Owen Gleiberman

The power of The Social Network is that Zuckerberg is a weasel with a mission that can never be dismissed. The movie suggests that he may have built his ambivalence about human connection into Facebook's very DNA. That's what makes him a jerk-hero for our time.

Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.

Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.

With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.

Brie Larson, as the caring but tormented Grace (who's pregnant and doesn't know if she has the faith to have her baby), and John Gallagher Jr., as her gentle-dweeb fellow worker Mason (who fears his love can't save her), show you what emotionally naked acting is all about.

The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.

E.T. is ultimately a tale of love, and the film becomes a cathartic leap into pure feeling. [2002 re-release]

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

King in the Wilderness is a searing film because it takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from the mountaintop. You glimpse the real glory of who he was: not a walking monument but a human being with fear, humor, guts, and (amazing) grace under pressure.

In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.

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

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

Hoop Dreams is an astonishing emotional experience — it has highs, lows, and everything in between.

May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.

La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled.

An extraordinary film; it may be the most haunting documentary since ''Crumb.''

The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.

As riveting as its title.

Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.

Mesmerizing.

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?

Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.

Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers.

A haunting and incandescent work of art.

One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.

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

Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.

Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male.

Nothing more (or less) than an enchanting light comedy of romantic confusion... It's a movie that understands love because it understands pain.

Disciplined script -- bitingly funny.

The one truly thrilling movie I've seen so far this year.

The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.

Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them.

There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.

In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.

Leaves you shaken and ecstatic at the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.

Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.

In Amour, these two actors show us what love is, what it really looks like, and what it may, at its most secret moments, demand.

It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of.

The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.

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.

A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.

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

A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.

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.

A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.

What’s magical about Kane — the sheer transformative thrill of invention — is there in every shot, every performance, every narrative surge.

The thriller that's exciting, cathartic, and powerfully disturbing. Prisoners is that type of movie. It's rooted in 40 years of Hollywood revenge films, yet it also breaks audacious new ground.

The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.

In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.

All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.

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.

Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.

The movie is rich with class tension, and if Allen nails the moods of the wealthy, he also gets surprising, dynamic performances from Hawkins, Cannavale, and Andrew Dice Clay as the folks who have no money but may have a fuller sense of what life is.

Killing them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you.

Most of us consider Marilyn Monroe a born star with modest acting skills, but Love, Marilyn deepens the argument that the ditzy, dim-bulb ''Marilyn'' was every inch a performance, and a brilliant one.

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

The new film, which unfolds in real time over the course of 80 minutes, is a deeper, darker, altogether more memorable experience. It doesn't extend the characters so much as fulfill them.

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.

One of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be.

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

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

Describing Woodstock as a concert movie is a little like calling Notre Dame a house of worship. In its scope and grandeur, its feel for the paradoxical nature of an event in which half a million middle-class bohemians created their own scruffy, surging community — a metropolis of mud — Woodstock remains the one true rock-concert spectacle, a counterculture Triumph of the Will. [1994]

Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered

The film sweeps us up like a thriller, forcing us to at least ask whether terrorism like the ELF's (which targeted property, never human lives) might ever be justified.

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

It's a film of jaw-dropping virtuosity and pleasure, one that leaves you revved, enthralled, tickled, moved, and amazed.

Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]

It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.

Lindhardt, sweet and childish and achingly vulnerable, gives a stunning performance.

By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.

Even when "Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning.

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

The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.

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."

By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.

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.

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.

An exquisitely fun documentary.

Argo is never less than wildly entertaining, but a major part of its power is that it so ominously captures the kickoff to the world we're in now.

The Past, is hugely ambitious — it's Farhadi seizing his moment — yet it's also a wrenchingly intimate tale of lives torn asunder by forces within and without them.

Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.

A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy.

Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.

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.''

The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.

The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. “One Battle After Another” is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.

A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.

After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.

It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.

A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.

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

The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.

It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.

Fruitvale Station is great political filmmaking because it's great filmmaking, period.

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

It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.