Owen Gleiberman

An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression. At the same time, it offers something we rarely encounter in a whirling martial-arts extravaganza: a romantic passion that's woven into the very fabric of the action.

A big, square, rousing political thriller docudrama.

Sensational sex-and-its-consequences melodrama.

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?

James Gray's Two Lovers really is a '70s movie, in the mode of such raw, unfiltered character studies as "The Panic in Needle Park," "Wanda," and "Fat City."

By the end, the rug gets pulled out from under us, showing that even the reality we think we see may be an illusion.

The old-world-meets-new mesh is incarnated in the movie's soundtrack, a joyful effusion of disco Bollywood that, by the end of Monsoon Wedding, sent my spirit soaring out of the theater.

Olsen, moody and apple-cheeked and intellectually avid, proves a true star: She turns being wiser than her years into an authentic generational state.

Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching.

Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.

Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.

To watch Ryan O’Neal’s performance as the upwardly mobile Barry, part victim and part cad, is to see Kubrick’s perverse genius with actors. He cast a dullard only to jolt us, by the end, with the revelation of the bastard within.

A terrific, small, funny, sad movie.

This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.

Idlewild is a romp, a ticket to rowdy good times.

A crowd-pleaser in the deepest sense, mixes heartbreak and happiness together until you don't even want to see them apart.

Alien3 is a grimly seductive end-of-the-world thriller, with pop-tragic overtones that build in resonance as the movie goes on.

A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.

The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making.

Pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful.

We're given an intimate seat to this wildly democratic - and creepily messianic - spectacle.

Funny, pungent, and weirdly gripping.

Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.

All three of the leads get very close to the Stooges' old looks and personalities, but they do more than impersonate; they inhabit.

Wilson has a scene near the end with Marley that's the most wrenchingly tender acting of his career.

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.

By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.

At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. It's a ride for the gut AND the brain.