Owen Gleiberman

An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.

Light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are lickety-split mad fun.

In Shoot Me, she wears her spiked cynicism like a cutting form of grace, and everyone around her (including audiences) gets healed by it.

Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity.

The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year.

El Bulli becomes a haunting celebration of the human desire to turn food into art - even if the results are consciously insane.

The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.

It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."

As compelling as it is bizarre.

A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play.

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.

Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since "Blair Witch" itself. It's also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.

Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why.

It's a crackerjack B movie worthy of comparison to such stylishly low-down, smart-meets-dumb, hyper-violent entertainments as the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown," Clint Eastwood's infamous police bloodbath "The Gauntlet," John Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13," and Arnold's own overlooked 1986 outing "Raw Deal."

The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.

Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."