Owen Gleiberman

The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.

In the fresh bopping beauty of their punk romantic sound, they kicked open a door of perception. They said to a generation: We got the beat, and you can too.

The General, for all its panache, is ultimately an unsatisfying movie. The reason, I think, is that Boorman’s slightly puerile romanticization of Cahill keeps getting in the way of the reality he’s showing us.

Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn't see him.

A fizzy and delirious high-camp message-movie musical that may just turn out to be the happiest movie of the summer.

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.''

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.

Even more than the first “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion” is a thriller wrapped in a deception tucked inside a riddle. It is, of course, a murder mystery with multiple suspects, but it’s one that comes with byways and flashbacks and bells and whistles, not to mention two whodunit homicides for the price of one.

The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.

The Night of the 12th is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is.

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

What the film leaves unexplained is how this joyous musical outpouring, which predated the revolution, could fare under a system with a pathological distrust of beauty.

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

The film is a record of what went on during the War of Independence — a much uglier and more brutal story than Israel has ever wanted to acknowledge. The film includes graphic testimony, and it comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought in the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

Western Stars isn’t a rockin’-out extravaganza; it’s intimate in its embrace. Yet it’s a moving testament to how much Bruce Springsteen has still got it. It’s a concert film you’ll want to experience with others, as a ray of light in the dark.

The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.

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’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is an enticingly clever and droll, nearly pitch-perfect piece of murder-mystery fun — a whodunit that lives up to the expectations set six years ago by “Knives Out,” which offered its own perfect revival of the Agatha Christie spirit, with a tasty frosting of meta cheekiness.

Wendy and Lucy is like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Antonioni. What's piercing about it, and also disturbing, is that Reichardt views the renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity -- as a lefty romantic dream.

X is a wily and entertaining slow-motion ride of terror that earns its shocks, along with its singular quease factor, which relates to the fact that the demons here are ancient specimens of humanity who actually have a touch of…humanity.

The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

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.

There’s a reason that it lacks the highs of "Wedding Crashers": The Internship puts us on the side of those who are trying to hold on to respectability, not tear it down.

Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

A Jekyll-and-Hyde teen comedy that sounds like a Pauly Shore reject, but Qualls moves his marionette body around with a true clown's effervescence, and he does rubber-faced parodies of youth cool that are just what youth cool deserves.

Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.

It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

All staged as a harsh poem of survival, with no great psychological interest, yet the ending carries a surprise feminist tug that’s worth the wait.

A richly tender and moving experience.

It's a death-wish revenge thriller posing as a lavishly pastoral historical epic.

A succulently entertaining movie that invites you to splash around in the dreams and follies of folks so rich they're the 1 percent of the 1 percent. It's like a champagne bath laced with arsenic.

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

As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick.

What was organic, and even obsessive, in the first outing comes off as pat and elaborate formula here. The new movie, energized as it is, too often feels like warmed-over sloppy seconds, with a what-do-we-do-now? riff that turns into an overly on-the-nose plot.

Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.

An amiable time-killer of an espionage comedy.

Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.

Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this. He also has a vision, of sorts — one that’s expressed, nearly inadvertently, in the metaphor of that space antenna. Watching Ad Astra, you may think you’ve signed on for a journey that’s out of this world, but it turns out that the film’s concerns are somberly tethered to Earth.

The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.

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.

Set in the 1960s, Robert De Niro's directorial debut is a work of vitality and flair. [22 Oct 1993, p.58]

What’s finally missing from Bugsy is the dirty, low-down kick of the crime genre — the quality that marked last year’s The Grifters, and that was there in The Godfather, too. Levinson would like to be bad, but his approach is reverent, ironic, tasteful. He’s made a gangster movie that, for all its lithe pleasures, enunciates too well.

You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.

This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.

"Andy Warhol" makes you see that beneath the gargoyle hipster mask, he filled that emptiness with an art of transcendent sincerity.

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.

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.

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is undeniably disturbing, especially that video scene and when it shows us (however discreetly) a body being hacked up in a bathtub. Yet the critics who’ve hailed it as a landmark are going overboard. Henry is just a superior B-movie with an artsy-clinical title.

Making Waves is a brisk 94 minutes, the last half hour of which is a quick-study primer on the categories of movie sound. The film is quite educational.

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

If Bergman Island is a roman à clef about Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, it’s an oblique one. If it’s a “Before” film, it’s one that embeds a crucial element of emotional exploration in the educated guesswork of the audience. If it’s a cinephile shell game made with disarmingly clever sincerity — and I would say that’s just what it is — it’s one that leaves you grateful to have paid a visit to this island.

The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.

Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.

Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen.

Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a soft-hearted fable that works on you in an enchanting way.

A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.

Lorenzo’s Oil is at once harrowing and riveting. In the age of AIDS, it has telling observations to make about how the institutionalized complacency of the medical establishment actually works. As remarkable a job as Miller and the actors have done, though, the film begins to wear you down. At 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s far too long, and (more crucially) it has a flat, repetitive structure.

You emerge from Desert One knowing certain aspects of the Iran-hostage crisis better than you did before. That makes it a worthy film, and an absorbing one.

Good Night, and Good Luck has a small-scale time-capsule fascination, yet its hermeticism is really a form of moral caution -- a way of keeping the issues neat, the liberal idealism untainted.

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

In David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby is more than just a rock ‘n’ roll survivor nursing a lifetime of second thoughts. He’s a romantic witness to a time that was genuinely about following the road of excess to the palace of wisdom.

A spooky, moving documentary.

The strength, and fascination, of The Force is that the movie isn’t on anyone’s side. It’s cognizant of the brutality and violence that police officers, in our era, have been caught on phone cameras committing. At the same time, it’s not out to demonize the police — it’s out to capture the pressures they’re under, and to show us what their job looks like from the inside.

A lively and appealing analog-nostalgia documentary.

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

If you're going to get on the wavelength of Little Miss Sunshine, you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots.

Sweetgrass is austere enough to make Frederick Wiseman's films look like Jersey Shore episodes, yet it has its own suspense.

The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.

"Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.

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.

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

There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.

Moving and eerily beautiful.

The movie has a mystery, and moral unease, that lingers.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.

Dano, it’s immediately clear, is a natural-born filmmaker, with an eye for elegant spare compositions that refrain from being too showy; they rarely get in the way of the story he’s telling. The tale itself is resonant and absorbing, though in a highly deliberate way.

Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.

The Lost Leonardo is the first art-world documentary I’ve seen that captures what art becomes once it goes through the looking glass of greed: not just a commodity, but a way of transferring and manipulating power. It’s enough to make the Mona Lisa stop smiling.

Mank is a tale of Old Hollywood that’s more steeped in Old Hollywood — its glamour and sleaze, its layer-cake hierarchies, its corruption and glory — than just about any movie you’ve seen, and the effect is to lend it a dizzying time-machine splendor.

The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.

Babygirl takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is like that.

Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau makes the mistake of treating Cyrano de Bergerac as though it were some lost Shakespearean tragedy instead of the wonderfully gimmicky (and familiar) tearjerker it is.

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.

She's a teller of hilarious gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor ever were. Yet while they were consumed by their demons, Rivers is just the opposite.

For all its music-trivia affection, High Fidelity is finally a pretty thin melody.

The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star, and it doesn't let Charlie off the hook for his cruelty or self-pity.

Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''

Ricky is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.

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.

[A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.