Owen Gleiberman

An insider nostalgia trip for graying art punks. It could have been called ''When We Were Cool,'' and it's finally so cool that it freezes you out.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut]

It's doubtful you'll ever see a combat documentary that channels the chaos of war as thoroughly as this one.

What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.

At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.

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.

Fruitvale Station is great political filmmaking because it's great filmmaking, period.

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

A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

Paranoid Park has the slightly glum insularity of minimalist fiction, but it's the first of Van Sant's blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down.

Lopez, for all her Latina-siren voluptuousness, has always projected a contained coolness, and this is the first movie in which it fully works for her.

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.

As long as Revanche focuses on the relationship between Tamara (Irina Potapenko), an indentured Ukrainian prostitute, and Alex (Johannes Krisch), the ex-con gofer and would-be tough guy who wants to help her escape, it's riveting.

Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera.

DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants.

Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but Farewell My Concubine may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime.

Sinners works more than it doesn’t, even if it doesn’t always gel, but it’s a commanding demonstration of how lavishly spirited and “serious” a popcorn movie can be.

Yet Red, White and Blue mostly lacks the gritty period flavor of the other Small Axe films. It’s a little glossed over. The (minor) daring of the movie is its downbeat narrative. It’s structured like the air seeping out of a tire, so that it presents us with a character of idealistic strength, commitment, and personal heroism only to plop him into a set of circumstances that won’t allow him to be a hero.

The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.

It’s a downbeat diary that hooks us by taking the form of an addict’s picaresque. For two hours, we don’t know where Leslie is going to land next any more than she does, and that lends the film a searing, unvarnished quality.

You know you're in the hands of a true filmmaker when you feel invited, at every turn, to share his sense of entrancement. I got that feeling in just about every frame of American Beauty.

This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.

Bold and brilliant.

The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year.

A powerful and important documentary.

Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.

Darwin's Nightmare points an all-purpose finger at globalization, yet the movie, as raw and vivid as it is, meanders terribly and - bigger problem - never hints at how the disasters it shows us are rooted in Africa's colonial past.

On the Record presents a searing, at times shocking exposé of alleged criminal acts. Yet here, as in those earlier chronicles, what’s extraordinary is the disturbingly intimate communion the film creates between the audience and the survivors. Not just the facts but the meaning of these alleged crimes comes scarily alive in the emotional details of their telling.

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

Shot in vivid black and white, the movie is like "Village of the Damned" directed by Ingmar Bergman, only without Bergman's intensity.

Fire of Love, which has been directed by Sara Dosa with a discursive, let’s-try-it-on lyricism, is like one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about fearless outliers, only this one is touched with romance.

All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.

As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.

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

Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.

The movie opens as borderline Hitchcock, echoing the tone of the filmmaker's bravura "Bad Education" (2004), and then turns into a kind of overly conceptualized Tennessee Williams.

Widows, while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isn’t a home run.

Homicide is engrossing, at least for a while, but the truly personal movie it wants to be remains locked up in Mamet’s head.

Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.

After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.

The enthralling spirit of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film.

Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.''

The new Arthur is a feathery screwball satire, competent on its own terms, yet as the movie went on I found it increasingly hard to separate the character's self-indulgence from that of the actor playing him.

The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.

The Cove is the rare documentary specifically designed as a thriller.

If this is the sound of a new generation, then it may be the first generation cautious enough to embrace friendship as mightier than love.

The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.

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

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

It's an energetic stunt of a movie, and it wants to make us sweat like it's 1974.

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

Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]

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

It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.

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

It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.

In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.

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

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

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

Hoffman and Thompson are each good enough to bring out a glow in the other.

The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.

A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

The movie, building on “The Witch,” proves that Robert Eggers possesses something more than impeccable genre skill. He has the ability to lock you into the fever of what’s happening onscreen.

As visual spectacle, Avatar is indelible, but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.

20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.

It's hard to think of the last time a Pixar film made you go ''Wow!'' That's part of why The LEGO Movie is such outrageous and intoxicating fun.

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

A funny and madly arresting new documentary.

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

Huppert has never been this cheerful, or lethal, and the movie itself is like Hitchcock's ''Rebecca'' reshot for House & Garden, with all the ghosts pulled out of the closet.

Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.

The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.

A haunting and incandescent work of art.

The 3-D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies.

King turns One Night in Miami into a real movie, staging it with a flowing visual confidence and vibrant emotional flair that gives it a fly-on-the-wall authenticity.

A vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.

It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.

Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.

The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. The Post celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today.

The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.

Lands on an imaginative fault line somewhere between tackiness and awe.

It's an academic meditation in underworld-thriller drag -- a movie that looks about as close to a straight-ahead, down-and-dirty genre entertainment as anything the director has made since his exploding-head horror days.

One emerges from Breaking Point stunned and moved, with the realization that the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves, as they have for centuries, but also that they’re now fighting for all of us.

The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.

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.”

Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

Is any of this, you know, fun? Just barely. But I'm sure I would have loved it at 6.

The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.