Owen Gleiberman

An exhilarating hall-of-mirrors look at what happens when global art fame turns anonymous, artists become objects, fans turn into artists, and the whole what's-sincere-and-what's-a-sham spectacle is more fun than art was ever supposed to be.

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

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

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

Jim Carrey's performance is an impersonation on the level of genius.

Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.

This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like.

Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.

Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody.

The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.

Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.

It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.

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

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.

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

It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.

It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.

It's Swank, however, who's the revelation. By the end, her Brandon/Teena is beyond male or female. It's as if we were simply glimpsing the character's soul, in all its yearning and conflicted beauty.

True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

Beautiful, wise, and poker-faced comedy of discombobulation.

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.

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

Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is.

Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.

Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.

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

Spencer is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance.

Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."

She's a teller of hilarious gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor ever were. Yet while they were consumed by their demons, Rivers is just the opposite.

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

A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please!

A voyeur's delight.

Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years.

Awesome documentary.

At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.

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

Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis.

A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.

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

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.

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.

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

It's Ejiofor's extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together.

In the Shadow of the Moon finds new resonance in the moment when America redefined progress -- but also when it heeded the siren song of a world so desolate it reminded you what a paradise ours truly is.

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.

This is Robert Redford doing what too many stars should do and don't: taking a chance. And reinventing his art. It's an extraordinary thing to see.

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

A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made.

As he rises to each challenge, you realize that von Trier, the most exalted of prankish sadists, has orchestrated the filmmaking equivalent of the story of Job. The Five Obstructions glories in art, life, and the faith that binds them.

A funny and madly arresting new documentary.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful and transporting experience — the best, I think, of Disney’s serious animated features in the multiplex era.

A wonderful movie, a delicate and touching drama that takes us deep inside the eccentric competitive mystique of grandmaster chess.

If ever there were an actor ripe to ''McConaughnesize'' his career, it's Jude Law — and guess what, he has done it, spectacularly, in Dom Hemingway.

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

It's a mad cycle of arrogance and despair, and Bloody Sunday etches it onto your nervous system.

It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

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

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is the rare movie that might be called a spiritual documentary.