Owen Gleiberman

What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.

Emotionally mesmerizing.

They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."

It's not art, but it's mighty fun.

Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?

You'll laugh - a lot - but you'll also shed tears of recognition at this funny, salty, strife-torn look at the agony and ecstasy of family.

Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick

This Is 40 isn't always hilarious, but it's ticklishly honest and droll about all the things being a parent can do to a relationship. And why it's still worth it.

If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.

Brashly engaging.

Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August.

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.

Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

Living in Oblivion celebrates the very act of filmmaking as grand folly, a triumph of absurdist heroism.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.

An artful piece of exploitation vérité.

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

Has a fractured fairy-tale charm, even if it isn't a nonstop laugh riot.

Enchantingly witty.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you angry, and also sad, to live in a country where innovation could be contrived into an enemy.

Bateman deserves props for sustaining Bad Words as a little balancing act between sulfurously funny hatred and humanity.