Owen Gleiberman

This is the richest role Paltrow has had since ''Shakespeare in Love,'' and she rises to the challenge. She digs deep into Plath's mercurial nature, giving us a Sylvia who's fiercely independent and alive yet burdened with demons of insecurity that bubble up in a rage.

Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.

With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.

The Spectacular Now doesn't shrink from being an all-out teen movie (it has hookups and a senior prom). Yet it's one of the rare truly soulful and authentic teen movies. It's about the experience of being caught on the cusp and not knowing which way you'll land.

Andrew Wagner has made a lovely comedy of death and rebirth.

When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.

Whether you respond to this movie may come down to the question of how far you think people are willing to go to realize their desires. Damage says that they’ll go all the way — past honor, past rationality, past sin. The movie may not always convince, but when it does it’s a cataclysmic peek into the erotic abyss.

Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.

Plato's Retreat was a buffet of bodies, and the film catches the moment America could think that was tasty.

The tale itself is so spectacularly perverse, and the film stays so authentically close to the personalities involved, that you don't feel dirty -- you feel cleansed.

Hopping from Germany to Turkey and back again, Akin is out to capture the ways that a globalized world can tear up our hearts, and repair them, too.

In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.

It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.

The film’s exhilaration is that it shows you, through its dangling-from-a-steel-beam footage, what love really is: scaling the heights of devotion, no matter how perilous, without a net.

As someone who’s absorbed bits and pieces of the Miles Davis story over the years but never felt like I had the big picture, I found “Birth of the Cool” to be intensely gratifying. Nelson is a filmmaker with a sixth sense for how to nudge history into the present.

Palm Trees and Power Lines finds a truth, one it wrenches out of an experience.

Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.

It shows you, through the ironic empathy summoned by Washington’s performance, just how fast the human race can slip off the tracks. And it brings that drama into ravishing deep focus.

Logan Lucky is Soderbergh in mid-season form, and there should be a solid summer niche for a movie that’s this much ripsnorting fun.

Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.

In its tiny-scaled staged-documentary way, Peter Hujar’s Day is exquisitely done and arresting to watch.

An exquisitely crafted documentary about the woman who was arguably the greatest movie critic who ever lived.

Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.

Agnès Varda, in the glory of her golden years, has become a humanist magician.

The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.