Owen Gleiberman

Logan Lucky is Soderbergh in mid-season form, and there should be a solid summer niche for a movie that’s this much ripsnorting fun.

If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.

The past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.

In its middlebrow celebratory way, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart reveals the Bee Gees’ saga to be one of the most fascinating and, at times, awe-inspiring in the history of pop.

The movie is a feminist lesson instead of what it should have been (and once was): a tough, synthetic, high-gloss entertainment that wears its heart on its lacquered fingernails.

Tickling Giants is a terrific movie that leaves you cherishing (a little more) the freedom we have, and holding in contempt (a little more) those who would compromise it. Mostly, the movie makes you understand how every society — and ours more than ever — needs people like Bassem Youssef to demonstrate that laughter will always be one of the essential ways to keep power in check.

All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.

Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.

Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.

White Noise is a deadly serious movie, but it is also, in a certain way, a funny one, because it captures the comedy of how much trouble even the influencers of hate now have squaring their lives with their belief systems

Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.

Gripping in its intimacy.

It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.

Powerful and searching documentary.

Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''

It is indeed a good movie, and quite an honest one, yet its setup is so ripe for cut corners and heartwarming chintz that I was almost surprised to see it sidestep the diagram I was expecting. I bet other viewers will have the same reaction.

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

A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.

Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.

Glum and preposterous -- an operatically stilted adolescent martyr fantasy -- and yet, as staged by Coppola, it's well worth seeing.

For all the praise that has been heaped upon it, is a quasisatisfying, half realized vision.

The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.

Features a supernatural twist that is merely okay, but the film's mood of fractured anxiety and longing made me eager to see what the director, Christoffer Boe, does next.

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.

In “The Covenant,” Guy Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.

Laced with colorful stories. ... The movie is mostly content to be a portrait of Ronstadt the artist, and it’s more than satisfying on that front.

It’s an elegantly oblique movie, even for Kiarostami, whose art thrums with quiet ethereal metaphor.

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.

You can feel director Lee Tamahori doing his best to get a rise out of you. Yet his work has fire and substance, too.

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.

Ailey, directed by Jamila Wignot, doesn’t always answer the questions you expect it to. It can be a tantalizing watch, but it’s a poetic and meditative documentary that often skimps on the nuts and bolts.

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.

Through it all, Natalie Maines' decision to shirk humility, to stick by her guns, to the point that the group returns to that London concert venue in 2006 and she utters the same joke again, becomes a feisty and inspiring act of something there is only one word for: patriotism.

Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is.

Notre Musique is Godard's post-9/11 statement, a meditation on how war emerges from the eternal, and hypocritical, duality of human perception -- the sense that it's always ''the other'' who dies.

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

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

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

There's nothing drab about the tormented place these men take each other to. You'll want to go along.

A fascinating and lovingly crafted musical documentary that nevertheless misunderstands its own subject.

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

The plot feels less like a realistic dilemma than it does a willed exercise in neorealist catharsis — a way of inviting Western audiences to bask in their materialist ”empathy.”

You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.

It’s a serious blast, with a plot that zigs and zags (but only because it sticks, within reason, to the facts), and a cast of characters who are so eccentrically scuzzy that maybe no one could have dreamed them up.

Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.

Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.

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

From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.

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

Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.

Brashly engaging.

Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.

Jim & Andy is fleetly edited and engrossing, animated by a sense of discovery.

“Alex Wheatle” is like a sketch for the biopic it might have been, but by the end you feel you’ve glimpsed the key fragment of a life.

This is basically a nerd-loosening-his-tie romantic comedy done in the manic-compulsive mode of "Liar Liar."

Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.

For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.

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.

Love Lies Bleeding turns consciously wild and garish, and you may think that the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.

The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.

David Simon, creator of "The Wire," who argues that the targeting of minorities, fused with mandatory sentencing, has turned the war on drugs into ''a holocaust in slow motion.''

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making.

Two Lottery Tickets is an existential-absurdist, dirty-kitchen-sink vision of ordinary lives that’s just funny and invigorating enough to hit a note of truth.

At the end, Bruce, speaking to us in voiceover, says that he plans to just keep going, to play in concert “until the wheels come off.” Watching Road Diary, you hope they never do.

Sin, more stylized than the director’s previous work, is also more detached.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

It’s a touching and original piece of bare-bones sentimental humanism, and Schoenaerts is terrific in it.

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

You should never take for granted a documentary that fills in the basics with flair and feeling. Especially when the basics consist of great big gobs of some of the most revolutionary and exhilarating popular art ever created in this country.

Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.

An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.

The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.

Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.

The movie is merciless sending up "Juno's" self-satisfied hipster gobbledygook, and it's quite funny to see Hannah Montana still promoting her tie-in products as she lies crushed and dying under a meteor.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

It’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.

Each time the violence explodes, it’s slashingly satisfying, because it’s earned, and also because Mangold knows just how to stage it.

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.

The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.

Unfortunately, most of the two-hour documentary is devoted to annotating what the Nazis stole for both their state and personal collections. The movie doesn't dramatize this crime -- it catalogs it. With deadening monotony.

To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.

It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.

The old-world-meets-new mesh is incarnated in the movie's soundtrack, a joyful effusion of disco Bollywood that, by the end of Monsoon Wedding, sent my spirit soaring out of the theater.

Candace Against the Universe has been made for “Phineas and Ferb” believers, and like such hipster kiddie brand extensions as “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies,” it’s not necessarily more fun than three good episodes of the show stacked together. But that’s fun enough.

Simply put, it may be the lamest movie ever made about poor white... Southern characters.

A voyeur's delight.

As someone who’s absorbed bits and pieces of the Miles Davis story over the years but never felt like I had the big picture, I found “Birth of the Cool” to be intensely gratifying. Nelson is a filmmaker with a sixth sense for how to nudge history into the present.

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.

With its lyrical vision of oppression, looks, if anything, milder now than it might have before the war.

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

A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.

The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.

Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.

A total motherf—kin’ blast. ... You might have to go all the way back to the ’80s to find a Murphy performance driven by this much pleasurable funky verve.

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

Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.

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

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.

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

This is how a Western today tries to give us more bang for the buck. By working this hard to be a crowd-pleaser, though, it may please fewer crowds.

The film never conveys that something larger is at work - like, say, the hand of fate. And without that, there's more busyness than beauty to Brontë.

The White Tiger isn’t a fairy tale, but by the end the movie still leaves you feeling that it has made a wish into a command.

For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.

Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.

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 a multimedia immersion, filled with rare footage of Zappa from his teenage years on and assembled with the loving dexterity we’ve come to expect from Alex Winter as a filmmaker.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a moving, wrenching, compellingly well-made documentary about Reeve’s life that inevitably ends up centering on his accident and its aftermath.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today.

It’s catchy and touching, it weaves the music into the story with a spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure, and it navigates an honest path from despair to belief, which is Carney’s disarmingly sweet calling card.

It’s neorealist corn, but it gets to you.

For all its modest charm, Dave is a true throwback to the Capra days, a political comedy just cockeyed enough to triumph over cynicism.

In Shine a Light, a crackling concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones are now so old that they seem new again.

The movie could have been a lot scarier.

Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.

The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.

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

The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.

We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.

What's infectious in Soul Power is the almost shocking optimism of its America-meets-Africa '70s world-beat vibe.

We go into The Meaning of Hitler craving that millimeter of insight, of intrigue and revelation. And the film provides it. It ruminates on Hitler and the Third Reich in ways that churn up your platitudes.

The Price of Everything exalts in the spirt of art over commerce, yet what’s thrilling about the film — and what echoes in your mind after it’s over — is that it captures all the ways those two forces can’t be separated.

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.

What lights Cinèvardaphoto is Varda's ageless ability to merge her spirit with that of the images she shows us.

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.

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

The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head

The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real.

It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between.

Spencer is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance.

Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch.

The movie is slick and cartoonish but also extremely clever, and its unabashed conventionality is exactly what’s fun about it.

No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.

A spooky, heartbreaking documentary.

Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.

What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted.

Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.

An exquisitely fun documentary.

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.

Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.

The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.

Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made.

The best reason to see Mother is the deliciously off-kilter performance of Debbie Reynolds, who speaks in pure honey-sweet tones yet keeps planting tiny seeds of disapproval, using her maternal ”concern” as an invisible form of warfare. You never quite catch her doing it; the character doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She just is who she is, and by the end you realize that that’s her glory.

Eckhart shows a new kind of foreboding anger. He's powerful as a man who will do anything to crack the ice.

The first hour of The Last of the Mohicans plays like a convoluted history lesson. I appreciate that Mann has enough respect for the audience's intelligence to sketch in this briar patch of conflicting loyalties. But he outlines the interlocking factions without really making it clear, in dramatic terms, what each one stands for.

Meticulous and detailed, a drug-world epic that holds you from moment to moment, immersing you in the intricate and sleazy logistics of crime. Yet the movie isn't quite enthralling; it's more like the ghost version of a '70s classic.

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld doesn’t offer the last word about the issues it raises. But it’s a movie that should be seen, grappled with, argued with, and experienced, because the questions it plants in us are dark enough to reverberate as powerfully as answers.

Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.

Catching Fire is smoothly exciting but a bit of a tease.

The movie IS a provocation, but not a glib or ideologically myopic one.

The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.

The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.

From first shot to last, it’s a film of high wit and confidence and verve, an astonishingly fluid and accomplished act of boundary-leaping.

Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.

Has more atmosphere than it does coherence; it's a series of floating tricks and gambits in search of a resolution. Even so, Ye's ''Vertigo'' fever is contagious.

The Lovers is a comedy of Middle American doldrums that leaves you rooting for its characters instead of smirking at them.

The Panama Papers captures and celebrates a different concentration of power: that of the journalists who’ve begun to band together by thinking globally, following the money as it travels — and does its best to hide — around the world.

[An] incisive and poignant documentary ... Sinéad O’Connor was a fire that went out too fast. "Nothing Compares" makes you see it’s still burning.

It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.

The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

The movie, for all its half-baked visual marvels, remains remarkably faithful to Lewis' story, and the innocence of his passion begins to shine through. It's there, most spectacularly, in Aslan, the lion-king messiah.

Encanto is a lively, lovely, lushly enveloping digitally animated musical fairy tale.

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

In Path of Blood, the masks come off, and we literally see the faces of Al Qaeda in action, with the propaganda machine turned off. What’s shocking is how ordinary and high-spirited they appear.

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

Delectably caustic comedy.

Europa, Europa isn’t the wrenching emotional saga it might have been.

Easy Money is not merely an early-career curiosity. It's one of the best underworld films I've seen in years, and Kinnaman gives a fantastic performance in it.

It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself.

The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.

The film devotes itself entirely to a celebration and exhaustive analysis of Morricone’s music — it’s a portrait of the artist as virtuoso soundtrack renegade.

A Better Life was directed by the eclectic Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy), who weaves the torpor and anxiety of immigrant life into something dramatically true, if at moments a bit draggy.

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

What The Order accomplishes that’s most haunting, and perceptive, is that it shows us how white supremacy in America can be two things at once, two sides of the same coin: the legal and “presentable” side, and the underlying violent side.

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.

Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

Matt Wolf directs “Recorder” with a lot of lively skill. He presents the eccentricity of Marion Stokes’ personality with supreme sympathetic understanding, or maybe you could say a bit more romanticism than it deserves.

This trio is like a looser, funnier version of the family of wrecks in Woody Allen's ''Interiors.''

Wide-ranging and beautifully edited -- it's a vivid evocation of a moment when even the ugliest guitar feedback could be taken as a serious political statement.

Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.

When you watch Get Me Roger Stone, the lively, fun, sickening, and essential new documentary, you realize that Atwater and Rove may have excelled at what they did, but there was — and is — only one king.

Sweet Land is a movie of extraordinary tenderness, in which Reaser and Guinee, using a language of looks, make you happy to think about what love once might have been.

The movie has a real kick to it. As Paul and Annie attempt to outsmart each other, Misery gets nastier and nastier. It turns into a psychotic cat-and-mouse game, and there are some genuine shocks.

Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.

Hiddleston, with pleading eyes and a mad-dog grin, plays Loki as a wounded sociopath who's cackling at the world but seething on the inside. Which makes you realize he's just about the only character in the movie who has an inside.

Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy.

Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.

As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly.

Time to Choose may come off, at moments, like the “Koyaanisqatsi” of environmental devastation, but it is also a dreadfully beautiful achievement. It shows us what the building blocks of climate change look like.

Nothing more than a modest, streamlined ''making of...'' diary about a movie that never got made -- it's ''Project Greenlight'' with bigger stars and bigger disasters.

When we finally see the time-lapse images his cameras took, they're awesome and terrifying - a meltdown out of a poetic horror film.

She's an Everywoman you can believe in, showcased in the kind of deft comedy of feminine passion - where deep despair meets Wilson Phillips - that a great many people have been waiting for. Now that Wiig and company have built it, will they come?

I wish that “Queer Japan” had delved more into historical matters of fashion and androgyny, or into the life of someone like Yukio Mishima. It’s a very present-tense movie, but how did the movements on display evolve? Kolbeins would have done well to show us. Instead, he presents a snapshot of a revolution in midair, leaping to find a form for how to remake the future.

Tully has its heart (and many other things) in the right place, but by the end you wish it had an imagination finely executed enough to match its empathy.

It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.

The Automat taps into so many resonant aspects of what America used to be that to watch it is to be drawn into an enchanting and wistfully profound time-tripping reverie.

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?

The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there.

As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins.

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

The movie, quite simply, goes to sleep whenever Zatoichi isn't fighting. When he is, it's a pulp dazzler.

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

As riveting as its title.

it's a synthetic, rather drab movie, one that seems linked less to experience, or even to fantasy, than to other movies - "Big," of course, and also "E.T.," "Mask," and "Phenomenon."

It’s a lovingly crafted movie, and in many ways a good one, but before that it’s an enraptured piece of old-is-new nostalgia.

Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.

It’s a messy and annoying one-joke movie that repeats the joke over and over again — and guess what, it was barely funny the first time.

It turns out to be a very good film — canny and honest and unexpectedly moving. But it’s layered with a thick and sugary frosting of adoration.

The animation in Lilo & Stitch has an engaging retro-simple vivacity, and it's nice to see a movie for tots make use of Elvis Presley, but the story is witless and oddly defanged.

Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.

As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.

It's a David-and-Goliath tale, full of anger and disturbing accusation, but it's also inspiring.

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

It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.

Side Effects is mostly a good Saturday-night movie, but by the end, it's caused a few unintended side effects of its own: a bit of head-scratching, and a giggle or two of disbelief.

Titanic floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.

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.

Holbrook makes Abner a shining-eyed, noble crank.

Divided into chapters, the film jumps around in time, which means that we get to observe Shimizu's utter failure to develop his characters from endless narrative angles.

Glazed over by its worship of Che Guevara.

The movie is a great big feast of wreckage. But that’s also what makes it a bit numbing.

The film simply examines the prejudice that’s standing right in front of it. It’s chilling, but it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

Audiences should have fun with Together, a body-horror movie about a serious thing — love — that never takes itself too seriously.

More noteworthy for its intentions than its execution.

The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.

Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote May December.

It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”

It's an academic meditation in underworld-thriller drag -- a movie that looks about as close to a straight-ahead, down-and-dirty genre entertainment as anything the director has made since his exploding-head horror days.

A candy store for film buffs.

For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.

A little too programmed in its despair, but it coasts along on the jagged music of the modern lothario's song.

Slow going, but I mean it as no insult when I say that it bored me, in the end, to tears.

It's an okay brat movie.

The icy whimsy of Kitchen Stories is certainly well sustained, but you don't laugh at the movie so much as wait for the joke to thaw.

Macdonald’s multi-faceted portrait of Houston allows us to touch the intertwined forces that did her in.

The film's charm ends up worn out by the very perfection of Frank's con. We look at this teen wizard of rotating identity, and we realize we know everything about him except who he is.

The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.

The first thing to say about The Lego Batman Movie is that it’s kicky, bedazzling, and super-fun.

There are fine, fresh observational moments, but the film is much ado about not so much.

What sustains the film is the performers' belief in their shaggy-dog selves, which is more than just talent - it's faith.

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

Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, directed by Daniel Raim, is a passionate and beguiling movie-love documentary that shines a light on two of the unsung artisan heroes of Hollywood.

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

Hugh Grant has grown up, holding on to his lightness and witty cynicism but losing the stuttering sherry-club mannerisms that were once his signature. In doing so, he has blossomed into the rare actor who can play a silver-tongued sleaze with a hidden inner decency.

A gripping documentary that uses voluminous period evidence — unedited news footage, tape recordings of SLA leader Cinque's rants — to brilliantly reconstruct the entire freak event.

Has a bright, dishy spirit.

As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.

I was touched, at moments, by O’Connor’s woeful countenance, but as written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, Rebuilding has no motor.

It’s easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.

Frozen is a squarely enchanting fairy tale that shows you how the definition of what's fresh in animation can shift.

After all of its sadness, a tender redemptive glow.

Yet S21, unlike many documentaries about the Nazi era, isn't a sickening panorama of brutality. Shot on video, it's quiet and intimate.

The pleasure of The Good Liar, and it’s a major one, is the chance to watch Mirren and McKellen act together in a cat-and-mouse duet that turns into an elegant waltz of affection and deception.

A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

What makes Oklahoma City a haunting experience is that the movie, in laying out the road that led to his humanity withering and dying, demonstrates a disquieting continuity between the anti-government wrath of Timothy McVeigh and the fervor of anti-government wreckage that has just been given a new credibility in America.

We're given an intimate seat to this wildly democratic - and creepily messianic - spectacle.

If The Bridesmaid is middle-drawer Chabrol, it's almost worth going to just to watch Laura Smet, a vamp of not-so-basic instinct.

Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis.

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.

For a long time now, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” has been two movies, and the hypnotic film-geek documentary 78/52 is an ingenious and irreverent master class in both of them.

In Monster Theron undergoes one of the most startling transformations in the history of movies.

At 88 minutes, Tabloid is short and sweet (it's pure movie candy), but by the end we've forged an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her unapologetic fearless/nutty valor. And that's what really makes a great tabloid story: It's a vortex that's also a mirror.

Too fragmented to be much more than a flip of the finger to history; the movie, with its mostly mute characters, is too content to plod.

As long as it showcases the art of krump, underscoring the dancers with ominous hip-hop beats, Rize is such a vibrant eruption of motion and attitude that you can forgive the film for being disorganized and too skimpy on street-dance history.

Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.

Beastie Boys Story is less seamless, but more personal, than a classic documentary. Horovitz and Diamond are infectious company, and the film does a meticulous job of presenting the evolution of Adam Yauch, who was always on the edge of technology (it was his idea to tape-loop “When the Levee Breaks”), as well as postmodern pranksterism.

Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.

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

It’s a movie of minor fascinations and seductions; it exerts the pull of a natural-born filmmaker’s eye.

The film can be rambling and glib, yet it's no mere crime drama. It captures a middle-class French society that looks more humane than ours, but is just as messed up.

The gimmicks, in the end, are too arbitrary to tie together in a memorably haunting fashion, though they do culminate in a Big Twist, a nifty one that almost -- but not quite -- makes you want to see the movie again.

Flushed Away lacks the action-contraption dottiness of a Wallace and Gromit adventure, but it hits its own sweet spot of demented delight.

And so even if you're held (as I was) by the acting, you may find yourself fighting the film's design. It reflects a certain lack of faith in your audience to take a performance as authentic as De Niro's and reduce it to the level of a glorified reach-out-and-touch-someone commercial.

Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful and transporting experience — the best, I think, of Disney’s serious animated features in the multiplex era.

Highly entertaining documentary about the folk-pop troubadour of Canada.

You can only hope, for these dudes’ sakes, that “Jackass” isn’t forever. But for now it’s earning its yucks, and its yuck.

Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.

The Bleeding Edge needs to be seen, so that it can change hearts and minds.

Dune is out to wow us, and sometimes succeeds, but it also wants to get under your skin like a hypnotically toxic mosquito. It does…until it doesn’t.

It’s a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip-hop.

A documentary that digs deep inside this most revolutionary and tortured of punk quartets, it's hard not to feel that the Ramones, who never had a hit record, were the greatest band in 50 years to be stonewalled out of success.

A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.

It evokes the spirit of Hitchcock and Highsmith.

It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.

Sweet, flaky, and more than a little aimless.

Mysterious Skin dawdles more than it flows, but it comes alive whenever Araki, hovering between tragedy and voyeurism, reveals how sex can tear lives to pieces.