Owen Gleiberman

A richly intimate sports fable.

There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.

The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''

The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it.

Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.

The film's darkly bedazzled view of the '70s is spurred by great dish from André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli, and Nile Rodgers, who set the stage for Halston's triumphs - and his jaw-dropping fall.

The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.

Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.

The 3-D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies.

As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.

Bilbo, as played by Freeman, suggests a sly-dog Dana Carvey without irony, and he is certainly overmatched, but that doesn't mean he's outplayed. Desolation is now his business.

Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.

A nimble and supple and moving comedy.

The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday.

Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.''

Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon.

The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.

Any doubts as to whether Sienna Miller is a gifted actress should be laid to rest by Interview.

After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.

The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.

Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''

With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.