Owen Gleiberman

This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way.

Part of Me works hard to prove it's more than a glorified infomercial, and one reason it is more is that Perry has a startling story to tell.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films, but I watched Paranormal Activity 3 in a state of high anxiety.

For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.

Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.

At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.

Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy.

The movie might almost be winking at the fact that any single one of these performers could easily be the featured star of his or her own upper-crust period piece.

A spooky, moving documentary.

The finest rock doc since "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, is a 40ish indie-rock star who carries himself like a hip lawyer.

Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.

The Trip looks like a lark - and is - yet there's a sneaky resonance to the way it celebrates what acting means to these two rogue cutups.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn't let those other players in the political process off the hook: the voters.

Penn Badgley saunters around with an air of spooky self-possession, and he does a dead-on impersonation of Buckley's high-vibrato wail.

Rachel Boynton’s gripping doc shows you what happens when the greed of oil companies meets the chaos of postcolonial Africa.

A singular and haunting experience.

The film is a bit too chronological, but its historical reverence is true to gospel's joyful insistence on locating the spiritual in the everyday.

The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.

Even as a kid, I could see that Midnight Cowboy’s true subject isn’t decadence but loneliness...Midnight Cowboy’s peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.

The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.

You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.

Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors.

The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.

Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.

Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater.