Owen Gleiberman

Fear of a Black Hat never achieves the dizzying cinema verite swirl that made Spinal Tap such a timeless satire. Many of the jokes are too literal (a goof on Vanilla Ice named Vanilla Sherbet). Still, Cundieff has what nearly every commentator on the rap scene has lacked: a first-class bull detector.

Plane is fodder, but the picture brazens through its own implausibilities, carried along — and occasionally aloft — by Gerard Butler’s squinty dynamo resolve.

Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.

Incident at Loch Ness, unfortunately, is a riddle wrapped in a hoax stuffed inside a crock.

The interviews are illuminating; Summer’s family members speak of her with complicated reverence, and with an appreciation for the currents of despair that she nurtured in private.

Madame X, on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.

The Help has a saucy, humorous side.

His pluck and chutzpah shine through.

Kirkman is shrewd enough to coax a wistful performance out of pretty boy Kip Pardue.

Has a fractured fairy-tale charm, even if it isn't a nonstop laugh riot.

Ideal Home is a trifle, but more than that it’s caught between eras, poised between wanting to crack you up at what cranky prima donnas its characters are and to make you tear up at the revelation of their normal hearts. The result? A comedy of flamboyant banality.

You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.

Mostly a mess: toothless when it should be nasty, not so much madcap as merely frantic.

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

At times too restrained, yet there are moments it captures the erotics of intimacy in a way that makes most American love stories look downright unfree.

Too many movies set in this period end up as action films in medieval drag. The excitement of “The King” is that Michôd lays out the consequences of combat with gruesome precision, demythologizing the battle.

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.

The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.

Turns the tricks of psychology into duplicitous high play.

Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity.

Somberly fantastic new mystery thriller.

As someone who has warmed up to Anderson's work only gradually, I'd call this a step back for him, but I also can't help but wonder: Will he ever take that crucial step forward and stop saying, Isn't it ironic?

Zahedi is ruefully funny and savage in his self-exposure.

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

There’s some crafty artistry at work in The Rental, and also some fairly standard pandering, which feels like a violation of the movie’s better instincts. That said, most of it is skillful and engrossing enough to establish Franco as a director to watch.

It’s a ham-handed, lurchingly obvious mess, without the glimmer of human interest that even a sensationalist horror film needs.

Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.

The Negotiator, once it gets going (there's a rather lengthy prosaic setup), is a satisfyingly tense and booby-trapped thriller about the meeting of two relentless minds.

The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.

A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. Eric LaRue is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.

It was an effective choice to shoot these majestic creatures vérité-style, with a jittery camera, but Trollhunter, unfortunately, is such an under-imagined knockoff of The Blair Witch Project that whenever the trolls aren't on screen, it verges on tedium.

It's not enough for the film to show us a child's corpse wrapped in cardboard; we've got to step back to see Kiarostami himself shooting the sad sight, so that it becomes a Godardian ironic statement.

Dunst, in her finest performance yet, has now transcended her fellow teen stars. She is arguably the first actress of her generation poised to take on Gwyneth and Julia.

The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.

Big Miracle is harmless enough, but what's annoying about it is its aura of fake activism. The movie doesn't seem to get that it's exactly when the news media began to devote more time to subjects like whales that it started to turn into news not for activists but for couch potatoes.

For a Good Time, Call... tells the tender tale of two roommates who team up to launch a phone-sex line. Whatever their virtues or flaws, each of these movies makes the dirtiest episode of "Sex and the City" look like Doris Day fluff.

Lonergan's dialogue can sweep you up in a whoosh of personality and ideas, but it's hard to see what, apart from ego, convinced him that this story was so epic.

Copshop is a processed slice of genre meatloaf with the gravy occasionally dribbled in ornate patterns. It’s junky and synthetic, but it fills you up.

The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.

Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.

Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of "Re-Animator," pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.

Warlock is an occult schlock-o-rama, with special effects so low-budget they might have come out of a joke shop.

It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.

The best thing about it is Peck, who shows you the sweet, virginal kid hiding inside the outlaw poseur.

It has its amusing (and enlightening) moments, but in many ways it’s just dancing around the meat of the matter.

For all its promising elements, Night and the City confronts us, yet again, with one of the most dismaying paradoxes in contemporary movies: that the actor who once seemed the heir to Brando, Clift, and, yes, Widmark — the actor who once got so far inside his roles that he just about detonated the screen — now plays characters who don’t seem to have any inner life at all.

Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.

One of those feminist cries in the dark in which the heroine, a saintly sufferer, is more admirable than interesting.

The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.

It took gifted hucksters to make this movie, a funny and spirited - what to call it?

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.

In a strange way the Williamson of "Dawson's Creek" is now at odds with the sophisticated joker who wrote "Scream."

The best thing in The Count of Monte Cristo is Guy Pearce's snot-nosed hauteur. He gives this scoundrel some wounded edges, and frills as well.

With its lightweight hero and its random spray of ''high-powered'' action, Broken Arrow is like an underpopulated version of The A-Team. It's not just John Woo who gets swallowed up by the impersonal mechanics of big-budget mayhem. It's the audience, which pays for a sleek, dark thriller and gets recycled pulp instead.

There’s a dullness at the core of Triple Frontier.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.

It’s got some talented actors and a certain jagged inner-city atmosphere, yet this first feature directed by Mario Van Peebles (son of the veteran black director Melvin Van Peebles) is little more than a sketchy exploitation melodrama.

El Bulli becomes a haunting celebration of the human desire to turn food into art - even if the results are consciously insane.

What’s ultimately moving about Along for the Ride is that it communicates how Dennis Hopper, by sticking true to his reckless muse, was an artist who changed things, and maybe changed everything.

The two characters barely even have a relationship; they're a union of demographics--the "urban" market meets the slapstick-action market.

As an expose of the new wave of racist youth-gang violence, Romper Stomper lacks depth, psychology, a sense of social background. Yet Wright’s flagrant attempt to humanize his skinheads-to turn them into bona fide movie characters-is, in its way, dramatic and vaguely honorable.

One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.

The herd’s endless quest to find water becomes a repetitive (and rather dry) theme. And to the extent that super-square anthropomorphic Disney filmmaking isn’t merely a form but a skill, I never felt overwhelmingly close to Gaia or Shanti or Jomo. The Disney nature films have always had a certain hermetic quality, but this one feels more sealed-off than usual.

A summer-adventure comedy, and its tone is fairly synthetic, yet it gets major props for giving us the first movie heroine who is clueless and easy in such a hardcore way.

It turns out that speeding along dirt roads isn't nearly as photogenic - or as varied - as surfing is.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

Stephens stages Another Gay Movie in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny.

Anastasia has the Disney house style down cold, yet the magic is missing. Perhaps that's because the story's somber emotional hook--Anastasia's thwarted desire for home--is asserted rather than dramatized.

It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy.

The movie, though it pretends to reveal how power works, is ultimately content to remain on the outside, sticking its finger in the eye of power.

The heist is fun and convincing without being dazzling, and some of the most amusing stuff in the film is just character comedy.

Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.

Hot Shots! offers a satisfying kick in the pants to a movie (and an era) that has more than earned it.

Wittier and more consistent than the first Addams Family movie. Paul Rudnick’s script offers sharp-edged variations on the topsy-turvy Addams worldview, and it’s much better at getting the Addamses out into the straight world, where they can really do some damage.

Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.

The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.

Rumble in the Bronx never quite achieves the smack-you-around zest of Chan's Hong Kong pictures. Still, it's hard to dislike a movie with such a friendly sense of the preposterous.

At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

This pleasantly rote movie will rouse you.

A stunt masquerading as a statement.

A notch more watchable than Volume I, if only because Joe, the self-destructive heroine, is now played front and center by the magnetically dyspeptic Charlotte Gainsbourg instead of the vacuous model Stacy Martin.

By the end of Onward, you’ll have chuckled and maybe choked up, and enjoyed a conventional ride.

Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.

French art thriller 13 Tzameti has a literal hair-trigger premise, yet it's so lacking in human dimensions that it creates virtually no suspense.

The Rehearsal is engrossing, but it’s not a major vision.

Couldn't Mike Judge, with his acid wit, have come up with a better title for a suburban-schlub comedy than ?Extract?

The fun of Role Models is that it's a high-concept movie executed with speed and finesse and the kind of brusquely tossed-off obscene banter that can get you laughing before you know what hit you.

The trouble with Giuliani Time is that Keating, as a filmmaker, wants to give power to the people but in his every perception he takes it away from them.

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

The portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.

If any character steals Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, it's the Grim Reaper, who, as played by William Sadler, keeps smirking with pleasure at the chance to loosen up.

The Incredible Hulk is just a luridly reductive and violent B movie -- one that clears a bar that hadn't been set very high.

The drama is so minimalist that it's hard to glimpse the man behind the woe.

The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today. But Nuremberg, competent and watchable as it is, isn’t big on psychological tension or insight.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

Maridueña, playing Hollywood’s first Latino superhero, proves an appealing star. And the novelty of casting a comic-book blockbuster with a mostly unknown crew of vibrant Latino actors finds its emotional grounding in Jaime’s family.

An efficient, intense formula thriller.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

Lust, Caution wants us to feel the erotic ping of buttoned-up people ripping open those buttons, but too often it's the film's drama that's under wraps.

Bay, at heart, isn't a fantasist; he's a literal-minded maestro of demolition.

It's like "Capturing the Friedmans" scrubbed to a happy ending.

Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.

The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.

The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.

Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.

The War Within plays effectively off our voyeurism, yet it has such a cloistered, American-eyed view of the nightmare of terrorism that I kept searching for the profound explanation beneath its piecemeal ones.

I wish that the film had more of the tasty futuristic detail promised by that dummy parole officer. I also wish that Blomkamp took us deeper into the world of Elysium.

Gracious, if meandering.

The emotions of the stories have been lost. We could be watching the standard ghoulish CGI effects that take place in any horror movie of the week.

Fun, and believable, on the most important level: It convinces us that Jaden Smith has what it takes to fight his way to the top.

This very Canadian thriller (i.e., no humor, lots of literal-minded future-shock portentousness) certainly does a number on you, though not necessarily a pleasurable one.

Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama.

The Pod Generation is very much about our flesh, and the forces that are only too happy to take it away from us.

Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments.

He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.

For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.

The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light.

Turns out to be a supple, intriguing, and beautifully staged movie. It features Dillon, in his most forceful performance since ''Drugstore Cowboy.''

The routinely scripted but kinetic Stone Cold is a throwback to Roger Corman’s Hell’s Angels flicks, in which beer-swilling denim-and-leather-clad freedom riders straddled their Harleys to terrorize the American heartland.

Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.

Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news.

Embarrassingly entertaining.

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

Its tone is stilted and mannered -- and most of it seems a bit loony.

A lot of good actors have gone to work for the Coens and ended up looking like puppets, but Hanks is too clever for that. He knows that he's playing a concoction rather than a human being.

A smashingly effective documentary -- I found it more resonant than ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' -- yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted.

The movie zips around without any true forward momentum. The stars carry you along, though.

Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.

You'd better deliver the goods. And Them, despite some moody imagery out of the "Blair Witch" school, never does.

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is a ride, a head trip, a CGI horror jam, a what-is-reality Marvel brainteaser and, at moments, a bit of an ordeal. It’s a somewhat engaging mess, but a mess all the same.

The bottom line is that none of these characters, after the swap, seem different enough from themselves to allow the comedy to detonate. That said, the double swap lends “Freakier Friday” a juggling-balls-in-the-air quality that gives off a pleasant hum. It’s fun to ride the film’s complications.

Night Falls on Manhattan makes you nostalgic for Lumet's truly first-rate corruption movies, like the great, underrated "Q&A" (1990).

The movie gets mired in these deceptive mechanics. It shows no curiosity about the hatred, so the characters seem less than whole.

The real crime is the way that the movie turns Gael García Bernal, the hot-tempered, Roman-lipped costar of ''Y Tu Mamá También, into a backwater Freddie Prinze Jr.

I do wish that Overnight caught in more precise detail what Duffy, who finally made his film on the cheap at an obscure studio, did to tick off the Miramax powers. Imagining it, though, is half the fun.

In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt revel in the crack timing, in the I-truly-do-not-like-you obscene banter, that makes even the most casual insult take wing.

Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.

The snappish domestic infighting is effectively staged, yet beneath its ''raw'' atmosphere Daybreak traffics in pop-sociological clichés.

The film is an inflammatory morality play shot through with rage and despair.

Features a supernatural twist that is merely okay, but the film's mood of fractured anxiety and longing made me eager to see what the director, Christoffer Boe, does next.

Jonathan Nossiter's second feature (after the intricate and haunting ''Sunday'') strikes unnerving chords of mystery and dismay as it fuses the sinister, jump cut dislocations of a metaphysical thriller like ''Don't Look Now'' with a pain soaked meditation on love, guilt, marriage, and adultery.

It’s a sharp, lively, and engrossing movie, one that provides a fascinating running commentary on how the world of “The Sopranos” came into being. Yet we can’t help but notice the difference in tone.

Allied is tense and absorbing, yet the film’s climactic act somehow falls short.

An enjoyable piece of hokum – your basic doom-laden parable of metaphysical sci-fi mind control, only with a surprise romantic sparkle.

The new Scream is about as good as “Scream 2” was — it keeps the thrill of the original “Scream” bouncing in the air like a blood-drenched balloon — but the film is basically a set of variations on a very old sleight-of-hand fear blueprint. Except that it’s now old enough to seem new again.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this oasis of romance amid the turmoil of Shanghai represents the way that Merchant and Ivory, for 40 years, saw themselves: as a sanctuary of calming, life-size taste in a movie culture grown coarse. It was often far from perfect, but I'll miss that sanctuary.

Given that it’s a spinoff of the “Toy Story” series, which is the greatest and most sustained achievement in contemporary animation, it should be noted that this is one of those Pixar movies that feels like it has 50 percent Disney DNA.

In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.

Since Foster plays warming-up-for-a-straitjacket panic with a clenched intensity rare to behold in a Hollywood actress, I, for one, was rooting for the radical -- that is, nuthouse -- option.

Notorious makes the death of Biggie Smalls look like a tragic mistake, instead of the outgrowth of a culture devoted to selling the fantasy of who's the biggest man.

Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.

A tawdry excuse for a movie, but it has a handful of shameless giggles.

Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.

Sober and honorable, yet it's far from searching.

Searchingly directed by John Scheinfeld (“The U.S. vs. John Lennon”), What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? is a tasty and urgent piece of rock history, but in a strange way the film never comes close to answering its own question.

As a romantic comedy, the picture is pleasant, predictable, and utterly weightless.

All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.

The movie has been shot with a pleasingly overripe visual flair, and on its own terms it’s fairly entertaining. Yet it isn’t about anything so much as its own explosiveness.

Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.

The American Meme is a film I very much recommend, since it’s both highly entertaining and an essential snapshot of the voyeuristic parasitic American fishbowl.

With Bullock doing a variation on her Miss Congeniality geek-tomboy-who-has-to-bloom character, and McCarthy letting her acidly oddball observations rip, the two actresses make their interplay bubble.

If there’s any shock value left to seeing a couple of matinee idols dressed up in women’s clothing, the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar gets it out of the way fast.

A gory, pulpy wink of an action thriller, was spun out of a parody trailer Rodriguez directed for the '70s-trash homage "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was sublime. As a feature, Machete is more fun than it isn't, but its deadpan mockery of exploitation clichés often slips a bit too close to being the real, schlocky thing.

Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''

Director Kathryn Bigelow is one of the new-style action wizards who’ve never quite mastered the nuts and bolts of telling a story.

The film, though sleek and easy to sit through, replaces genuine dramatic involvement with a superficial, rock & roll empathy-it's as though we were watching Cruise's character and playing air guitar to his emotions. There are plenty of soulless movies around. What's special about Days of Thunder is that it works overtime trying to convince you it's not one of them.

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.

An Officer and a Spy has a this-happened-and-then-this-happened quality. And that’s why the movie, beneath the two-dimensional jauntiness of its acting and the period vividness of its sets and costumes, feels more dutiful than riveting.

Gudegast, for all his casualness toward plausibility, is an energizing filmmaker. He keeps the mano-a-mano standoffs humming, and he’s got a sixth sense for how to showcase Butler as a glamorously disheveled schlock version of Dirty Harry–meets–Popeye Doyle-meets– “Lethal Weapon”-gone-lone-wolf.

The film's best trick is the way that it treats conspiracy as a kind of political ''Blair Witch,'' a monstrous murk that haunts us precisely because it can never be seen.

Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns.

Just cryptic enough to keep you guessing, and for some viewers that may qualify as a night out. But Mamet's gamesmanship was more fun when it was less eager to look important.

A canny, derivative, wildly gruesome portrait of a London sociopath who's the scariest of sadists, in part because he's also a very courtly one.

Chris Evans is blithely likable despite a few faux-Cruise mannerisms, Basinger makes a vividly frightened yet resourceful woman in peril, and William H. Macy scores as a mild L.A. cop who lets out his inner macho.

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant.

All Day and a Night is made with empathy and skill, but it’s as clear-eyed and remorseless as a news report.

In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.

Under the Silver Lake gets its hooks in you, but it’s a good-bad movie: an academic stab at making the darkness visible.

What About Bob? is just funny enough to make you wish it had been wilder and less predictable.

The story in Madagascar 3 is functional, but the antically civilized spirit is infectious.

Soul Surfer, while formulaic in design, is an authentic and heartfelt movie.

Chong does his time (nine months) and has the last laugh, emerging as a born-again activist-survivor of the culture wars.

Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.

Quite honestly, you could nap for an hour and not miss a thing, but when the crew finally makes it to the glowing piles of booty at Treasure Planet's core, the film unleashes some pleasing visual fireworks. That's where it should have started, not ended.

House of Gucci is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.

The dialogue in Being the Ricardos has the blunt directness, dagger wit, and perfectly cut corners of Sorkinese ­­— a sound that might be described as hardass Talmudic screwball. Beyond that, though, the entire movie is a piece of thrillingly stylized compression. It gets a real head of steam going, a hurtling energy and anxiety that rides on everything Lucy is feeling.

Where Bad Moms plunges into zesty new satirical terrain is in capturing the ruthless one-upmanship of the mommy-wars era, when all the progressive thinking of the last 40 years has only ratcheted up the perfectionistic demands on children and parents alike.

“Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.

Throw in a nagging divorce settlement, an unplanned murder, and Billy Crudup - hilarious! - as a raging security man, and Jill Sprecher's film enjoyably fuses cleverness and sheer desperation.

Lonely Hearts never locates the key to the killers' bloody bond.

By the end, the pieties of Nell fall into place all too neatly.

Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's "Hero."

You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.

I will say that it's been a while since a romantic comedy mustered this much charm by looking this much like life.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

Rails & Ties is like one bad TV movie that slammed into another.

It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.

One of the happiest movies around.

Petersen gives us monumental images of waves and rain and wind, but the editing is so choppy that the images don't build and crest.

Beowulf is a solemnly gorgeous, at times borderline stolid piece of Tolkien-with-a-joystick mythology.

In its top-heavy image-driven way, The Secret Garden is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel’s essence. The garden isn’t a supernatural place, but it’s supposed to be a mystical place. In this movie, it comes closer to being a special effect.

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."

Spider-Man 3 has terrific moments, but after the danger and majesty and romantic brio of "Spider-Man 2," those adrenalized rooftop ballets feel, more than ever, like sequences.

It's eye candy that detonates.

A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.

Rigid, airless, and browbeatingly repetitive, Das Experiment is an overly didactic piece of thesis hectoring; it's like ''Lord of the Flies'' set in a Skinner box.

Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.

The Best Man Holiday is an eggnog that's sticky-sweet and heavy at the same time.

Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.

The Holocaust scenes are wrenching, the past-meets-present dialectics less so.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie has some laughs, but it’s essentially the tossed-together version of a hangout movie. It’s a roast served at room temperature.

Told in a tricky flashback mode that's vivid even with a few too many temporal kinks, Don't Move is the sort of thing that Claude Chabrol was once praised for making with more pretension and a lot less less juice.

By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts," featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle.

In Happenstance, fortune doesn't just smile -- it schemes and tricks and zigzags, forming an urban road map of fate's detours.

The First Wives Club has all the conviction a comedy of female vengeance needs. But as soon as the dumb plot takes over, the wit leaks out of the movie like helium from a balloon.

The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.

Rory O'Shea Was Here gazes at the physically afflicted and just about begs for our sympathy long after we've grown restless and eager to feel something else.

Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.

When you see No Hard Feelings, you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

This sequel to “The Shining” may register, in the end, as a long footnote, but it makes you glad that you got to play in that sinister funhouse again.

The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head?

At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.

Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.

DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

Back in his day, Mr. Peabody was a dog whose over-civility had bite. Now he's a genius you want to cuddle with.

Alien3 is a grimly seductive end-of-the-world thriller, with pop-tragic overtones that build in resonance as the movie goes on.

As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated.

He rarely allowed himself to be interviewed, but Henri Cartier-Bresson, here nearing 100, comes off as a marvelous, spritely, and companionable figure.

Déjà Vu is watchable trash, meticulously edited in Scott's skip-stutter style, but there's something ultimately unsatisfying about a thriller that more or less makes up its rules as it goes along.

The film, at two hours, still feels padded out with recent history. I would have liked, instead, to see some other dimension of Sharpton — who he is away from the protest marches. “Loudmouth” feels highly controlled, almost overly focused on Sharpton’s political identity at the expense of everything else.

Cocaine Cowboys, which at times seems like it could have been edited by someone on coke, comes at you as a vast bloody river of underworld information.

The Mask, a rattletrap Jekyll-and-Hyde farce, surrounds Carrey with a nothing plot and a cast of ciphers. Still, his scenes as the Mask are rowdy and enjoyable.

Heartbreaker is like a caper comedy meets "The Bodyguard" - it's winsome and accomplished fluff.

Bits and pieces of the movie are funny.

The story is too patterned and too contrived.

As a character, Austin Powers hasn't worn out his welcome, exactly, but he has outlived his novelty.

It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

I've seen far worse thrillers than A Perfect Murder, but the movie is ultimately more competent than pleasurable.

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

Cars 3 is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done.

In ''Ordinary People,'' at least one character -- Mary Tyler Moore's -- had to fall so that the others could survive. In Moonlight Mile, no one gets shut out of the hug cycle.

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance.

Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps Roll Bounce jumping.

It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.

Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.

Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.

You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In The Drama he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”

So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.

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.

For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” like “Nobody” before it, unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience.

Schwarzenegger’s willingness to flirt with femininity, to become truly radiant, is the most engaging aspect of Junior. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t portray his transformation to starry-eyed pregnant bliss with much comic ingenuity.

If Microsoft and Nike ever merged into one corporate megalith (MicroNike?) and commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to direct its visionary new Super Bowl commercial, the result might look something like Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi.

Smart enough to hook us with the best thing it has going: Cedric the Entertainer's gruffly uproarious and lived-in performance as Eddie.

What it isn't is a believable relationship. Yet that may scarcely matter to LaBute, a gifted and corrosive wordsmith who appears intent, by now, on shoving all romantic couplings into the meat grinder of his misanthropic design.

A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.

It’s both a highly entertaining movie and, by the end, a haunting one. It revels in Dalí’s artifice even as it mercilessly peels away his layers.

Cyrus, an apple-cheeked dumpling, resembles Pia Zadora, but when she exhorts the crowd, it's with the martial efficiency of Hillary Clinton.

Rarely has a movie captured the obscene violence of sex trafficking with such unvarnished grubbiness. In the end, though, The Whistleblower is a corporate thriller.

It's the die-hard camaraderie that undergirded this squad and lifted it to the top.

The characters in Memphis Belle may have ethnic names, but in spirit the actors are all playing WASPs — fresh-faced, pretty-boy WASPs, the kind that make the little girls swoon. It’s Dead Poets Society Goes to War.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bring their A game; they never let us feel as if they’re going through the motions. The marks may be standard issue, but they hit them with fury and flair.

Of course, the hollow drama of The Lover might not matter so much if these two actually did something interesting in bed. As it is, they barely get out of the missionary position. With far more explicit (and inventive) erotic films available at almost any video store, one has to wonder: How much point is there to portraying sexual passion as serious and ”adult” if you only end up taking all the fun out of it?

Ballerina is a worthy entry in the “John Wick” canon, though I say that as someone who doesn’t think the “John Wick” canon is all that. By the end, Ana de Armas has proved that fighting like a girl and fighting like a guy need not be appreciably different, especially if they’re all fighting like a video game.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films, but I watched Paranormal Activity 3 in a state of high anxiety.

Phoenix’s performance is astonishing.

This remains the one and only fusion of ''Deliverance'' and ''Hansel and Gretel'' that I ever hope to see.

It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.

It's like seeing the birth of the '60s, with great moments (including Neal Cassady doing speed-freak monologues).

While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.

You may wish that you were reading about these events in The New Yorker, because the movie is so choked with neutral detail that it’s a little bloodless. It lacks fire.

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

Plato's Retreat was a buffet of bodies, and the film catches the moment America could think that was tasty.

This Is 40 isn't always hilarious, but it's ticklishly honest and droll about all the things being a parent can do to a relationship. And why it's still worth it.

Despite the don't-look-down Olympian settings, Cliffhanger's spirit is brutal and earthbound.

One of those raucous, hyperactive kiddie flicks that knocks you upside the head from its opening frame.

Nothing more than amiable fluff, yet Bettany infuses it with a brazen dash of reality. You believe in him, even when you don't quite believe in the movie.

The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.

You can have a reasonably nice time at Salmon Fishing in the Yemen if you accept that it's the tidiest movie imaginable to ever say that falling in love is like swimming upstream.

It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art.

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

“Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.

On Stranger Tides isn't nearly strange enough. Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.

It's galvanizing to see it played out through the furious contradiction of Carter's personality. He is pious, stubborn, compassionate, testy, moral, unreasonable, and wise.

The film is acted with great flair and emotional precision, and it’s been staged by Taymor with vividly detailed historical flavor, yet it tells Steinem’s story in a way that’s more wide than deep.

The film satirizes, and celebrates, an idea pivotal to both Hollywood and love: that in a world of impostors, the pretender with the most conviction can become exactly what he pretends to be.

It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.

Works hard to be exciting, but the movie scarcely lives up to its title. It could have used a bit of a fuel injection itself.

Despite its logy, red-herring structure, the film has enough enigma and weirdness that it gradually stirs to life.

Through the character of a saddened priest, Malick seems to be saying that the reason for our breakups, for our fragmented lives and relationships, is that we can no longer see God. If we could, we would be whole again. That may be true, but in To the Wonder, it's Terrence Malick who isn't letting his characters be whole.

The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.

Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.

The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. Operation Finale doesn’t feel like that, yet taken on its own here’s how it really happened terms, the movie is at once plausible and sketchy, intriguing and not fully satisfying.

The movie is red meat for anyone who thrives on a certain brand of punchy, in-your-face emotional shock value. Yet the pull of what happens on screen came, for me, with a major qualification: I went with it, but I didn't totally buy it. The film is a contraption that spreads its darkness like whipped butter on a roll.

Directed by the ingenious documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), A Brief History of Time held out the promise of being an audacious, brain-bending experience. Instead, it's plodding and disappointingly conventional.

Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.

The director, Paul Schrader, tries for cleansing audacity, but ends up too close to farce.