Owen Gleiberman

In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.

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

Do Hou's films deserve to be seen? Absolutely, if only to end the myth that they're too perfect for this world.

Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.

Emotionally mesmerizing.

A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.

Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching.

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary.

Shouldering a laconic-good-guy, neo- Gary Cooper role, Robbins never quite makes emotional contact with the audience.

Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.

Ballard connects you to the beauteous inner calm of the wild, even if audiences today are looking for a lot less calm.

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 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.

If Loach had given full voice to each side of this division, he could have made a great film -- maybe THE great film -- about the Irish struggle.

It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

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.

True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.

The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.

The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.

It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.

Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.

Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.

It's like "Capturing the Friedmans" scrubbed to a happy ending.

A fable of money as the root of jealousy, discord, violence, but the film's slippery fascination as sociological exposé is the flip side of its thinness as drama.

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