Owen Gleiberman

Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.

It evokes the spirit of Hitchcock and Highsmith.

The Negotiator, once it gets going (there's a rather lengthy prosaic setup), is a satisfyingly tense and booby-trapped thriller about the meeting of two relentless minds.

The movie is like a less original "WALL•E," but it's still vibrant and touching.

Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.

The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.

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

There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.

Passionate and saucy comedy.

An alienated-teen movie that surfs along on the whims and casual cruelties of its central character runs a risk: It can wind up as random and undisciplined as she is. Instead, Little Birds is a touching and distinctive achievement.

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

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!''

The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.

Deeply rich and strange new romantic comedy.

Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps Roll Bounce jumping.

Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut]

A grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple "Rashomon."

Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness.

It took long enough, but Disney has finally come up with an animated heroine who's a good role model and a funky, arresting personality at the same time.

The Last Boy Scout is a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I’ve seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren’t this much fun.

At times too movieish, yet Ashkenazi creates a memorable figure: a spy who operates - admirably - out of the most unyielding nationalist conviction, only to learn that he needs to let some of that conviction go.

Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.

Far more grotesque than the first Human Centipede - in fact, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) could be the sickest B movie ever made.

The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.

Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news.

Adam Scott has a controlled, almost overly impeccable charisma. Handsome, with small precise facial features, he has a witty, hiply downcast delivery that, on screen, can make him seem like a unit unto himself.

The Golden Army dazzles like something out of "Jason and the Argonauts." To make a comic-book fantasy this derivative yet this dazzling requires more than technique. It takes a director in touch with his inner hellboy.

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

Gordon-Levitt proves a natural filmmaker, nimbly staging Jon's highly amusing Catholic confessions, along with porn montages that mimic the dopamine-charged editing of "Requiem for a Dream." He also gets a terrific performance out of Tony Danza as Jon's hilariously blinkered brute of a dad.

A mood of lush romantic decadence -- sleaze made enigmatic -- hovers over Where the Truth Lies, which has a score that works so hard to evoke "Vertigo" that it may leave you dizzy.

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.

A pulsating snapshot of America caught in a mad, liberating identity crisis.

A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.

Woodley, through the delicate power of her acting, does something compelling: She shows you what a prickly, fearful, yet daring personality looks like when it's nestled deep within the kind of modest, bookish girl who shouldn't even like gym class.

Wind sometimes dawdles, but it’s a sports movie with soul.

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

The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.

Delectably caustic comedy.

The best thing about Revolutionary Road, a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple, is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there.

It was only with the advent of digital technology that the notion of an entire film done in a single take became possible. Mike Figgis got there first with ''Time Code,'' and now the Russian director Alexander Sokurov has brought off a comparably startling feat with Russian Ark.

Like its two predecessors, Scary Movie 3 is a hit-or-miss affair, but the gags that connect really connect.

Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, an ebullient sliver of a movie, follows a group of men and women in their early 20s, and for once the un-dialogue dialogue doesn't come off as an affectation.

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.

As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.

The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.

Battle of the Smithsonian has plenty of life. But it's Adams who gives it zing.

Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today.

As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.

A fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy.

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.

A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.

U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.

Hurtling and impassioned, driven by some of the greatest popular music ever recorded, this wildly overripe and unkempt biopic is a true experience.

Devious and inspired enough to juice you past any weak spots. Thou shalt be amused.

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.

Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.

Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.

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

A great many filmmakers — too many — use handheld cameras to evoke a sensation of raw, this is really happening immediacy. But director Paul Greengrass is unique. At a glance, his live-wire, ragged-camera method may seem overly familiar, but the way he employs it, that method is as expressive as the style of a superb novelist.

Gas Food Lodging is really about the same thing Thelma & Louise was about: It’s a portrait of working-class women betrayed and abandoned by men. Yet I vastly preferred this movie’s generous and buoyant tone.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.

If anyone steals the movie, though, it's Sylvie Testud, who never lets on whether the sexy French country maid she's playing is mournfully obtuse or embodies the wisdom of the ages.

Machete Kills is gruesomely baroque trash staged with a kinetic freedom that is truly eye-popping, so you can forgive its lapses, like how it goes on a little too long. Rodriguez's only real sin as a filmmaker is that he wants to give you way too much of a crazy ultraviolent good time.

Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.

A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".

First Snow is essentially a short story with a metaphysical twist, but Pearce puts his fears more up front than any actor I can think of.

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Roberts, in her most forceful dramatic performance, allows us to take in every moment through fresh, impassioned eyes.

Herzog's fascinating, rambling, love-hate documentary about their friendship and creative partnership, and in its discursive, anecdotal way it gets at the essence of one of cinema's indelible crackpots.

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.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this oasis of romance amid the turmoil of Shanghai represents the way that Merchant and Ivory, for 40 years, saw themselves: as a sanctuary of calming, life-size taste in a movie culture grown coarse. It was often far from perfect, but I'll miss that sanctuary.

What holds The Eclipse together is Hinds' sorrowful and moving performance as a man haunted in more ways than one.

At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.

Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.

Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.

Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

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

Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.

It's like Woodstock without the mud, and it leaves you feeling clean.

Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.

This is the sort of incendiary role a lot of actors would kill for, yet the shock of Norton's performance isn't its showboat flamboyance. It's that he makes this sadistic junior sociopath rueful and intelligent.

Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns.

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

Like Christina’s dance, the movie is a gorgeous tease, an artful promise of something that never quite arrives.

It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.

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

A lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you.

The rare case in which a filmmaker's unadulterated worship of his subjects adds force and resonance--and not just luster--to the way that we see them.

Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.

I wish that the film had more of the tasty futuristic detail promised by that dummy parole officer. I also wish that Blomkamp took us deeper into the world of Elysium.

As long as Nair follows the two characters’ romantic moves or details the lives of their families (whose contrasting status on the ethnic-minority ladder marks them as both rivals and uneasy comrades), the movie is funny, observant, and deeply humane.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.

Gripping in its intimacy.

Frankie & Johnny does what any true romantic movie should: It makes the mysterious, push-and-pull alchemy of love seem, once again, worth the effort.

Posey, her attention divided up into slivers, is funny as hell, but she's also terrifying in her evocation of a kind of moment-to-moment PowerPoint existence.

The movie, which has the slightly glum perversity of early Chabrol, is a dream of betrayal, with the squirmiest attack-of-nature tableau since Willard.

Just because a scenario turns dark doesn't mean that it's convincing. House of Sand and Fog is artful until it lunges for Art.

Williams hasn't been this sympathetic in years.

It hooks you up, happily, to your inner top chef.

Full of splendidly shot wonders.

Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.

Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.

The film is an inflammatory morality play shot through with rage and despair.

It's eye candy that detonates.

Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.

Smart enough to hook us with the best thing it has going: Cedric the Entertainer's gruffly uproarious and lived-in performance as Eddie.

It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.

Highlights Gaskin's down-home gumption as an advocate for the glory of natural childbirth.

The Young Victoria has a subtler flow than you might expect, and at times it's calmer than you may like. Director Jean-Marc Vallée's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded? princess fantasy.

The movie is fascinating, though it smacks its own lips a bit too much at the tackiness of freak '70s stardom.

Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have.

A breakneck inner-city odyssey of jump-cut shaky-cam suspense.

Captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury.

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

The movie is sensationally exciting, but its hey-kids-let s-put-on-a-war! story line plays like Beverly Hills, 90210 recast as a military-recruitment film for the Third Reich.

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

A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.

Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge. 

Hannibal lacks the rounded emotional elegance of ''The Silence of the Lambs'' (that was a great film; this one is merely good).

The movie draws us into complicity with someone who may be on the verge of insanity, but only because he's living with the unbearable.

If the pleaures of Heavenly Creatures remain defiantly on the surface, on that level the movie is a dazzler.

Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.

The film's style is so ''objective'' it's a bit subdued, yet this is a sports drama of total originality, as well as the most authentic inside view of the immigrant experience the movies have given us in quite a while.

A gratifyingly clever, booby-trapped thriller that has enough fun and imagination and dash to more than justify its existence.

People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.

Lila, played by Vahina Giocante, who resembles a sexed-up young Emma Thompson, is a teasing, 16-year-old blond baby doll with a gleam of perception beyond her years.

Has too many contrivances, but as an act of sinister staging, it proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker.

Her memories lack the quality of revelation -- that is, up until the remarkable final section, in which she describes the last weeks in the bunker with Hitler and Eva Braun.

By the time Hard Target reaches its amazing climax, set in a warehouse stocked with surreal Mardi Gras floats, the film has become an incendiary action orgy, as joyously excessive as the grand finale in a fireworks show. Woo puts the thrill back into getting blown away.

To explain a serial killer is to diminish his madness, but Dahmer does something quietly riveting. It lets you brush up against the humanity of a psycho, without making him any less psycho.

The film is consistently fun, and Tucker's comeuppance ? will leave you gasping (if not gagging) with laughter.

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.

Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.

Hard Candy is extreme - a battle of the sexes that glides from tricky to angry to shockingly ugly.

A good satire that had the untimely bad luck to be about a U.S. soldier who will do anything it takes to party, except fight for the right.

Won't Back Down says that whatever your feelings about the subject, lack of change cannot be the answer to our public-education crisis. Trying to cram an informational exposé and a vintage inspirational awards-bait weeper into one movie, Won't Back Down is awkward at times, yet it's also passionate in a surprisingly smart way. It makes a genuine drama out of impossible issues.

Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power.

A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.

Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.

The movie is consistently entertaining; it sucks you in. James Spader is a little too recessive, yet he lends the action a core of wormy anxiety.

Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.

In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.

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.

Harper Lee hasn't been interviewed in 47 years, but this meditation on her only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," puts you inside her skin.

Lyrical, stirring, and beautifully acted — a seamless adaptation of a novel many will recall with almost too much familiarity.

The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around.

The Fifth Estate is flawed (it grips the brain but not the heart), yet it feverishly exposes the tenor of whistle-blowing in the brave new world, with the Internet as a billboard for anyone out to spill secrets. Call it the anti-social network.

That's Trumbo's message -- that the true victim was America.

The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head?

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.

The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no.

The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary.

The Australian actress Frances O'Connor is a true find. She's as beautiful as the young Barbara Hershey, with a stare that's pensive yet playful, and she puts us in touch with the quiet battle of emotions in Fanny.

Cameron wants to take the audience ''back to 'Titanic,''' but the journey's magic is hemmed in, paradoxically, by the transcendence of his previous effort; surely he must know that a lot of us never left.

Even from the safety of a movie seat, you can just about feel the stinging hardness of the surf. Blue crush? This is more like white smash.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

The key to The Company is the quiet, focused rapture of Neve Campbell, who formally trained in ballet and performed all of her on-screen dances. The tranquil delight she takes in her body becomes its own eloquent form of acting.

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.

Control goes past the clichés of punk rock-god gloom to offer a snapshot of alienation that's shockingly humane.

Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It's the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself.

Ritchie concocts a crime-jungle demimonde that's organically linked to the real world, and it's a damn fun one to visit.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

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

Schrader tries to find the human side of it all, and he scores with Lohan, who taps a vulnerability beneath her dissolution to remind you why she's still a movie star.

The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.

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.

As skewed, prismatic, and free of fluff as the man himself.

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

The cast is a pitch-perfect assemblage of pretty young things, but James Van Der Beek, as a slit-eyed dorm stud, proves that he can be an actor of cruel force.

The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.

Lurie hits closer to the bone here than he did in his ham-handed "The Contender" (2000).

The creators of Captain America: The Winter ­Soldier have brought off something fresh and bold.

The story in Madagascar 3 is functional, but the antically civilized spirit is infectious.

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

It’s really one of the very first, very early Gen-X movies (the true first one, to me, is 1978’s terrific Over the Edge), and I was struck all over again by the freshness of what it captured: these four prematurely jaded adolescent girls, led by Jodie Foster as the sensible one, living like baby adults, cut off from their parents and the past, bonded only by attitude, consumerism, and the pop-culture decadence they share.

Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.

In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.

Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.

It's an enjoyable ramble, with a feel for what made the early days of rock as wild as any that followed.

If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

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

It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.

It’s the rare movie that truly evokes the grindhouse ’70s, because it means everything it’s doing. It’s exploitation made with vicious sincerity.

It’s a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more.

In the piercing and perceptive documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, it’s fascinating, in an outrageous and distressing way, to witness the moment when Ailes transformed the nation’s political landscape virtually overnight.

As an actress, Olivia Wilde has been something of a shape-shifter, but in this movie she seems to be burning through all her previous roles to find something essential. She grabs hold of the spectacle of agonized female anger, and does it with a grace and power that easily matches that of Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

Throughout the film, he’s so calmly but blazingly articulate, so candid about the processes of moviemaking and his strengths (and weaknesses) as an actor, so wise about the meaning of his own stardom, that I realized, with a touch of embarrassment, a prejudice I’ve been carrying around for 47 years. Deep in my reptile brain, I still think Sylvester Stallone is Rocky.

Lazy Eye makes you realize how rare it is to see a movie, even an indie movie, that gives you the privilege of listening to authentically smart conversation. The understated flow of talk makes us feel like we’re eavesdropping.

“Weird,” it turns out, isn’t a real biopic. It’s a movie that does to the biopic form what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” — imitates it, razzes it, throws mud at it, turns it inside out. And all with supreme affection.

Bodies Bodies Bodies, with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a lark, a contradiction — a lurid, violent, caught-in-the-gutter movie that’s also a nimble and knowing tall tale for adults.

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.

On the Rocks turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whisky brand of world-weary deviltry.

Assassins is a terrific true-crime story, but it’s also a documentary thriller about the new world disorder.

The Suicide Squad is cunningly scuzzy, disreputable fun.

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.

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.

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

There’s a grand paradox at work in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The film isn’t simply a technological experiment; it’s also a highly original, heartfelt, and engrossing story. And part of the power of it lies in the way that those two things are connected.

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.

It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.

Creed III is a sports drama that feels like a thriller with an urgent conscience.

[Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.

I found the film intensely revealing of Gaga’s life and personality, especially when she’s getting treatments to deal with the pain that’s dogged her for three years, ever since she suffered a broken hip (misdiagnosed at the time) on tour.

A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.

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.

You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.

There are scenes in Spielberg’s version that will melt you, scenes that will make your pulse race, and scenes where you simply sit back and revel in the big-spirited grandeur of it all.

It’s far from a masterpiece, yet it holds you, it adds up, and it’s something to see.

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.

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.

As Wolfgang, directed by David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), entertainingly captures, Puck tumbled into innovations that became more influential than anyone, including him, might have expected.

A loopy entertaining WTF lark. ... The fact that it holds you, for 77 minutes, is a testament to the debauched rigor of Dupieux’s filmmaking.

What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive.

You walk out of Chasing Coral feeling that Richard Vevers is correct: The more that people see, and understand, the death of our coral, the more they’ll realize that climate change isn’t just about wrecking the planet, it’s about humanity destroying itself.

It just has a story to tell, and it does that incredibly compellingly.

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.

This is closer to a grandly efficient greatest-hits thrill ride, packaged like a video game. Yet on that level it’s a confidently spooky, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-jangling piece of entertainment.

[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.

The Rise of Skywalker is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (I mean that, but given the last eight films, the bar isn’t that high

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.

“Chasing Trane” is a seductive piece of middle-of-the-road documentary filmmaking; it gives you the basics, but beautifully.

Mayor Pete shows us the trial by fire of it all, and also the jubilant grind.

A perfect movie for this moment.

The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.

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.

David E. Talbert, the writer-director of Almost Christmas, has assembled a gifted cast and given them a chance to stretch out and play with their roles. He has made a heartwarming gripe-and-grouchfest that pushes a lot of buttons, though with a vivacity that’s exuberantly funny and sincere.

Even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.

As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.

A perfectly timed, compulsively watchable once-over-lightly documentary. ... After all [the recent] dramatic treatments, it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things.

The Blackening is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere.

As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.

The relentless flow of manufactured scandal and over-the-top lies in Our New President, all packaged with “authentic” video footage and flash-cut techniques, is sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing.... But mostly it’s scary.

The movie, like so many Cronenberg films, is a gut-twister that is really, just underneath, a painstakingly chewed-over and cerebral experience. It’s an outré nightmare that keeps telling you what to think about what it means.

This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something.

All Day and a Night is made with empathy and skill, but it’s as clear-eyed and remorseless as a news report.

Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.

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

The Bibi Files is an important documentary, because it takes in the big picture of how Benjamin Netanyahu became so entrenched that he remade Israel in his own image, in much the same way that Trump has done in the U.S. and will now try to do even more.

Plan B is a girls-behaving-badly all-night-long road-trip comedy that’s built on a formula chassis, but it’s fast and funny, with a scandalous spirit, and it’s got a couple of lead performances that, if there’s any justice, should have the town talking.

A groundbreaking, creepy, fascinating, and important documentary.

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.

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 portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving.

We’re invited to laugh at what we’re seeing, yet Miller works in such a heartfelt and unassuming way that we’re never standing outside the quirks.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.

The Fate of the Furious is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop.

It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough.

Frank Serpico is a finely etched and fascinating documentary.

Hello, Bookstore is a salute to the sacramental qualities of art that are threaded through everyday life.

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

"Sheryl" tells these anecdotes, and others, in a swift and captivating fashion, with the director, Amy Scott, in engaging command.

This is dark, squalid, squinting-through-the-keyhole stuff, and it can make a film like The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe sound like a guilty-pleasure piece of true-crime trash, one of those glorified tabloid-TV exposés with a patina of investigative credibility. In fact, it’s a very good film.

The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.

“Dream Is Destiny” is a pleasurably crafted career snapshot that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

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

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.

House of Gucci is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.

For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.

The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.

Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.

Fall is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.

When I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel (the script is by Christy Hall) and directed by Justin Baldoni (who is one of the film’s costars), it’s an avid and emotional movie that pulls you right along. If you go in not knowing what it’s about, and are therefore all the more surprised by where it goes, it may be even more effective.

The Pod Generation is very much about our flesh, and the forces that are only too happy to take it away from us.

It’s a commercial comedy that has a delirious good time poking fun at Nicolas Cage, celebrating everything that makes him Nicolas Cage — and, in the end, actually becoming a Nicolas Cage movie, which turns out to be both a cheesy thing and a special thing.

Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does.

Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.

It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.