Owen Gleiberman

At Thunder Road, you’ll giggle at moments, and you’ll also be moved, but mostly you’ll know the precise crazy-sane reality of who this man is.

It’s a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip-hop.

For All Mankind certainly succeeds at evoking the ironically serene aesthetics of space travel. What it never quite captures is the accompanying human drama. In all likelihood, the film will be shown in classrooms for years to come, but it’s just possible kids will watch it and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Awesome documentary.

A domestic tragedy of lacerating vision.

Her memories lack the quality of revelation -- that is, up until the remarkable final section, in which she describes the last weeks in the bunker with Hitler and Eva Braun.

Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity.

The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous.

Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.

It’s a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more.

It's an irony too significant to ignore that the movie, which proselytizes against penning up whales in order to make them do cute tricks for humans, spends much of its time making Willy do cute tricks for humans.

Lindhardt, sweet and childish and achingly vulnerable, gives a stunning performance.

Another Round is the kind of movie that’s so into its cool concept that it doesn’t sweat the details. Yet the film’s sloppy broadness ends up fighting the Dogme style, which keeps telling us that these people are authentic.

Captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury.

The movie draws us into complicity with someone who may be on the verge of insanity, but only because he's living with the unbearable.

It’s the rare movie that truly evokes the grindhouse ’70s, because it means everything it’s doing. It’s exploitation made with vicious sincerity.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

The sequence serves no real purpose beyond dazzle for dazzle's sake, but when you're watching it, that's purpose enough.

The daring thing Coppola does, given that we’re used to seeing even sophisticated biopics weave the lives they’re showing us into dramatic arcs, is to present the rise and fall of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship as a diary, one that simply flows forward in a kind of objective Zen fashion, never trumping anything up.

An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.

A powerfully timely and absorbing documentary.

The rare rock doc that’s a must-see.

Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.

A canny, derivative, wildly gruesome portrait of a London sociopath who's the scariest of sadists, in part because he's also a very courtly one.

A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.

It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.

A tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time.

Directed by the ingenious documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), A Brief History of Time held out the promise of being an audacious, brain-bending experience. Instead, it's plodding and disappointingly conventional.