Owen Gleiberman

What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.

Emotionally mesmerizing.

They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."

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

Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?

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.

Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick

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.

If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.

Brashly engaging.

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

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August.

Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.

Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

Living in Oblivion celebrates the very act of filmmaking as grand folly, a triumph of absurdist heroism.

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

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.

An artful piece of exploitation vérité.

The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.

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

Enchantingly witty.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you angry, and also sad, to live in a country where innovation could be contrived into an enemy.

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

Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.

This lone, fallen Nazi's obsessive distance from his actions is enough to give The Specialist a lingering chill.

An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.

Light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are lickety-split mad fun.

In Shoot Me, she wears her spiked cynicism like a cutting form of grace, and everyone around her (including audiences) gets healed by it.

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.

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

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

The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.

It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."

As compelling as it is bizarre.

A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play.

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.

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

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since "Blair Witch" itself. It's also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.

Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

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

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why.

It's a crackerjack B movie worthy of comparison to such stylishly low-down, smart-meets-dumb, hyper-violent entertainments as the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown," Clint Eastwood's infamous police bloodbath "The Gauntlet," John Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13," and Arnold's own overlooked 1986 outing "Raw Deal."

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.

Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."

The Cockettes weren't talented, exactly, yet the bedazzled flakiness of their passion takes you closer than just about any movie has to what was once really meant by the term ''free-spirited.''

Clooney certainly brings out the best in his actors, but his driving trait as a filmmaker is that he knows what plays - he has an uncanny sense of how to uncork a scene and let it bubble and flow.

A richly intimate sports fable.

There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.

The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''

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

Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.

The film's darkly bedazzled view of the '70s is spurred by great dish from André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli, and Nile Rodgers, who set the stage for Halston's triumphs - and his jaw-dropping fall.

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

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.

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.

Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.

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

As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.

Bilbo, as played by Freeman, suggests a sly-dog Dana Carvey without irony, and he is certainly overmatched, but that doesn't mean he's outplayed. Desolation is now his business.

Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.

A nimble and supple and moving comedy.

The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday.

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

Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon.

The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.

Any doubts as to whether Sienna Miller is a gifted actress should be laid to rest by Interview.

After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.

The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.

Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''

With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.

The film doesn't turn its issues into a glorified essay, but it does use them to give the audience a vital emotional workout.

It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.

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

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.

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.

For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.

Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.

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

Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy.

The movie might almost be winking at the fact that any single one of these performers could easily be the featured star of his or her own upper-crust period piece.