mythology.''

Last Breath delivers every incident with so much specificity that it’s like a cinematic piece of journalism. Yet it leaves you with a minor tingle of the uncanny.

You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''

One of the rare movies from Israel that refuses to spell out its politics, and you may wind up grateful for the ambiguity.

The movie excoriates the hypocrisy of self-hating gay lawmakers (several of whom it outs), yet it also explores the burden of the public closet.

I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.

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

Funny and ebullient look at a man in full confusion.

Cold Weather becomes the world's first mumblecore "thriller" - a good idea for a movie that someone, in the future, should execute a bit less lackadaisically.

The scandal of McCarthyism is too daunting to shake off. But Guilty By Suspicion leaves you wishing that someone would finally make a decent movie about it.

It’s not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to the side, chuckling at the human folly he’s showing you.

Any doubts as to whether Sienna Miller is a gifted actress should be laid to rest by Interview.

A breakneck inner-city odyssey of jump-cut shaky-cam suspense.

Whatever its melodramatic shortcomings, South Central offers a wrenching view of modern youth-gang violence by demonstrating, with desperate candor, that the civilized alternatives are fast disappearing.

Moses was elevating mankind to a place closer to God, but when the Red Sea parts here, the feeling it gives you isn't awe; it's closer to deep impact.

As is often the case with Lee, though, the film left me wishing for even more scenes of casual intimacy, still the most powerful way to carry any message.

This is closer to a grandly efficient greatest-hits thrill ride, packaged like a video game. Yet on that level it’s a confidently spooky, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-jangling piece of entertainment.

Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.

Badly lit and at times, awkwardly inspirational, yet there's real feeling in it, especially when the movie suggests that Tourette's syndrome is every bit as pure an expression of the spirit as it is a ''disorder.''

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors.

The upshot is that those who appear to be guilty may not be -- a muddled message for our time.

It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.

For today’s filmmakers, the addiction to kinetic overkill has become a disease in itself.

Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power -- a design but not a vision.

Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.

A spectacularly turbulent portrait of the chaos and bloodshed that have come to define Haiti.

A Better Life was directed by the eclectic Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy), who weaves the torpor and anxiety of immigrant life into something dramatically true, if at moments a bit draggy.

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

Much of the time, the film itself veers perilously close to becoming the sort of high- body-count action spectacular it’s supposed to be parodying. When gags are tossed off in the midst of bomb blasts and deafening machine-gun fire, is it any wonder that audiences will tend to ignore the comedy and focus on the mayhem? If Hot Shots! Part Deux proves anything, it’s that making fun of big, raucous, sky-high explosions is a joke of rapidly diminishing returns.

The movie, in a sense, is just like Bettie's photos: all glorious surface. The Notorious Bettie Page captures, with seductive finesse, how Bettie Page happened, yet what it leaves us with is the tantalizing enigma of a girl who couldn't truly be ''bad'' because she made sex divinely delicious.

It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.

There’s a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls.

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.

Scene for scene, the duo are in good form. Yet this is one case where more turns out to be less.

He can barely skate, but it hardly matters: As a goon, he's a genius.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.

“The Lost Weekend” is a compelling movie and a valuable puzzle piece, but it’s only pretending to be the whole puzzle.

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

Godard, as always, sounds full of insight, yet he uses the past to damn the present in a way that may be reflexively self-serving. In Praise of Love leaves a taste as bitter as poison ash.

As Wolfgang, directed by David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), entertainingly captures, Puck tumbled into innovations that became more influential than anyone, including him, might have expected.

If you let yourself get on that wavelength of frisky innocence, The Bad Guys 2 exerts a wholesome and slightly mischievous appeal.

Bombshell is a scalding and powerful movie about what selling, in America, has become. The film is about selling sex, selling a candidate, selling yourself, selling the truth. And about how at Fox News all those things came together.

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

A deft Stephen King freak-out.

A unintentionally funny fanzine-flavored documentary.

A turgid muddle of romance, espionage, and geek valor, despite intimations that it might have turned into ''A Reasonably Dapper-Looking Mind.''

Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.

It just has a story to tell, and it does that incredibly compellingly.

As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly.

The baby-voiced costar of "Chasing Amy" proves an effortless filmmaker, turning Lucy’s journey into the awakening of a soul.

Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.

Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.

Clever and smooth, yet, like Angèle herself (or Nathalie Baye), the film is almost too placid for its own good.

Funny, pungent, and weirdly gripping.

I was amused more or less throughout by the ingeniously designed and executed stunt that is Team America.

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

Though it’s far from the last word on ZZ Top, “That Little Ol’ Band From Texas” fills in the nuts and bolts, giving you enough of a glimpse of how it all happened to make it seem like a down-home rock ‘n’ roll mirage come true.

From what we can tell, Brown was a dancer, all right, in life as well as on the field -- a dancer with a powerful forearm, one that Lee covers in protective padding.

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

Living Out Loud is like "An Unmarried Woman" recast as a sitcom-cute update of Marty.

Killing them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you.

Downsizing is an ingenious comedy of scale, a touching tale of a man whose problems grow bigger as he gets smaller, and an earnest environmental parable.

It’s the bright and daffy absurdist spinoff that these weren’t-but-could-have-been-sketch-comedy characters deserve, and it feels, in its modestly clever and diverting way, just right.

A richer, stronger, and more moving piece of work [than Philomena], a historical detective story that carries the kick of a true-life “Da Vinci Code.”

The one performer who seems at home with the gravity of it all is Emma Thompson.

Chabrol has fashioned a mystery that caves in on itself, but unfortunately, it caves in on the audience, too.

This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.

The Young Victoria has a subtler flow than you might expect, and at times it's calmer than you may like. Director Jean-Marc Vallée's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded? princess fantasy.

There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as The Road seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.

Vivarium has a canny visual design (you won’t soon forget the rows of Monopoly houses), but the movie becomes an example of the imitative fallacy. It makes the audience feel deadened too.

The movie has a mystery, and moral unease, that lingers.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil brings us literally closer to Bosch’s images than one could probably get in almost any museum. As directed by Pieter van Huystee, the film offers a true immersion in his artistry. But it’s also a little slipshod — an off-kilter window into the politics of the art world. It’s like a fascinating magazine feature with some missing pieces.

Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening, a movie that pulls into focus 30 years of porn in America. It also pulls no punches.

Here's one case where it's no praise to say that a movie leaves you with more questions than answers.

Big Time Adolescence isn’t bad, but it’s a trifle.

To me, the most potent dimension of The U.S. vs. John Lennon is the way that it captures the contradictory romanticism of Lennon the radical.

Lurie hits closer to the bone here than he did in his ham-handed "The Contender" (2000).

It’s a measure of the film’s middlebrow kitschiness that its centerpiece sequence turns out to be a tasteful soft-core version of the lesbian ravishment of Marilyn Chambers in "Behind the Green Door."

The film’s exhilaration is that it shows you, through its dangling-from-a-steel-beam footage, what love really is: scaling the heights of devotion, no matter how perilous, without a net.

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

Blades of Glory has funny moves even when its characters can barely move, but the film seldom gets past its one basic laugh: that a real man figure-skating is a contradiction in terms.

It’s a willfully idiosyncratic movie that feels like a strangely fitting final film, since it amounts to Michell’s cockeyed tip of the hat to the monarchy and what it means. You could have a good debate about what, exactly, he’s trying to express in “Elizabeth,” but what I saw is a level-headed adoration that is neither fussy nor old-fashioned, since it’s cut with an acerbic awareness of the absurdity of royalty in the contemporary age.

Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.

Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.

Roth, a great actor, is reduced to a walking sneer, and the picture creeps along in a series of handsome but painfully languorous hazy-shade-of-winter tableaux.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is full of essential stuff, but on some level it feels like a Led Zeppelin infomercial.

It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

Nudity, as “Skin” captures in its lively and disarming way, is the great leveler: the thing that makes us all gawk, no matter what the context.

There’s no denying the movie gets a rise out of us, but it does so by mining the fears within our hokiest prejudices.

A throwback to the age when Westerns were quaint.

An extended framing device set in the present day, with Kathy Bates as a put-upon housewife who becomes the fierce, confident, new-and-improved ”Tawanda,” is the sort of ghastly idea that gives feminism a bad name. The movie left me wishing its sterling cast — including a radiant Jessica Tandy — had been better served.

I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.

When the film version isn't assaulting you with gizmos, it's an awkward, depersonalized piece of hackwork.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

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

The movie is a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn — a serviceable epic of brutal warfare, Colosseum duels featuring lavish decapitations and beasts both animal and human, along with the middlebrow “decadence” of palace intrigue.

Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”

For Patriot Games to have been more than a generic international thriller, it would have needed to take us deep inside the clandestine organizations — the IRA and the CIA — on which Clancy is fixated. That doesn’t happen.

Turns into a lyrical and stirring meditation on the mystery of autism.

In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.

On screen, Twilight is repetitive and a tad sodden, too prosaic to really soar. But Hardwicke stirs this teen pulp to a pleasing simmer.

It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.

It Could Happen to You is a syrupy-sweet package undiluted by wit, tartness, observation. It would be easier to enjoy the stars in Charlie and Yvonne’s eyes if the movie didn’t keep patting them on the back.

In Proof, Paltrow plays yet another young woman who is being gnawed at by termites of instability, only this time out, her performance, rather than startling, is merely competent: earnest and overly familiar.

Has the taint of exploitation.

The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

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

A bright, whirling pinwheel of a movie that tosses around special effects like confetti, but the techno magic is graced with a touch of sensuality.

Zippy, enjoyable sci-fi slapstick jamboree.

As a director, Mehta would do well to stop smothering her empathy in glibness (she uses the family's ancient mute grandmother as a sitcom prank), but her empathy pokes through nonetheless.

If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.

For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.

When the mortars aren’t firing, the movie ebbs, flows, occasionally sags, and sometimes rivets.

Trekkies is hilarious, fascinating, and, at times, almost scary.

Eastwood is now playing a man whose will is stronger than his body, and it's that tension -- between anger and frailty, steel and decay -- that powers the movie.

More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.

A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.

The History of Sound is a movie that never fully finds a life beyond what it is on paper.

There are limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the sight of two grown men acting like complete cretins.

Serial Mom has traces of Waters’ acid wit, but most of the movie is tame and overly conscious of its naughty felicities.

A lackluster affair — smooth and mildly pleasant, with some honest chuckles but without Brooks’ special, prosaic madness.

Naked Gun 33 1/3 has a sluggish, one-gag-at-a- time rhythm, and it aims at too many soft targets. Aside from the Oscar sequence, the movie’s big satirical coup is a send-up of prison-escape pictures (yawn).

Like a naive modernist hymn made by someone who doesn't, deep down, believe in hymns.

As compelling as it is bizarre.

Sensational sex-and-its-consequences melodrama.

If Kids is simultaneously engrossing and detached, observant and just plain showy, that may be because the film is so caught up in trying to be a statement that it never develops its characters beyond their rowdy, bellicose facades.

As the movie goes on, these fleshy little beings turn into…well, people. And that's something to see. But Babies, without falsifying its subject, could have used a more soul-stirring sense of showbiz -- that is, a riper display of infantile special effects.

By the time Hard Target reaches its amazing climax, set in a warehouse stocked with surreal Mardi Gras floats, the film has become an incendiary action orgy, as joyously excessive as the grand finale in a fireworks show. Woo puts the thrill back into getting blown away.

If you think it all adds up to a bald-faced rip off of ''The Shining,'' you'd be right, with a crucial difference: Wendigo trades the puffed-up metaphysics of middle-class murder for the no-budget spectacle of...an incredibly fake-looking monster deer.

Entertainingly deft sleight-of-hand thriller.

Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.

It's a death-wish revenge thriller posing as a lavishly pastoral historical epic.

Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.

Native Son, after its promising first half, leaves you dispirited, because it’s a movie where hope gets snuffed by a stacked deck.

The movie walks the line of surreal vulgarity (you will not, repeat not, expect the penis), yet most of it, intentionally, is less nutzoid than your average megaplex genre parody.

Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.

Scott, working from a script by William Monahan, is so busy balancing our sympathies, making sure no one gets offended, that he has made a pageant of war that would have gotten a thumbs-up from Eleanor Roosevelt.

If you're going to say the unsayable and stay charming while doing so, it helps to look more like Sarah Silverman than Andrew Dice Clay.

The moral murk of Crónicas would be more effective if the story weren't so contrived, yet the movie is worth seeing for Leguizamo's sinewy urgency, Alcázar's desperate cleverness as the killer, and the squalid, frantic atmosphere of Latin American hunger.

For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.

To explain a serial killer is to diminish his madness, but Dahmer does something quietly riveting. It lets you brush up against the humanity of a psycho, without making him any less psycho.

In “The Covenant,” Guy Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.

[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.

An intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity.

Were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in some rollicking sex-positive way, an intrinsic part of the feminist revolution? Or did they represent one step forward and one high kick back? You could make the case either way, but the film pushes the clean and forceful — if highly ironic — argument that the Cheerleaders were nothing more or less than empowered entertainers who seized control of their sexuality and, in doing so, advanced the liberation of women.

In Path of Blood, the masks come off, and we literally see the faces of Al Qaeda in action, with the propaganda machine turned off. What’s shocking is how ordinary and high-spirited they appear.

It would be hard to imagine a filmmaking style as serious yet lazy as the earnest vérité bobbing and weaving employed by La Petite Jérusalem.

Vitus, a fizzy domestic fairy tale from Switzerland, gives you a lift, as it revels in the oddball joy of genius as kid power.

Halftime justly salutes Lopez’s pride in her achievements, but it’s every bit as much a salute to her brand management.

The movie is consistently entertaining; it sucks you in. James Spader is a little too recessive, yet he lends the action a core of wormy anxiety.

Pfeiffer transcends any hint of cliché ''cougar'' voraciousness.

I'm not exactly sure this is a situation that a lot of people are going to identify with. More to the point, it gives the movie a faulty design. Dylan and Jamie sleep together and get along famously. Where's the dramatic motor?

Achieves the near-impossible: It turns the Marquis de Sade into a dullard.

The trouble with the movie is that there's nothing to Muriel but her false dreams: We never quite glimpse the woman they're hiding.

The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.

For a while, The Last Exorcism shrewdly exploits our voyeurism, as it sustains the teasing question of whether there's actually anything supernatural going on. The payoff, however, isn't scary enough.

Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.

I found the film intensely revealing of Gaga’s life and personality, especially when she’s getting treatments to deal with the pain that’s dogged her for three years, ever since she suffered a broken hip (misdiagnosed at the time) on tour.

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

The movie is funny when it's nasty, as when Ron and Veronica trade insults at the anchor desk. Most of the time, though, it's not nasty enough.

The trouble with Changeling is that it plays less like reality than like a bare-bones, moralistic rehash of other, better movies, such as "L.A. Confidential" or "Frances."

You could wander into this poetic documentary willing to be sympathetic toward its subject -- men who have sex with horses -- and still find Zoo cryptic and borderline bogus.

There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.

At best, a half-finished puzzle, but Broomfield leaves you with questions that few investigators have even dared to ask.

It's a heartfelt movie that could have used a zigzaggier undercurrent, though Olyphant, in the sort of role that Paul Newman used to swagger through, has a star's easy command.

Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude.

Damsel is a comedy of attitude made with the indulgent touch of an art Western. That’s a refreshingly original thing, though it’s not as blow-you-away cool as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

The movie, after a while, drifts into an all too literal parable of the limits of never leaving the house.

Depression is a fair subject for a movie, but this much moroseness shouldn't come to this little.

Most of The River Wild moves at an annoyingly maladroit, stop-and-go tempo — it feels too much like a camping trip — and almost nothing that happens is very believable.

The truth is that Undertow is like a conventional Hollywood movie operating on half its cylinders.

A clever, by-the-numbers gothic thriller. Single White Female is entertaining claptrap.

Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done.

Joe Penna knows how to make a movie that holds you without being pushy about it. His voice as a filmmaker comes through, even in a genre as studded with commercial tropes as this one.

Peter Bogdanovich taps deep into the Hearst mystique, entertainingly reenacting a historic scandal.

The movie is ''Rosemary's Suburban Baby'' without a witch in sight.

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

The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.

The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, the backwaters of showbiz, and true magic. It's a wee charmer that left me enchanted.

Let Him Go isn’t subtle, but as a genre film it’s original and shrewdly made, with a floridly gripping suspense. And Lane and Costner give it their all in a casual way that only pros this seasoned and gifted can. They turn the movie into an unlikely thing: a touchingly bone-weary romance steeped in vengeance.

Eden lacks the technique to give its stifled domestic-erotic feelings their full power.

Provokes a suspense halfway between comedy and horror. I'm not sure if I enjoyed myself, exactly, but I could hardly wait to see what I'd be appalled by next.

Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity.

As heavy with message as any Hollywood delinquent drama of the late '50s.

There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.

It's scary good fun.

Maria bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor.

What defines the slacker-geek twentysomething men and women who wander through Joe Swanberg's too-hip-to-be-romantic comedy Hannah Takes the Stairsis that they treat their libidos as minor accessories -- only to stammer through every casual conversation as if they were on a first Internet date.

Mayor Pete shows us the trial by fire of it all, and also the jubilant grind.

Alpha, a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way.

Life desperately wants to let Murphy and Lawrence be actors, but it can't imagine them as anything more than rowdy showmen. That's a kind of prison as well.

The Upside of Anger is overly therapized, yet Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.

In The Dreamers, Bertolucci wants to take us back to a more revolutionary time, but mostly he ends up recalling the faded revolution of his own glory days.

Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.

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

True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.

Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.

Mostly comes down to rage fiends going at one another with baseball bats, knives, pesticide tanks, and power drills.

Wahlberg, with shaggy hair and a pumped bod he wears more convincingly than any actor, plays Vince as a guy who truly doesn't expect to win. That makes his rib-bruising triumph all the more believable and touching.

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

Miss Potter, right to the end, is the definition of a "nice" movie, and that makes it a genuine oddball in a universe of increasingly distressed and uncivilized pop culture.

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.

Younger, in his debut feature, is as canny as he is derivative.

The movie is altogether too infatuated with its ramshackle spirit. Most of the gags take after the characters -- they just sit there.

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.

“Money Shot,” with a no-fuss journalistic evenhandedness, makes the case that the reaction against the site, though most of it came from an unassailable moral place, may have been out of balance — that it wound up hurting sex workers without actually doing anything tangible to help the victims of trafficking.

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.

Of the idiosyncratic ''little'' movies that Soderbergh has made to clear his head (Full Frontal, Schizopolis), this is the first that truly connects.

Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.

An entertaining but also oddly naive documentary about American advertising.

An earnest, scrappy, and finally touching drama about a young man from Memphis who’s got a dream — he’s a wine buff who wants to become a sommelier — but if he follows it, it will tear him away from everything his father yearned for him to be. That, of course, is part of why it’s a tasty dream.

The chintzy characters, hair-raising deaths, and one spectacular rocket-launcher joke aren't enough to give "Hostel" a run for its blood.

It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.

As a fix of pop iconography, V for Vendetta is eyeball grabbing, even if it lacks the relentless videogame bravura that sold the Matrix films. As a movie, however, it's merely okay, with a pivotal dramatic weakness: Evey, for all the attentions of her revolutionary Svengali, remains, in essence, a bystander, and Portman, her head shaved, plays her like Joan of Arc as a tremulous Girl Scout.

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

Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.

Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

If it's possible to be a rip-off with wit, Disturbia qualifies.

Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don't arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.

The dialogue veers into digressions about ADHD, the cruddiness of mainstream dog food, and much else. That these asides prove more fun than the central action is what gives Hit & Run its flavor: tasty at times, even if the film evaporates as you watch it.

The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.

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

Prelude to a Kiss is squishy yet blah. It teaches the characters a lesson they don’t need to learn.

The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.

Sadly, the movie indicates that Polanski’s erotic narcissism may have consumed not just his life but, by all appearances, his art as well.

“CHAOS” ends up suggesting that the Manson murders were a grand plot, orchestrated from on high (by the CIA? the Deep State? Nixon?) to turn America against the counterculture. I don’t believe that theory for a second, but there’s one way I think it stays true to the spirit of Charles Manson: It’s pure madness.

A Jazzman’s Blues overflows with melodrama, yet it isn’t staged broadly. It’s closer to Perry’s version of a Douglas Sirk film, one that takes a romance and heightens it until the complications are growing and twisting around it like vines.

What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.

Despite some splendid snowcapped vistas and one rather frightening grizzly-bear attack, White Fang, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel is dramatically inert. Nothing in the picture really takes hold — certainly not the relationship between young Jack (Ethan Hawke) and White Fang, who seem like near-strangers even at the final clinch.

A skillful and winning piece of honest booster portraiture.

Has too many contrivances, but as an act of sinister staging, it proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker.

In a world ruled by process, is compassion still real? Or is it just another scam? In Ocean's Thirteen, it is deviously, and merrily, both.

Little more than a rambling chain of combative buddy mishaps, but the interplay between Vaughn and Favreau, who does great double takes of thrusting chin frustration, spins you through the weak patches.

In its mingling of horniness and disgust, Tomcats attains a convoluted cleverness.

Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.

Has the dubious distinction of being just about the mildest porno comedy ever made. It's like something the teenage Pedro Almodóvar might have written to shock his 10th-grade creative writing teacher.

The movie is just a lightweight riff on “Beetlejuice” — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]

This is Ethan’s chance to strut his solo stuff. And he does, in a very Ethan Coen way: clever, modest, borderline invisible, but with a kick that sneaks up on you. ... 'Trouble in Mind' plays like an undiluted shot of rock ‘n’ roll moonshine joy.

There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the new cartoon of Curious George, featuring the voice of Will Ferrell as the Man in the Yellow Hat, doesn't veer all that far from the soothing tone of the books.

Klown, a comedy from Denmark about two men on a canoe trip who descend into all sorts of desperate debauchery, demonstrates how the semi-improv, jitter-cam mode of filmmaking has gone from being a style to a tic - a way to disguise how unreal a movie can be.

In Henry & June, Kaufman, trying to deepen the erotic explorations of Unbearable Lightness, ends up with a triangle movie that’s watchable but also arty and rather stilted.

The surprise is that “Skull Island” isn’t just ten times as good as “Jurassic World”; it’s a rousing and smartly crafted primordial-beastie spectacular.

In the course of City Hall, Calhoun doesn’t just get to the bottom of a scandal. He grows up, and watching Cusack enact the transformation, I thought I glimpsed this gifted young actor growing into a star.

A feel-good movie that doesn't give you enough to feel good about.

This is the sort of incendiary role a lot of actors would kill for, yet the shock of Norton's performance isn't its showboat flamboyance. It's that he makes this sadistic junior sociopath rueful and intelligent.

As directed by series creator Rob Thomas, the movie, like the show, is entertainingly fast-talking in a tidy, faux-serious way. Kristen Bell, if anything, has only gained in appeal.

Neeson and Brosnan are supremely well-matched foils, though I do wish that the filmmaker, David Von Ancken, had lent his sparsely mythic tale just a twinge of something...new.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

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.

The thrust of the movie is that even for Jerry, the quintessential scientist of stand-up, comedy is very, very hard to do. By the end, you're closer to knowing why.

I’m glad to report that All the Old Knives is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived. It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either.

It's a fearless and brilliant racial-historical satire, done in a meticulous re-creation of the Ken Burns mode, that chronicles the last 150 years of America as if the South had won the Civil War.

It’s a looser, warmer, and more meditative romance, one that takes its time by giving its actors room to breathe.

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

Fall is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.

Were women put on earth to be warriors? Demi Moore certainly was. The role of Jordan fits her as snugly as a new layer of muscle.

By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety.

It's a romantic noir chase thriller made in the violently schlocky spirit of Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway."

The Cook, The Thief is so full of loathing it just about gags on its own bile.

If The Matrix Reloaded is a trip through high-toned mediocrity, not nearly as suggestive or cohesive as ''The Matrix,'' it's one of the most wizardly mediocre movies I've seen in quite some time.

"Sheryl" tells these anecdotes, and others, in a swift and captivating fashion, with the director, Amy Scott, in engaging command.

The case it makes for nuclear power is sober, grounded, journalistic. But don’t take my word for it — seek the movie out. It demands and deserves to be seen.

The movie, while elegantly photographed, is mostly a shambles. It keeps throwing things at you in an oblique and random way, and it’s constructed like a puzzle with no solution.

With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!

And that’s what this overly eager, fractious, Burtonized but standardized, loudly comic but ultimately rather mirthless remake does to Dumbo. It transforms a miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need. The character of Dumbo is still touching, but the tale of entrapment and rescue that surrounds him is not. It’s arduous and forgettable, done in busy italicized strokes, and apart from that FX elephant the movie doesn’t come up with a single character who hooks us emotionally.

Michael Sheen and Maria Bello both have wrenching moments in this quiet, oblique drama. Yet the movie isn't really convincing.

When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors.

There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.

The director-cowriter, Brian Dannelly, has great fun tweaking the way American Christianity has been born again as a commodified, suburbanized, pop-saturated belief system.

If you want to see the missing link between John Wayne's squint and Clint Eastwood's sneer, look no further than Charlton Heston in Major Dundee.

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

Feminist sanctimony, it turns out, looks much the same forward and backward.

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

Selby’s book is considered a gutbucket classic of the post-Beat era, but its hellish vision was, in part, a reaction to the stifling postwar optimism of ’50s America. Now, it seems overdone — especially when recreated with this much hyperbolic showmanship. Last Exit to Brooklyn is so relentless it’s not of this world.

A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.

In About Last Night, Hart blows up, to hilariously oversize proportions, the eternal male desire for freedom. He’s raunch on wheels.