Owen Gleiberman

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

If I respect Downfall more than I was enthralled by it, that's because its portayal stops short of revelation. Once you witness Hitler's denial, the film has little more to say about him.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

The Spectacular Now doesn't shrink from being an all-out teen movie (it has hookups and a senior prom). Yet it's one of the rare truly soulful and authentic teen movies. It's about the experience of being caught on the cusp and not knowing which way you'll land.

Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.

If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.

The movie should have been called Diary of a Wimpy Forrest Gump. It's genuinely soft-hearted (you're all but guaranteed to cry) but mush-brained, too.

The end will haunt you.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

Another intimate and powerful drama about what’s going on in people’s everyday lives. ... Loach stages all of this with supreme confidence and flow.

Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.

Exhibiting Forgiveness sends you out on a note of hope, but it’s not exactly a feel-good movie. It’s a feel-the-reality movie, a drama willing to scald. That’s its quiet power.

It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.

Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear.

This time we expect to be played, but the twist is that we're also touched -- which, the film implies, is the cinema's own form of deception.

Parts of the film play like the world's slowest and most insensitive reality show (Who Wants to Be an Octogenarian?).

What makes The Hunting Party an original, gonzo treat is the way that Shepard plants the movie's tone somewhere between hair-trigger investigative danger and the from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire glee of a Hope/Crosby picture.

Matt Wolf directs “Recorder” with a lot of lively skill. He presents the eccentricity of Marion Stokes’ personality with supreme sympathetic understanding, or maybe you could say a bit more romanticism than it deserves.

A tale of ordinary Americans scraping bottom, yet there's a redemption in that. The film asks: If you were this desperate, wouldn't you do the same?

The film flashes back to the poisoning, and it could be the most sickening and calamitous suspense-thriller episode you ever saw.

It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.

Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

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.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

So overstuffed with random fireworks that despite its politics, it's easy to imagine the film getting a four-star rave from Bush or Saddam.

Watching “Lost and Found,” you’re moved by a life that veered into tragedy, yet the place it lands lifts you up. More than a great photographer, Ernest Cole captured something essential. By the end you feel the ghost is speaking to you.