Owen Gleiberman

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.

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

“Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.

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

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

While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the jumping-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.

Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is a storytelling mediocrity, but as spectacle it has tumult and rhythm.

Abigail was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made those last two “Scream” films, and though I was impressed, to a degree, by what they brought off there, this movie feels like a step backward into overwrought generic schlock.

At its best, Back to Black, the forthright and compelling movie that’s been made of Winehouse’s life, takes that light/dark balance and digs into the drama of it, making it sing.

The director, Adam Wingard (who made “Godzilla vs. Kong”), knows how to choreograph a beastie battle so that it does maximum damage in a way that appeals to your inner toy-smashing seven-year-old.

There may be a lot more going on “Blood and Honey 2,” but let’s not kid ourselves. It’s mostly a shambles.

Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.

You might say that “Frozen Empire” has to work even harder to invent a reason for itself to exist. Yet it’s a livelier movie than “Afterlife.”

In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.

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

As a rom-com, Irish Wish is more than willing to kiss the Blarney Stone. Yet the chemistry of Lohan and Speleers makes it watchable enough to get by.

“Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.

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

It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.

The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.

Imaginary, despite a few creepy moments, is starved for scenes that make the fear it’s showing you relatable.

Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.

The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.

Spaceman, it’s my duty to report, is a glum and meandering science-fiction fairy tale of a movie.

Drive-Away Dolls is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle.

The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade.

The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.

Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.

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

The 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.

"Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a moving, wrenching, compellingly well-made documentary about Reeve’s life that inevitably ends up centering on his accident and its aftermath.

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

Exhibiting Forgiveness sends you out on a note of hope, but it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. It’s a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.

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

Love Lies Bleeding turns consciously wild and garish, and you may think that the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.

The sly beauty of The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it’s a wicked satire of white people that’s also an empathetic satire of Black people.

You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.

You can rest assured that Mean Girls, the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era in a handful of ways.

Everything is at once telegraphed and derivative.

The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.

Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.

The Boys in the Boat is a gentleman’s sports movie, with Clooney working hard to make one “like they used to.” He brings it off, even if there’s a lingering quaintness to it all.

“Rebel Moon,” while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only.

A perfect movie for this moment.

Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed with supreme love and insight by Lisa Cortés, is the enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves.

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

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

The funny moments in Genie, and there are a handful of them, emerge mostly from McCarthy just tossing off lines with her dislocating insouciance.

A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.

Howery’s line readings sound improvised, and that’s a good thing. He’s the ebullient, fast-talking spark plug of a formula comedy with a cheap engine, though one that putters along harmlessly enough.

Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.

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.

It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”

The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.

The movie is being marketed as a “psychological” thriller, but psychology is what it doesn’t have. It’s more like “Cape Fear” reduced to a “Predator” sequel.

For a first movie, Old Dads shows promise. Bill Burr is onto something about how the new culture of control messes with the heads of ordinary people. Next time, though, he should channel the rage instead of flaunting it.

The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.

Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

Foe wants to end with a big “Whoa.” Instead, it leaves us going “Huh, interesting” and “Whuuut?” at the same time.

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

The torture set pieces in the “Saw” films are lavish gifts of baroque horror presented to the audience. They are, quite simply, the reason we came. Tobin Bell, with his stare of pitiless wisdom, is also a draw, but “Saw X” raises the issue of how much of John Kramer’s hand-wringing is too much. In the eyes of a lot of “Saw” fans, hand-wringing < hands cut off with mechanized garden shears.

I take no vicious pleasure in saying that Poolman, a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.

What’s strange about Together 99 is that it looks like a Lukas Moodysson film (natural light), it moves like a Lukas Moodysson film (the documentary-like flow), but it’s blanketed with a sodden forlorn Swedish bourgeois cynicism that makes you think Moodysson needs to get out more.

This is true 21st-century trash: a movie in which the action itself is expendable.

Throughout the film, he’s so calmly but blazingly articulate, so candid about the processes of moviemaking and his strengths (and weaknesses) as an actor, so wise about the meaning of his own stardom, that I realized, with a touch of embarrassment, a prejudice I’ve been carrying around for 47 years. Deep in my reptile brain, I still think Sylvester Stallone is Rocky.

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.

Knox Goes Away doesn’t traffic in comedy — or exaggerated reality. In addition to being a noir that holds you exactly the way a noir should, it may be one of the best dramas about dementia I’ve ever seen.

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

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.

Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.

The daring thing Coppola does, given that we’re used to seeing even sophisticated biopics weave the lives they’re showing us into dramatic arcs, is to present the rise and fall of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship as a diary, one that simply flows forward in a kind of objective Zen fashion, never trumping anything up.