Owen Gleiberman

It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.

Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie.

Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

It's not every comedy that can make you laugh with ridicule and cringe in empathetic horror at the same time.

Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi.

Anthology films usually work better in theory than execution, but this feature parade of shorts is a blithe, worldly, and enchanting exception.

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

In a world ruled by process, is compassion still real? Or is it just another scam? In Ocean's Thirteen, it is deviously, and merrily, both.

He's a bombs-away provocateur, and in Religulous, Maher's blasphemous detonation of all things holy and scriptural, he doesn't really pretend to play fair. He's like Lenny Bruce with an inquiring mind and a video camera.

Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack.

Turns out to be a supple, intriguing, and beautifully staged movie. It features Dillon, in his most forceful performance since ''Drugstore Cowboy.''

Hercules, like Aladdin, zips Disney’s house animation style past sentimentality and into an age of ironic media-wise overload. That’s not a bad place for it to be.

Rouses you in conventional ways, but it's also the rare animated film that uses 3-D for its breathtaking spatial and emotional possibilities.

Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done.

The result is a wacked kiddie Rashomon in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. Hoodwinked's most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes.

The movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.

A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.

It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.

Wendy and Lucy is like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Antonioni. What's piercing about it, and also disturbing, is that Reichardt views the renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity -- as a lefty romantic dream.

All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.

The movie excoriates the hypocrisy of self-hating gay lawmakers (several of whom it outs), yet it also explores the burden of the public closet.

The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he's running TO.

Morris, using a welter of photographs (many of which we haven't seen), constructs a day-to-day sense of how Abu Ghraib descended into a medieval hell.

The movie is a toxic dart aimed at the spangly new heart of American hypocrisy: our fake-tolerant, fake-charitable, fake-liberated-yet-still madly-closeted fame culture.

Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen.

A smashingly effective documentary -- I found it more resonant than ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' -- yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted.

It's a fearless and brilliant racial-historical satire, done in a meticulous re-creation of the Ken Burns mode, that chronicles the last 150 years of America as if the South had won the Civil War.

One of the pleasures of The Bank Job is that it returns us to the days when robbing a bank was a gritty, hole-in-the-wall affair.