Owen Gleiberman

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Entertainment Weekly, Variety
For 3,926 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 37% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Owen Gleiberman's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Invite
Lowest review score: 0 The Men Who Stare at Goats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,325 out of 3926
  2. Mixed: 1,190 out of 3926
  3. Negative: 411 out of 3926
3926 movie reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Training Day
    There's no denying that Washington can play a rococo villain with flip ebullience, but I fervently wish he were doing it in a movie that paid more than lip service to the real world.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    The movie is based on a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    A Room for Romeo Brass
    More and more independent filmmakers seem to be cobbling together characters and scenes that have surface hook and flash without organic emotional logic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    White Sands
    White Sands, on the other hand, is a dud, the sort of movie that swathes its emptiness in layers of chic, swirling ”visuals.”
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Malice
    The only thing that makes this ludicrous botch even borderline watchable is Alec Baldwin’s enjoyably supercilious performance as a leering stud surgeon who thinks nothing of belting back shots of bourbon before going in to perform an operation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    A Perfect World
    The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Gray Matters
    Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Only God Forgives
    It's a solemnly preposterous piece of designer revenge pulp, with actors who stand around bathed in red and blue light like David Lynch mannequins in between scenes of torture and murder.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Striptease
    Striptease lets down its own performers right along with the audience. It’s a Christmas tree someone forgot to string with ornaments.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Shrink
    It wants to be "Good Will Hunting" set in the land of "Entourage," but its bummed-out touchy-feeliness is every bit as concocted as its overly jaded showbiz corruption.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
    It’s disappointingly ho-hum, without the spectacular — and often very funny — special effects that have become the hallmark of this series.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Charlie St. Cloud
    The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Committed
    An inert screwball cartoon, a celebration of monogamy as fashion statement.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Village of the Damned
    When the children in Carpenter’s Village flash their glowing eyes, hypnotizing the hapless grown-ups into committing a series of increasingly lurid suicides, the kids don’t seem much more bizarre — or frightening — than your average 10-year-old Nintendo freak.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Limits of Control
    The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Passion Play
    This underworld fairy tale is so soggy and sentimental it's like a new genre: Hallmark noir.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Freejack
    The trouble with low-rent science-fiction movies is that beneath all the futuristic gimcrackery — the video phones and laser guns and hyperspace leaps, the obligatory time-travel setups — you realize, at some point, that you’re watching a routine urban chase thriller: Lethal Weapon 2000. For most of its running time, Freejack bounces and sputters along atop the usual action- movie chassis.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Downloading Nancy
    There are brutal scenes with razor blades and other impromptu devices of erotic torment, but what makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
    Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Dangerous Minds
    Yet despite its promising pedigree, Dangerous Minds has a slick, syrupy fraudulence -- it's like an Afterschool Special made for MTV.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Novocaine
    There are many things wrong with Novocaine, but the film's most gnawing pain is its clodhopper farfetchedness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    54
    There's a glimmer of what the film might have been, though, in the performance of Mike Myers, who plays Studio co-owner Steve Rubell, with his sweaty thinning hair and look-at-me-I-got-class Lacoste shirts, as a vengeful gargoyle presiding over a kingdom of beauty he can rule but never join.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Butterfly Effect
    Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    There's precious little in Luc Besson's solemnly inflated, battle-weary historical epic.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    White Fang
    Despite some splendid snowcapped vistas and one rather frightening grizzly-bear attack, White Fang, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel is dramatically inert. Nothing in the picture really takes hold — certainly not the relationship between young Jack (Ethan Hawke) and White Fang, who seem like near-strangers even at the final clinch.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Holly
    A dawdling, myopic drama.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Garfield
    Cloddish, unfunny dud.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Creation
    One of those tepid, genteel biopics that's far too busy ennobling its hero to bother giving him any recklessly interesting personality traits.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Shipping News
    A limp and sodden downer.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Hollywood Ending
    For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Deck the Halls
    In this year's lump of coal, Matthew Broderick is the control freak who lives for toasty yuletide cheer, and Danny DeVito is the vulgar pest who wants his holiday lights seen from space. The dueling-neighbor crankfest is blah.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Miss Conception
    Graham is charming, but Miss Conception is a cloddish biological-clock bedroom farce.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Malibu's Most Wanted
    A send-up of rap personality in which no one actually has a personality. The joke, alas, is on the movie.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Repo Men
    A grisly one-note chase thriller.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    My Super Ex-Girlfriend
    It's "Bewitched" meets "Fatal Attraction," with one funny bedroom scene, but it was a miscalculation to make Thurman the antagonist.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    College
    Friendly yet toothless, College musters little energy even as anarchic-party-movie nostalgia.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Daredevil
    Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    High Tension
    The latest reshuffling of "Chainsaw" tropes.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Jeepers Creepers
    Turns into a grab-bag freak show as desperate as it is arbitrary.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Turistas
    The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    If only for the sake of adults, couldn't the folks behind the Alvin films have had the good grace to turn Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel into a musical?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    The movie isn't racist; it's just lame. If Brooks truly cared about Muslims or how their funny bones worked, Looking for Comedy might have had some zing, but all his character is interested in is the 500-page report he has to deliver - a homework assignment from hell.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Captivity
    Roland Joffé brings an artful video-grunge look, and not much else, to this "Saw" clone.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Dead Man
    The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Evita
    Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Ghost Rider
    So much flatter than it was on the comic-book page.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Keeping Up with the Steins
    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.''
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    3 Days to Kill
    The movie never finds a way to blend the emotional and the rat-a-tat-tat into one seamless package the way that Besson did in his one and only good movie, The Professional (1994).
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Surviving the Game
    Essentially, the movie is Cliffhanger with one third the firepower. Ice-T, looking like a depressed lion in his thick Rasta braids, remains a charismatic camera subject, though he’s too much the snaggletoothed urban runt to make a convincing action dynamo.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
    Mostly about the prospect of getting your skin ripped by fishhooks.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Bubba Ho-tep
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Land of the Dead
    In Land of the Dead there are virtually no good parts. The movie is listless and uninspired.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Grind
    Supplies stretches of actual skating footage by pros doubling for the stars. It's in these moments, freed from the earthbound pull of its market-tested components, that the movie briefly relaxes into the sheer thrilling audacity of flying into the air propelled by a board on wheels.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Rush Hour
    The two characters barely even have a relationship; they're a union of demographics--the "urban" market meets the slapstick-action market.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Birth
    When Kidman slithers into a bathtub with her young ''husband,'' the scene, in its soft-pedaled way, is the definition of exploitation: It appears to have been cooked up for no other purpose than to conjure creepy child-porn overtones.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    A Scanner Darkly
    In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Ruins
    The Ruins is lumpish, static, and obvious. It's a gringos-go-home cautionary fright flick done in the spirit of a cheap '50s horror movie, except that it leaves you longing for the competence of grade-Z studio-system trash.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    My Mother
    Ma Mère, while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    La Ciénaga
    It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Dead Man on Campus
    As a satire of new-style collegiate types, this MTV production actually evinces a few germs of rancid wit.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Switch
    Switch leaves one feeling that Blake Edwards is more than a little confused.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The lesson is that fun can't be planned, but the film is so airless (think iCarly as a videogame) that there isn't a truly playful moment in it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Robin Hood
    The battles are grainy and ''existential,'' but what they aren't is thrilling. They're surging crowd scenes with streams of arrows and flecks of blood, and Crowe, slashing his way through them, is a glorified extra. He's so grimly possessed with purpose that he's a bore, and so is the movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Day Night Day Night
    A stunt masquerading as a statement.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Poetic Justice
    With Poetic Justice, John Singleton has (at least temporarily) lost his way, but he may have found an actor [Shakur] who can help lead him back.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Dracula 2000
    One of those desultory F/X and no script potboilers that seems to restart itself with every new scene.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Heaven
    Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Muriel's Wedding
    The trouble with the movie is that there's nothing to Muriel but her false dreams: We never quite glimpse the woman they're hiding.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    F/X2
    The movie itself is convoluted and almost unbelievably lackluster.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    HouseSitter
    Every time Housesitter seems about to turn wild, it gets waterlogged with heart.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    Altogether too faithful to its source. The makers of this ponderously middlebrow Canadian production have re-created the Gospel of John in its pristine entirety -- word for word, miracle for miracle.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Exorcist: The Beginning
    The new movie is a dusty piñata stuffed with omens and not much more.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Red Hook Summer
    Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Little Odessa
    Roth, a great actor, is reduced to a walking sneer, and the picture creeps along in a series of handsome but painfully languorous hazy-shade-of-winter tableaux.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    True Colors
    The film, which has an overly complicated script (by Kevin Wade), is like Wall Street minus Gordon Gekko. It takes the fun out of back-room political sleaziness — and out of political integrity, too.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    CB4
    CB4 would like to be a savage hip-hop lampoon, but, in fact, the film strikes a cautious balance between satire and homage. It can’t decide whether it wants to ridicule CB4 or hold the group up as role models. What we’re left with is a soggy catalog of rap cliches.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Raise Your Voice
    Hilary Duff makes me long for the comparatively Dostoyevskian depths of Sandra Dee.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Day the Earth Stood Still
    The original Day the Earth Stood Still had a paranoid poetry that lifted the audience up even as it warned the world to come together. This one is so dour it just comes off as a scolding.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Enigma
    A turgid muddle of romance, espionage, and geek valor, despite intimations that it might have turned into ''A Reasonably Dapper-Looking Mind.''
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    The Cook, The Thief is so full of loathing it just about gags on its own bile.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Career Opportunities
    In a sense, John Hughes doesn’t produce movies anymore. He produces entertainment machines, and Career Opportunities has been shamelessly patched together — like Frankenstein’s monster — from bits and pieces of Home Alone and The Breakfast Club.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Miracle at St. Anna
    Miracle isn't powerful, it's muddled and diffuse.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)
    Ready to Wear is messy and vaguely nasty -- a blur with attitude.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Muse
    An embarrassment--a fairy-tale showbiz satire that seems to defang itself, scene by scene.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    13 Tzameti
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Les amants criminels
    This remains the one and only fusion of ''Deliverance'' and ''Hansel and Gretel'' that I ever hope to see.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Thorn in the Heart
    But overall, this lazy, sweet trifle seems to express the banality of well-being.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Omen
    There's one moment that achieves the camp shiver of the original, when Damien's nanny hangs herself at his birthday party (''Damien, it's all for you!'').
    • 72 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Miami Blues
    What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Across the Universe
    Goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Breakfast on Pluto
    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."
    • 25 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The One
    It's hardly much of a thrill to see The One recycle, on a lower budget, the slo-mo bullet dodges from "The Matrix," along with unspectacular variations on several other of that film's time-bending demolition-ballet effects.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Alexander
    An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    20 Dates
    Raging ego aside, the penny-ante hucksterism of his I'm-going-on-dates-to-get-famous-making-a-movie-about-dates approach is too cloying and opportunistic to bear.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Tank Girl
    Petty, though, is the only reason to see this coy and scrappy comic-book adventure-a trash bin of sci-fi detritus.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Angela's Ashes
    Seems populated yet uninhabited; the only real star is the gloom.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Color of Night
    A deliriously brain-dead erotic thriller...The patients (played by, among others, Lesley Ann Warren and Brad Dourif) are all nutjob cliches.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Spy Hard
    I'm happy to report, though, that even a dud like Spy Hard can't completely douse the stumbling Zen charm of Leslie Nielsen, whose genius is that he never quite sheds the illusion that he isn't in on the joke.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Too chicly depressive -- and, for the most part, too dull -- to bear.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Handmaid's Tale
    The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock — just like the book.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Experiment
    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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Senseless
    Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Son of No One
    The more that secret comes out, the more incoherent (and ludicrous) the film gets.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    License to Wed
    The creepy-faced robot twin babies are funny (for a while); the rest of the film is not. It's like "Meet the Parents" with Dr. Phil as the officiant from hell.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Stoker
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Tombstone
    If only director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo) knew how to do something with cliches other than throw them into the pot and stir. A preposterously inflated 135 minutes long, Tombstone plays like a three-hour rough cut that’s been trimmed down to a slightly shorter rough cut.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    One Eight Seven
    The prospect of a teacher driven to his students’ level of sociopathic vengeance might have packed a ghoulish wallop had the film viewed it as tragic. Reynolds, however, is just grinding out exploitation thrills.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Buddy Boy
    Be wary of any movie in which the hero is monosyllabic and a stutterer at the same time.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Mary Reilly
    The film's chief novelty turns out to be its drab ''literary'' approach to horror.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Newton Boys
    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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    The problem with the movie isn't that it sells out Rocky and Bullwinkle -- it's that it can't keep up with them.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    Wes Craven’s New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Opposite of Sex
    Traffics in the coyly blasphemous, aren't-we-dysfunctional family-disaster chic that has become the single most annoying trend in independent filmmaking.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Little Ashes
    I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Pulse
    In this American remake of the spooky, more-atmospheric-than-coherent 2005 J-horror thriller, the ghosts blink and crackle into existence with an electromagnetic sputter, but really, they're not so different from the gauzy, see-through spirits of yesteryear.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men sounds like a what's-not-to-like? movie, but it turns out to be a bizarre failure.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Scandal
    Les Liaisons Dangereuses is such an elaborate and satisfying structure of deceit and salaciousness that every attempt I have seen to adapt it on film -- "Dangerous Liaisons," "Cruel Intentions," even the trashy 1959 Roger Vadim version -- has resulted in an entertainment of agreeable nasty elegance. Until now.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Amityville Horror
    Extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of that creaky, derivative, fly-infested, don't-go-in-the-attic boofest.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Treasure Planet
    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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Suicide Kings
    Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies without sitting through another imitation of early Quentin Tarantino, along comes Suicide Kings.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Cup
    Little more than a plodding celebration of global television trumping everything in its midst.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Enter the Void
    Director Gaspar Noé proved a shock poet in "Irreversible" (2003). In Enter the Void, he's a shockingly tedious show-off.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Mod Squad
    Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    I Am Sam
    The dumbing down of low-IQ sentimentality.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Must Love Dogs
    This is a movie of fake conflict, fake heart, even fake doggy love.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Angel Eyes
    A cumbersome dud, grows draggier with each new revelation.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Killing Zoe
    The idiocy of the plot is the tip-off that writer-director Roger Avary is really just interested in random displays of nihilistic decadence (e.g., heroin-shooting, prostitute-bashing, lotsa blood).
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Ezra
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Statement
    If any actor could reveal the squirmy soul of a war criminal, it's Caine, so it feels like a cheat when The Statement gives him nothing to portray but self-condemnation.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Dream House
    This suburban gothic is a logy, convoluted mess.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Fay Grim
    The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
    The movie recapitulates the absurdist tabloid-redneck comedy of the great, original Chainsaw without a hint of its primal terror.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    8 ½ Women
    Keeps teasing you with intimations of the libidinous animal within.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Nativity Story
    The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Jacob's Ladder
    The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Sade
    Achieves the near-impossible: It turns the Marquis de Sade into a dullard.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Bitter Moon
    Sadly, the movie indicates that Polanski’s erotic narcissism may have consumed not just his life but, by all appearances, his art as well.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Nanny Diaries
    For a light comedy, The Nanny Diaries turns out to have an off-putting theme. It glorifies the romance of slumming.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Object of My Affection
    So riddled with cultural stereotypes, woe-is-me neurotic mopiness, and glib therapeutic compassion that by the end all it leaves you with is a waxy buildup of falseness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Alive
    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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Soapdish
    Soapdish makes the tackiness of soap operas seem far more desperate than funny.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Analyze That
    It's not just that Tony Soprano is richer, darker, cooler, and scarier. The dude gets more laughs.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    M. Butterfly
    Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Whatever It Takes
    Populated by ersatz versions of stars who, in this case, are fairly vanilla to begin with.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Hitcher
    A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Shooter
    The ultimate crime of this paranoid enemy-of-the-state pulp, directed with more style than brains by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), is how dull it is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    New Jack City
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Love Me If You Dare
    The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Upside Down
    Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Its title aside, this slow, clunky omnibus film feels more like a TV show than a movie. It’s not very scary, and there isn’t much contrast among the episodes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Wild at Heart
    A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Sugar Hill
    Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Chopper
    A movie overtly designed to win attention (and not to do much else).
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    You're Gonna Miss Me
    Has the taint of exploitation.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Zus & zo
    The title translates, roughly, as ''This & That,'' a confectionary shrug that pretty well sums up the blasé inconsequentiality of it all.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Like Mike
    Like Mike has the synthetically wrapped pseudo-charm of a perfunctory ''Flubber'' sequel.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Superhero Movie
    Seems to have been given the comedy equivalent of blood thinner. It has the blazing satirical boldness to skewer the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man -- and, amazingly, not much else.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Father and Son
    Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Some Girl(s)
    The things that once made Neil LaBute's movies seem like tossed grenades — the loutish protagonists, the sadism toward women — now come off as more dated than scandalous.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Mean Machine
    After too many ''Full Monty''s, it has come to look like nothing so much as a coy ritual of emasculation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Byzantium
    The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on "Let the Right One In."
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Inspector Gadget
    The image of this kitchen-magician dream robot comes at us in little jolts and spasms that have the zappy, self-contained rhythm of a fast-food tie-in commercial.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Prelude to a Kiss
    Prelude to a Kiss is squishy yet blah. It teaches the characters a lesson they don’t need to learn.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Jetsons: The Movie
    In an age of Simpson-mania, George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy seem blander than ever.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Adore
    Adore has the distinction of featuring some of the most laughable dialogue in any movie this year.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Bad Boys
    It's like a series of cliches exploding in your face.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    LUV
    The rapper and actor Common has become a highly skilled screen star, but this touchy-feely dud does him wrong.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Law Abiding Citizen
    Clyde is meant to be nuts, but too often it's Law Abiding Citizen that checks rationality at the door.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Looking for Eric
    The British director Ken Loach can be a master of working-class realism, but not in this cranky, rudderless shambles.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Nabbeun namja
    Really, who needs a bad guy who's this guilty about being bad?
    • 30 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Art of War
    The dialogue is chintzy and rhythmless.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Stealth
    Stealth, a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame clichés.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    A primer no one needed, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? should have been called "The Post-9/11 World for Dummies."
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    No Such Thing
    Hartley is trapped between sincerity and mock sincerity, and that all but dooms a filmmaker to slipping through the cracks.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Boxing Helena
    Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Wendell Baker Story
    Feels like an attempt to rebottle the postmodern fizz of Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket." I wish instead they'd put a stopper in it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Greendale
    In the history of rock-star indulgence on film, I would rank it somewhere between Bob Dylan's epic carnival of pretension ''Renaldo & Clara'' and the overblown messianic doldrums of 1982's ''Pink Floyd The Wall.''
    • 28 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Blood: The Last Vampire
    Gory but dramatically inert vampire schlocker.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Dark Half
    The most frightening thing about this movie is that King and Romero actually thought it was scary.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Johnny Mnemonic
    Offhand, I can’t think of an actor who could use a brain implant more. The trouble isn’t that Reeves talks like a surfer dude; it’s that he tries so hard not to talk like a surfer dude.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Hard Rain
    The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Bullhead
    Overheated yet bizarrely opaque criminal character study from Belgium.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Rocker
    The only brazen thing about the film is how shamelessly it rips off "School of Rock."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Hard Word
    An Australian crime caper that's one part ''Sexy Beast,'' one part ''The Full Monty,'' and three parts very flat soda.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Eagle vs Shark
    It's a tale that reduces angst, not to mention love, to a generational tic.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Music of the Heart
    A sentimental epic that forgets to include the sentiment
    • 58 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Year of the Horse
    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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    The Box
    It's no coincidence that The Box plays like the world's murkiest Twilight Zone episode. It's loosely based on ''Button, Button,'' a short story by Richard Matheson, who wrote some of the series' greatest scripts.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Original Sin
    Aspires to blasphemy but achieves only banality.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Regarding Henry
    The movie has a few jokes, but it could have used some of the canny, real-world logic that made Rain Man so convincing (and funny).
    • 31 Metascore
    • 42 Owen Gleiberman
    Cop Out
    Without that heightened racial antipathy-turned-camaraderie, there's not a whole lot to Cop Out besides watching Kevin Smith pretend, with a crudeness that is simply boring, that he's an action director making a comic thriller about cops versus a Mexican drug gang (yawn).
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Death Wish
    All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Assassin's Creed
    In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Yellow Birds
    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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Venom
    Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Harold and the Purple Crayon
    The film ends with an overly spelled-out plea for the value of “imagination,” but about the only thing the filmmakers are drawing with their purple crayon is algorithms.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Pale Blue Eye
    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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Ultimate Playlist of Noise
    In the last 20 minutes, Keean Johnson, who mostly acts cool and on top of things, drops his guard, letting in an honest ripple of pain and fear. He hits a true note, and the fact that Marcus can’t hear it almost makes up for the doom-laden whimsy of the rest of the movie.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    Michael Moore In TrumpLand turns out to be a tossed hand grenade that doesn’t fully detonate.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    After
    An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Thing with Feathers
    The whole thing is oppressive and, in an odd way, not very interesting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Reagan Show
    The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Eleanor the Great
    Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Halloween Kills
    Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but Halloween Kills is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Meg 2: The Trench
    The Meg 2 is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously derivative and, for a few stretches (like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It is, in other words, all an August movie really needs to be. But there’s a way that the line between August movies and movies, period, is growing thinner every day.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Last Christmas
    As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Red One
    The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Sonic the Hedgehog
    We all know that your average Hollywood comedy tends to include some on-set improvisation, but in this case the contrast between the leaden pseudo-brashness of the rest of the movie and the ping! of Carrey’s dialogue is so marked that it almost feels like he made up his entire character on the spot. (I’m not declaring that he actually did. I’m just sayin’.)
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    “Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein, while neither scary nor funny (the way Zelda Williams has directed it, it sits in some corkscrew zone that feels more like “overly complicated SNL sketch”), skims off the top of a dozen once-cool sources.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Therapy for a Vampire
    If a diagram were the same thing as a script, then Therapy for a Vampire might be a smashingly silly lark. But as written and directed by Daniel Ruehl, the film is a blueprint of mild anemic kitsch.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    No, the “Saw” series hasn’t really changed. So depending on whether you’re a fan or not, eat up…or throw up.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Crawl
    Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Trap
    Asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    So is it, you know, fun? At times it is; at others it’s exhausting. Let’s call the whole thing fun-xhausting.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Pathaan
    Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Noelle
    What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is fussy and prudish — about erotic longing, and about the rock ‘n’ roll that gives form to it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The High Note
    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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Yes Day
    Yes Day strings together a series of just-say-yes set pieces that don’t play out the central premise so much as they turn it into an extended kiddie-action-movie burlesque.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Henry Johnson
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Little Things
    This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Kraven the Hunter
    The action in Kraven the Hunter is fine as far as it goes, but it rarely incites or bedazzles you.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    American Dharma
    What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Vivarium
    Vivarium has a canny visual design (you won’t soon forget the rows of Monopoly houses), but the movie becomes an example of the imitative fallacy. It makes the audience feel deadened too.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Devil All the Time
    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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Escape Room
    The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Sno Babies
    It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Underworld: Blood Wars
    There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Scream 7
    Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Everything's Going to Be Great
    Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    American Hangman
    American Hangman belongs to that species of grade-Z movie that’s at once grisly and pretentious. It’s trash with a lot on its mind.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Dangal
    There’s hardly a moment in Dangal that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Exorcist: Believer
    The Exorcist: Believer, in its superficially competent and poshly mounted way, feels about as dangerous as a crucifix dipped in a bottle of designer water.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Something
    Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Dosed
    This is a subject that deserves a rigorous documentary exploration, like Alison Klayman’s must-see psychotropic exposé “Take Your Pills.” But Dosed isn’t that kind of movie.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    House Party
    The film taps into the glitz ethos of the age of social-media envy without necessarily scrutinizing what it all means. Kid ‘n Play had put on a party to remember, but the new movie, much like Kevin and Damon themselves, just goes with the flow of the scam.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Shrouds
    As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    My Spy: The Eternal City
    The film is light enough without being funny enough, most of it staged, by director Peter Segal (“Tommy Boy,” “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”), in a kind of generic action overdrive.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Duel
    The Duel promises a battle of wits and wills, then turns into a violent grab-bag. But it does make you want to see Woody Harrelson get another movie worthy of his leering bald Nietzschean bravura.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Firestarter
    The whole thing plays like “Logan” done in the worst humdrum rhythmless made-for-streaming generic style, the lighting flat, the soundtrack heavy with John Carpenter’s old-school one-man-at-the-synthesizer horror music, because if you took that sound of processed dread away you wouldn’t have much else.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Marksman
    The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Yesterday
    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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Mine
    The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Lost Transmissions
    It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Terrifier 2
    Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Die My Love
    By the time Die My Love reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Anemone
    As you watch the film, though, it’s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Kung Fu Panda 4
    Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    South of Heaven
    The movie gives Jason Sudeikis a chance to act without the safety net of comedy, and he proves that he’s got the right stuff. But next time he needs to do it in a movie that offers the safety net of believability.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Occupied City
    In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Ben-Hur
    Minus a hero who has the macho charisma to wrap a movie around him like he owned it, the new Ben-Hur is an oddly lackluster affair: sludgy and plodding, photographed (by Oliver Wood) in nondescript medium close-up, an epic that feels like a mini-series served up in bits and pieces.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Dirt
    It’s just a thinly written (by Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson), generically staged (by Jeff Tremaine, director of the “Jackass” films) VH1-style sketchbook of a movie — which is to say, it’s a Netflix film, with zero atmosphere, overly blunt lighting, and a threadbare post-psychological telegraphed quality that gives you nothing to read between the lines.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Parallel Tales
    The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel in such a sodden way. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Nobody's Fool
    In Nobody’s Fool, Tiffany Haddish is just furious and funny enough to make you wish that the rest of the movie wasn’t a droopy romantic comedy without the comedy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Triple Frontier
    There’s a dullness at the core of Triple Frontier.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Silk Road
    A fervently topical, at times intriguing, but ultimately rather sketchy drama about the online black market.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Hellboy
    It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Ideal Home
    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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Burning Sea
    The movie has every right to be fiction, but the heart of its drama lies in its patina of plausibility.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    The Desperate Hour
    Watts’ commitment holds the movie together. She acts as if that phone were her flesh-and-blood partner. But it’s not. It’s a device impersonating something human. And so is Lakewood.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Owen Gleiberman
    Disenchanted
    Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.
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