Owen Gleiberman

Bluntly put, Neil Young’s music now has too much integrity and not enough hooks, and so does Year of the Horse. The rough-grain Super-8 images, while a nifty visual correlative to the Crazy Horse sound, deny us the fundamental pleasure of a concert movie — a sense of intimacy with the band’s performance.

The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.

Stan Lee is a fan-service documentary released by Disney+ (it drops on June 16), yet it’s very well-made, and watching it you’re confronted with a revelation: that the comic books that Lee began to create in 1961 didn’t just mark a seismic break with the comic books of the past.

Victoria & Abdul is a pleasant enough entertainment, and it will bring the inevitable awards chatter Dench’s way (is her acting ever less than pinpoint? Never). But as prestige period pieces go, it’s far from top-drawer (more like second drawer, or even third), because its cozy lack of enlightenment is echoed in the standard but far from scintillating play of its drama.

In a strange way, the movie, as doggedly made as it is, remains stubbornly uncompelling. That, I think, is because Gibney’s own connection to the subject, while it charges him with righteous passion, has resulted in a rare loss of perspective.

Starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch.

This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way.

No one is going to confuse The Firm with art, but its high- cholesterol virtues-a story that keeps you guessing, a dozen meaty character turns-are enough to send you home sated.

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.

Just about the only way to make sense of the film is to view its Christian family the way that the director, James Marsh, does -- with a contempt masquerading as social criticism. William Hurt, for one, deserves better.

Hard Candy is extreme - a battle of the sexes that glides from tricky to angry to shockingly ugly.

A mild but charmingly off-kilter romantic comedy that gently satirizes love in an era of buy-now-pay-later brinkmanship.

Zwick offers excitingly staged moments, but once you get past the novelty of WWII Jews acting this heroically macho, Defiance bogs down in a not very well-developed script.

In the brutally efficient Under Siege, Seagal, with his soft-spoken nihilist charm, attempts to move beyond limb-snapping exploitation and into epically scaled mainstream thrillers. He succeeds — but only because this sort of slick action bash doesn’t require a star with much personality. At this point, personality might only get in the way.

Nerve is a comic-book vision of how the Internet has become a gladiatorial arena of voyeurism. But the movie, like the game it’s about, is hard to stop watching, even when you know it’s playing you.

Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has at nearly two hours. It’s a bauble that tries to stretch itself into a boutique dream.

Of course, the essence of the fish-out-of-water comedy is that it’s never been a realistic genre — it’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Yet An American Pickle, in its ethnically satirical and scattered way, lacks the integrity of its own ridiculousness. It’s pungent but flavorless: an unkosher dill.

The Bridge crosses a disquieting line.

As a love-jones soap opera, Brown Sugar feeds right into Dre's nostalgic crankiness.

The Rocketeer is mostly an example of pop moviemaking at its most derivative.

There’s dialogue, but very little interchange. The movie makes your average mumblecore mumblefest sound like Preston Sturges.

Winfrey's performance is full of stoic anger, and individual moments have ferocity and pull, yet you're always aware of them as moments.

It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.

At once overly episodic and playfully arty, like a TV movie made by Fellini.

It's all more lightweight-likable than exciting.

Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, The Midnight Sky just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.

More potent than anything in Snakes on a Plane is the fantasy offscreen: that if enough people talk up their desire to see this film and, at the same time, take an overt delight in what an unabashed piece of junk it is, they will fuse with the hype, with the movie's mystique. They will not just watch Snakes on a Plane; they will own it.

The picture itself is only mechanically breezy.

What's really needed is a story with some sizzle, but Bigelow, in K-19, can't seem to decide whether she's making a shoot-the-works underwater rouser, like ''U-571'' or ''Crimson Tide,'' or a lofty historical message movie that hits us with the breaking news that the arms race was, in every sense, a poisonous game.

Colorful and exciting, yet unless you're a young moviegoer, nothing in it takes you by complete surprise. (It's less a nail-biter than a chin-stroker.)

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

It’s like a Wes Anderson movie set during the Third Reich. ... And yet it’s not as if it’s a terrible movie; it’s actually a studiously conventional movie dressed up in the self-congratulatory “daring” of its look!-let’s-prank-the-Nazis cachet.

“Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.

The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.

In Die Hard With a Vengeance, McTiernan stages individual sequences with great finesse (there's a terrific bit with Willis and five thugs in an elevator), yet they don't add up to a taut, dread-ridden whole.

It’s friendly and diverting and formulaic, in an inoffensive and good-natured way, and it’s a totally minor affair.

It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.

A marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere.

Not until the last 20 minutes does Gozu come fully alive. A man has sex with a seductive beauty, who then gives birth to...well, let's just say it's a sight that may take time to fight its way out of your head.

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

The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.

It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.

Hardy, speaking in low, flat, almost musically macho tones, has the bruiser charisma of a caveman Kevin Costner. It's not the money he's clinging to - it's the freedom.

Brothers isn't badly acted, but as directed by the increasingly impersonal Jim Sheridan, it's lumbering and heavy-handed, a film that piles on overwrought dramatic twists until it begins to creak under the weight of its presumed significance.

Happy Death Day is “Groundhog Day” dipped in blood, and if the movie isn’t all that clever, it’s just clever enough to get by.

The script of The High Note, by Flora Greeson, is long on wish-fulfillment and short on inside authority, and the director, Nisha Ganatra (“Late Night”), stages it with a hit-or-miss geniality that keeps cutting corners on the story’s emotional honesty. The feel-good factor hovers over this movie like a fuzzy bland cloud.

The hokey, laborious Thunderheart would be little more than a leftover 1970s conspiracy thriller were it not for the novelty of its setting: a modern Indian reservation — which, as the movie reveals, is by now a fancy word for slum.

Watching it, you feel the depth of Mamet’s talent. It’s never left him. But you also feel the contempt he now has for the verities of entertainment. He wants to take us out of our comfort zone. The trouble is that he’s created his own rarefied discomfort zone of self-indulgence posing as importance.

While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.

Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage inject tasty bits of personality into their roles.

Moana 2 is an okay movie, an above-average kiddie roller-coaster, and a piece of pure product in a way that the first “Moana,” at its best, transcended.

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.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

First Snow is essentially a short story with a metaphysical twist, but Pearce puts his fears more up front than any actor I can think of.

A symbol of the lost father, it looms, protects, and also wreaks havoc when a big branch collapses onto the house. Mostly, it's the expression of a movie that's content to stand still.

Undisputed is a shrewd and splendidly volatile B movie structured around a highly original gambit of suspense.

A lively, disposable hybrid of the sincere and the synthetic.

As a movie, Freakonomics is like Jujubes for the brain - it starts to get cloying halfway through the box.

A gilded entry in the cinema du quirk. It's a movie that invites you, all too often, to feel superior to the people on screen.

The story takes no outsize turns, no big surprise twists. Perhaps the only surprise is how touching it is: a tale that will caress you, and your children, in a way that speaks to something true. It reminds you of what it’s like to be moved by a kids’ film that’s driven by more than nonstop movement.

The movie is like Doctor Dolittle remade as a therapeutic sudser. By the end, it got to me.

Monday, shot with a mostly Greek crew, has been made with some liveliness and skill, and the two actors really fuse. . . . But Papadimitropoulos treats most of the film as if he were making “Blue Valentine” or “Head-On”: a study in masculine narcissism.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.

Val Kilmer, as a polite horn-rimmed sociopath with a heart of gold, keeps showing up to drop Nietzschean pensées.

Benny & Joon turns out to be a whimsical (and not very well paced) heart tugger in which two nice couples spend 98 ever-so-slightly flaky minutes figuring out that they’re perfect for each other.

As a movie, Wayne's World isn't much more than an amiable goof, yet it's carried along by the flaked-out exuberance of its two stars.

The movie is cranked up somewhere between stylish and proudly stupid, dusted with sunniness from Amy Smart (as Chev's sleepy girlfriend) -- and guaranteed to be out of your system by the time the lights come up.

Garry Marshall takes over the movie (no mystery: his son, Scott, directed it), and Keeping Up With the Steins turns into a recipe to forget: chopped liver with ''heart.''

Daybreakers turns?into a ponderous apocalyptic chase film -- it's like "Children of Men" with exploding-plasma shock effects.

The shots of urban traffic jams have more spark than the story, which skips from a pregnancy to the filming of a musical to murder - without convincing us of any of it.

Lila, played by Vahina Giocante, who resembles a sexed-up young Emma Thompson, is a teasing, 16-year-old blond baby doll with a gleam of perception beyond her years.

The film reveals, rather delectably, how potent the power of suggestion can be in a world gone madly groupie.

Too tightly made not to keep you watching, Holy Smoke is also too hokey and didactic to take seriously.

The best thing about the movie, which is a very elegantly crafted piece of gothic snuff hokum, is the way it teases and intrigues us with the revelation of what's on that tape.

Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives...is an example of how a movie can be flagrantly hagiographic, sentimental, and hypnotized by its own subject — and still make you want to keep watching it.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.

The Laundromat is Soderbergh at his most playful, and also Soderbergh at his most wonkish, and damned, in this case, if the two don’t chime together.

Even those of us who find anti-homosexual ''deprogramming'' to be hideously intolerant and naive may find ourselves oddly relieved that Mark is there (in a Christian rehab center).

The underlying integrity of “Ezra,” what makes it an honest film despite some formula devices, is that its message about how to help children with special needs is that there’s no magic way. Beyond celebrating them for who they are and showing them who you are.

To the extent that Born in China is, by its very existence, a minor act of cross-cultural diplomacy, its most progressive effect is to unveil the majestic diversity of Chinese landscapes.

I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.

The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]

It's not every comedy that can make you laugh with ridicule and cringe in empathetic horror at the same time.

It's ''The Matrix'' meets ''TRON'' meets ''Jimmy Neutron,'' with all the cheery (if not cheesy) evanescence of a Jolly Rancher commercial. I mean that as a compliment.

It's not art, but it's mighty fun.

Permanent Midnight never shows us who Jerry Stahl was before he began shooting junk, and so we have no real stake in what the drugs did to him. He’s a case study in search of a movie.

Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.

As it becomes clear that Ball, in essence, has just restaged American Beauty with a socially conscious paint job, the sensationalism of Towelhead looks more and more like a dramatic tic.

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.

Every actor registers...In a film of minor ambition, they're all worthy company.

In the end, Scent of a Woman offers little more than lumbering simulation of Rain Man's nimble magic. But Pacino's performance-scabrous, tender, ripely theatrical-is a master showman's trick.

You hardly need to be devoted to the ways of Buddhism to see when a gifted filmmaker, for the sake of multicultural niceness, has enthusiastically abandoned his mind.

The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.

The Broken Hearts Gallery pushes all the rom-com buttons but does it knowingly, with a spirit that embraces killer cynicism and then comes out the other side.

It has a pleasing brawn and sweep, and you get caught up in it. As meat-and-potatoes escapism, it’s good diner food served with extra ketchup.

Smart People, unlike "Sideways" or "The Savages," has a plot that's a little too rote.

Bateman deserves props for sustaining Bad Words as a little balancing act between sulfurously funny hatred and humanity.

The Fourth War is an old-soldiers-never-die movie — an ironic elegy — and though much of the story is contrived and second-rate, Scheider gives a richly felt performance.

Part of Me works hard to prove it's more than a glorified infomercial, and one reason it is more is that Perry has a startling story to tell.

In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.

Scored to a disarmingly quaint array of fiddle-and-banjo tunes, The Newton Boys has so little in the way of blood or rancor that before long, you begin to notice that there's no real drama in it, either.

Each of these improv farceurs wins a few laughs. But not enough.

Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.

It redefines family craziness as normal in a way that those who seek it out will gratefully relate to.

Happy Death Day 2U is more complicated than the first “Happy Death Day,” but in this case more complicated means less fun.

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 Secret Life of Bees is a lesson -- or, rather, a whole series of them -- we no longer need to learn. Of course, it's also a divine-sisterhood-defeats-all chick flick, and on that score there's no denying that its clichés are rousingly up to date.

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.

A limp and sodden downer.

It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.

Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity.

Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.

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

Hannibal lacks the rounded emotional elegance of ''The Silence of the Lambs'' (that was a great film; this one is merely good).

Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.

There's an unconvincing last-act twist, but this is the movie "Little Children" wanted to be.

The Help has a saucy, humorous side.

A tangy raw stew of history, even if it never begins to confront the contradictions that bedeviled black militancy.

The trouble isn’t that Greenwald is preaching to the choir; a good documentary can increase the passion of the choir. It’s that he isn’t adding in any meaningful way to the choir’s knowledge.

For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.

An embarrassment--a fairy-tale showbiz satire that seems to defang itself, scene by scene.

Journey is just the new version of a 1950s comin'-at-ya roller coaster, with a tape measure, trilobite antennae, and giant snapping piranha thrust at the audience.

It might have helped had the film included a few more representatives of the straight world. As it is, there’s almost nothing for the family to play off. We’re shut up in that mansion right along with them, and the kookiness grows fatally quaint.

Zucker gives the Camelot legend a makeover and rediscovers its humanizing fire. He has made a true adult fairy tale, only with a heart of glass.

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

Don Coscarelli, writer-director of the logy, fatuous Bubba Ho-Tep, is trying to will a cult movie into existence -- which, of course, never works.

Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.

A tastefully overbearing franchise fairy tale with a handful of ravishing touches.

Penn Badgley saunters around with an air of spooky self-possession, and he does a dead-on impersonation of Buckley's high-vibrato wail.

Jackson, though, does lend this earnest formula flick a core of conviction.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

These are standard youth-movie dilemmas, but they're brought to life by the high-energy cast and the musical numbers, which Ortega shoots with electrifying pizzazz.

If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.

The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.

Moverman balances the potential for staginess with his flowing cinematic bravura; he keeps surprising you, and he gives the drama a dash of poison elegance.

Foster, working from a patchy, meandering script by W.D. Richter, produces scene after scene of rudderless banter. The movie is all asides, all nattering; the actors seem lost in their busy, fractious shticks.

Where Broadcast News mourned the trivialization of the nightly news, Morning Glory asks you to learn to stop worrying and love the trivia.

Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.

Wind sometimes dawdles, but it’s a sports movie with soul.

It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.

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

Shia LaBeouf, who appears to be on hand to prove that a movie with a crusading newspaper reporter can still exist, perks up his scenes, and Redford acts with his usual hyperalert, placid control.

13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.

It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.

So scrupulously researched and argued that only a fool would ignore its findings.

What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.

A highly conventional 2-D infomercial.

I didn't mind The Terminal, but I didn't really buy it, either. Spielberg has crafted the film with a proficiency as seamless, and impersonal, as the setting, and you may feel, after a while, that you're longing for your departure time.

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.

War Dogs marks a key turning point for Phillips. After all these years of yocks, it’s his first true grown-up movie, and it’s a nimble, gripping, and terrific one, with plenty of laughs, only now they’re rooted in the reality of fear, and in behavior that’s authentically scurrilous.

The movie is scattershot (intense at some moments, slack at others), but it earns its docu-style creepiness, and Karpovsky's stretch as an actor is daring and authentic.

Branagh did a nice job of directing "Thor," but all he can do here is try to energize the recycled pulp of the script.

Sherlock Holmes is an odd amalgam, a top-heavy light entertainment that keeps throwing things at you and doesn't seem too concerned with whether they stick.

It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.

It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.

Has a few viciously funny moments.

For all the pitfalls it scrupulously avoids, Dogfight isn’t finally very interesting. It’s not just the movie’s plot that’s diminutive. The emotions seem small too.

The film is so committed to its view of Ezra as a pawn in the psychotic game of postcolonial Africa that he is never allowed, as a character, to become more than a pawn.

Donovan, acting with ironic reserve, hands the movie to Morse, who makes his character the kind of crank you can care about just because he's so abysmally lost.

A good satire that had the untimely bad luck to be about a U.S. soldier who will do anything it takes to party, except fight for the right.

There’s a real spark to Connery’s performance, but except for that Kaufman has produced a middling contradiction, a thriller too polite to hit its target.

Beneath The Corruptor's explosive body count is a rock-solid, visually slick crime thriller set in the squalid netherworld of Manhattan's Chinatown.

The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it.

The aerial-dogfight scenes, which are beautiful and shot through with jittery panic, are notable for not being staged for videogame kicks.

Fitfully amusing, mostly annoying rom-com.

In every way dreadful.

About the only thing the movie kills with any decisiveness is your time.

Woodley gives herself over to the physical and spiritual reality of each scene. She knows how to play an ordinary woman who’s wild at heart, and she keeps you captivated, even when the film itself is watchable in a perfectly competent, touching, and standard way.

It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

In the Land of Blood and Honey captures the sickening way the war in Bosnia became a gray zone of genocide. Yet that, unfortunately, is not enough to make it a good movie.

Goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical.

More than ever, Johnny Knoxville and his boys belong to a very elite club of idiocy. They martyr themselves for our diversion, driven at every moment to ask: Are you not entertained?

The movie is too cute to take itself too seriously, but it still feels like it was made by some very stoned college students.

A Dirty Shame isn't dirty fun. It's the perv "Footloose."

The Two Jakes is competent and watchable.

Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.

Costner's surfer-bum affectlessness works here; he turns the Mariner into the world's most jaded lifeguard.

Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.

Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish.

As a movie with the title A-ha: The Movie should do, this one, directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Thomas Robsahm (with Aslaug Holm as co-director), tells you everything you need to know about the career of A-ha, even as it leaves out most of their personal lives.

A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.

Bobcat Goldthwait's new movie is a burlesque that turns into a harangue that turns into a rampage.

Chastain and Garfield give performances that are brashly entertaining but also canny and layered, as the characters get caught up in something far bigger than themselves. The Bakkers were hucksters of a grand order, and the film uses their spectacular greedhead soap opera to tell the larger American story of how Christianity got turned into showbiz.

He's a bombs-away provocateur, and in Religulous, Maher's blasphemous detonation of all things holy and scriptural, he doesn't really pretend to play fair. He's like Lenny Bruce with an inquiring mind and a video camera.

You'll laugh - a lot - but you'll also shed tears of recognition at this funny, salty, strife-torn look at the agony and ecstasy of family.

The movie is “Fatal Attraction” for the age of the revolving-door hook-up, and in its fevered low-budget way it’s just clever enough to do what it sets out to do. It gives toxic masculinity its just desserts.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is wired-up synthetic fun. It’s a trivial kiddie flick that moves at the speed of your mind playing video games.

Here's what I can say for sure about the humanoid attackers in the new version of The Crazies: They're not very interesting.

It's hard to buy this relationship even for a moment. Adam is sweet, meticulous, and, at times, sort of clever, but it's also a not-quite-surprising-enough heartwarming trifle.

A big, dumb, crude, noisy, goose-the-audience bash and proud of it. It's not nearly as unsettling as ''28 Days Later.''

The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around.

What Salles doesn't conjure is the rapture of Kerouac's bohemian romanticism. Without it, On the Road is a remote experience, all reason and no rhyme.

Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step.

Even Watchmen fanatics may be doomed to a disappointment that results from trying to stay THIS faithful to a comic book.

In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.

Lords of Dogtown is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile."

Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.

Our senses may be the stuff of drama, but not when they're treated as nice and neat as this.

In its wildly overwrought, burrito-Western way, is about as close to a home movie as you're likely to see in a megaplex.

The Fate of the Furious is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop.

Quick Change starts out fast and loose — it gets the audience primed for a ripsnorting caper comedy. Yet almost nothing that follows is as clever, as surprising, or as casually anarchic as that nifty opening sequence. Murray himself served as codirector, and though he doesn't do anything terribly wrong, the movie lacks comic zest.

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.

By the time Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is over, it may send more than a few viewers scurrying off to the bookstore. They'll surely want to see what all the fuss was about.

The movie, in its conventional and likable way, knocks the stuffing out of superhero fantasy. Its joke is that a mangy crew of animals doing outlandish CGI magic tricks is essentially what a comic-book movie is.

In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.

It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.

Neither colorfully brutal nor especially fun. It's a plodding, derivative gothic potboiler: "The Shining" meets "Coraline," with a touch of "Gremlins" played (boringly) straight.

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.

This is the richest role Paltrow has had since ''Shakespeare in Love,'' and she rises to the challenge. She digs deep into Plath's mercurial nature, giving us a Sylvia who's fiercely independent and alive yet burdened with demons of insecurity that bubble up in a rage.

It's a painstakingly correct update of what is, let's face it, one of the least culturally correct love stories ever to be mythologized by Hollywood.

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.

Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.

Wolf Creek, an unusually crisp and boldly shot "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" knockoff, looks as ancient and patterned as a druidic ritual.

To the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We're supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.

It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.

The trouble with Death Becomes Her isn’t that its comic vision is too dark but that it has no shadings, no acerbic glee. Zemeckis gives nastiness such a hard sell he forgets to take any delight in it.

Coppola, who has made clever music videos, including the one for Moby's ''Honey,'' clearly had a lot of fun detailing the mod cheesiness of this intergalactic period piece, though the satire would have been more ticklish if ''Austin Powers'' hadn't gotten there first.

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

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.

As the school drama teacher who tries to unlock ''the real,'' Patricia Clarkson makes high theatrical solemnity funny.

By the end of Boss Level, you may feel a lot like Pulver. Putting “Groundhog Day” on action steroids, the film has a patina of cleverness that’s pleasing enough, but you’ve seen it before. And you’ll see it again.

The Pale Blue Eye wants to get into the 19th-century darkness, but it’s suffocatingly somber and static. The film showcases its two investigators in an ostensibly enigmatic dance-of-the-seven-frontier-high-collars way, but for much of the movie we’re a step ahead of them.

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.

My Girl has some sweet, funny moments (the cast is uniformly appealing), yet it unfolds in a landscape of paralyzing, pop-psych banality.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.

From the get-go, The Recruit is one of those thrillers that delights in pulling the rug out from under you, only to find another rug below that.

Doesn't offer anything to adult viewers as thrilling, as shivery, as satisfyingly primal as Steven Spielberg's intricate predator choreography in the original ''Jurassic Park.''

On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.

The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose.

Alive is an unsettling contradiction: a well-intentioned gross-out movie. It may be the first film in history to say that cannibalism is good for you.

Writer-director John Herzfeld blends violence and top-heavy absurdism, creating a self-conscious muddle of indie-style hackery. Strip away the goofball nihilism, though, and what’s left is as formulaic as any straight-to-tape opus with a title like "Dangerous Instinct."

The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.

All three of the leads get very close to the Stooges' old looks and personalities, but they do more than impersonate; they inhabit.

The sexy, scruffy, neo-Warriors pageantry of ghetto teen hunger would have been a lot more vital if Clark didn't have such a class-war chip on his shoulder.

Atkinson's goofball grotesquerie never lets up -- right through to the inspired finale.

Going Shopping is sharp and funny about all the things that shopping can mean to the women who live to do it, and even to those who don't.

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

The film evokes how homicide became the ultimate orgasm for kids who had turned themselves into zombies of flesh.

His (Gibson) slow-burn fury keeps the movie going, but not enough to invest us in any justice beyond payback.

Touchy Feely is minor, but these people are good company.

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.

If An Affair to Remember worked for you, Love Affair may do the same. It resurrects the earlier film’s sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity, right down to the awful final scene, which always felt — and still feels — as if another 20 minutes of movie were yet to come. Then again, what moved viewers in the ’50s seems almost luridly manipulative and unconvincing now.

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

You can’t make a good thriller when the most pressing issue is whether the protagonists will have to default on their mortgage payments.

Whenever Sin Nombre turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill, but the film's images vastly outstrip its imagination.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.

The actors are charming, but the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it.

Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.

The movie also captures Thompson's tragedy: the haze of drugs and bad writing that consumed him for no less than his last 30 years.

The murder as entertainment premise of Series 7 is proof that even the blackest of humor is no longer particularly outrageous.

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.

A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.

The camera loves Banderas -- a velvet stud -- as much as it did the young Clint Eastwood.

A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.

David E. Talbert, the writer-director of Almost Christmas, has assembled a gifted cast and given them a chance to stretch out and play with their roles. He has made a heartwarming gripe-and-grouchfest that pushes a lot of buttons, though with a vivacity that’s exuberantly funny and sincere.

Becoming Jane has a burnished feminine sadness, and the director, Julian Jarrold, gives it a creamy-dark visual flow.

Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

The Devil All the Time shows us a lot of bad behavior, but the movie isn’t really interested in what makes the sinners tick. And without that lurid curiosity, it’s just a series of Sunday School lessons: a noir that wants to scrub away the darkness.

This time we expect to be played, but the twist is that we're also touched -- which, the film implies, is the cinema's own form of deception.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

Clifford the Big Red Dog becomes a rowdy chase film — as agreeable as Clifford himself, as simultaneously cute and in-your-face, and as genially random in its ability to create chaos.

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

There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.

Old, like most Shyamalan movies, has a catchy hook along with some elegant filmmaking gambits. But instead of developing his premise in an insidious and powerful way, the writer-director just keeps throwing a lot of things at you.

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.

We Summon the Darkness is a psycho thriller that pulls the bloody rug out from under you, and does it in a shivery sly way.

It's a tale that reduces angst, not to mention love, to a generational tic.

Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.

In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.

Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.

You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.

Schrader, in Auto Focus, displayed a devious sense of sin, but in Dominion the Calvinist schoolboy in him insists on trumping sin with guilt.

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 Craft should please teenage girls at malls everywhere. But the film ends up descending into moralizing blahness. Most of the special effects are routine (the girls levitate like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice), though there is one memorable bit: a nightmare featuring enough snakes, bugs, and slithery maggots to make Indiana Jones go gulp.

The trouble with The Truth About Charlie is that it really is after the truth about Charlie, a character we could hardly give a damn about. The only charade is the illusion that we might actually be entertained.

This shot-on-film-and-video trifle reveals a Bombay (that's what all the characters call it) that "Slumdog Millionaire" didn't: a delicate metropolis sunk in torpor.

Shepard's charisma has always reached back to an earlier time, so it's easy to accept him as a kind of pre-counterculture hero - Eastwood without the sneer - who aged into the era of tabloid scandal.

Gleeson and McAdams make a touching, lifelike couple, but by the time the movie starts telling us to live each day as if we were going back and doing it all over again, you may feel Curtis has mistaken hokum for wisdom.

For all the nimbleness of its first half and the chemical zing of Pitt and Jolie, the film devolves into a fractious and explosive mess, hitting the same note of ''ironic'' violence over and over.

Safe has more action than intrigue (or logic), and it's boilerplate vicious. It may satisfy Statham's fans, but they - like he - would do well to enlarge their expectations.

Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.

Works just like a Tenacious D song. The movie feels giddy and eruptive, dopily enthralled with itself, and more or less made up on the spot.

The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. But that’s the hook. Violent Night is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.

It's a toasty, star-packed ensemble comedy in which a handful of lonelyhearts attempt, with some success, to come out of their shells, and it's going to make a lot of holiday romantics feel very, very good; watching it, I felt cozy and charmed myself.

You might be wondering if “Clown in a Cornfield” is at least scary. No, it’s not, and it’s not trying too hard to be.

The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.

The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

Marcia Gay Harden is an angry vulgarian who steals shampoo off the maids' carts and bribes a lawyer to get her baby. Sayles may not have planned it this way, but Harden makes crassness as powerful as any maternal instinct.

To turn fondly remembered TV trash into a movie that knows it's cruddy -- and that isn't, therefore, quite as cruddy as it might have been -- takes a perverse pinch of talent, if not style.

Urgent, heartfelt, and not-quite-as-predictable-as-you-think environmental rabble-rouser.

What in the Buddha's name is going on in I Heart Huckabees? Russell has come up with a grab bag of ideas that don't stick with you because they don't stick together.

Rendition certainly makes the case that torture, whatever name it goes under, is indefensible, yet one can agree with that view entirely and still feel that the movie is just a borderline exploitation of what anyone who reads the papers already knows.

It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.