Owen Gleiberman

Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.

The Trip looks like a lark - and is - yet there's a sneaky resonance to the way it celebrates what acting means to these two rogue cutups.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn't let those other players in the political process off the hook: the voters.

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

Rachel Boynton’s gripping doc shows you what happens when the greed of oil companies meets the chaos of postcolonial Africa.

A singular and haunting experience.

The film is a bit too chronological, but its historical reverence is true to gospel's joyful insistence on locating the spiritual in the everyday.

The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.

Even as a kid, I could see that Midnight Cowboy’s true subject isn’t decadence but loneliness...Midnight Cowboy’s peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.

The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.

You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.

Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it.

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

When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors.

The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.

Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.

Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater.

Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.

Soderbergh is able to execute his games without pigeonholing his characters. He has made that rare thing, a modern-day noir with feeling.

Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.

Breathless and petite yet powerfully in-your-face, Fisher combines dizzy femininity and no-nonsense verve in the manner of a classic screwball heroine. She's like Carole Lombard reborn as a tiny angel-faced dynamo.

The film casts a hypnotic spell all its own. It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.

For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.

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

Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above.

The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.

The baby-voiced costar of "Chasing Amy" proves an effortless filmmaker, turning Lucy’s journey into the awakening of a soul.

Turns the tricks of psychology into duplicitous high play.

Days after I saw The Artist, I was still thinking (and grinning) about it, because the movie's real romance is the one between us, the jaded 21st-century audience, and the mechanical innocence of old movies, which here becomes new again.

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.

It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment.

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.

The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.

There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology.

The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.

An Inconvenient Truth can't, of course, reveal a future that is still up to us, but by the time you're done watching, the real question is, Which way on God's green earth would you want to err?

Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

It's scary good fun.

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

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

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.

A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride.

On the eve of Wuornos' 2002 execution, Broomfield digs deep into her abusive hell of a background (beatings, incest, sleeping homeless in the frozen Michigan woods) as well as her quasi-psychotic defense mechanisms.

The Passenger isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression.

Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater.

Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.

The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon.

The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, the backwaters of showbiz, and true magic. It's a wee charmer that left me enchanted.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters.

In the end, the most impressive performance may be Spike Lee's. He uses skill without gimmickry, flash without fuss, to tap the mesmerizing soul of this pulp.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

On the Outs parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power.

By the end of the movie, you realize that these two have devised nothing less than a media-age alternative to the Nixon era’s dirty tricks. The War Room is a giddy celebration of clean tricks.

The end will haunt you.

Agreeably skewed fun.

The Fugitive is hardly Hitchcock — it never taps our emotions in a way that threatens to transcend the action — but it’s a mainstream thriller made with conviction, intelligence, and heat. In Hollywood, that used to be called professionalism. These days, it’s rare enough to look like artistry.

The movie is Mike's story, and Channing Tatum proves himself a true movie star. His Mike glides through the world with the ease of a god, and on stage he's electrifying.

Trekkies is hilarious, fascinating, and, at times, almost scary.

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

You could describe Margin Call as a thriller (it's wired with suspense), yet the tension all comes from words.

If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe.

Crystal’s ordinariness — his utter lack of glamour — really works for him here. He’s far more pleasureful to watch in this sort of dramatic-comedy role than, say, Robin Williams, because his comfy, urban-shlemiel personality helps ground the jokes.

Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation.

A domestic tragedy of lacerating vision.

The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance.

Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.

This one, as thoughtful as it is rousing, scores a TKO.

A richly tender and moving experience.

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.

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

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

It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.

Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie.

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

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

Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi.

Anthology films usually work better in theory than execution, but this feature parade of shorts is a blithe, worldly, and enchanting exception.

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

In a world ruled by process, is compassion still real? Or is it just another scam? In Ocean's Thirteen, it is deviously, and merrily, both.

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.

Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack.

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

Hercules, like Aladdin, zips Disney’s house animation style past sentimentality and into an age of ironic media-wise overload. That’s not a bad place for it to be.

Rouses you in conventional ways, but it's also the rare animated film that uses 3-D for its breathtaking spatial and emotional possibilities.

Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done.

The result is a wacked kiddie Rashomon in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. Hoodwinked's most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes.

The movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.

A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.

It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.