Owen Gleiberman

Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is a droll, spirited, and disarmingly intimate documentary that now feels karmically timed.

Control goes past the clichés of punk rock-god gloom to offer a snapshot of alienation that's shockingly humane.

You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by My Flesh and Blood, but the director, Jonathan Karsh, merges compassion with voyeurism until you can't tell the difference.

It has the sprawl and generosity of a good Dead show, yet there’s nothing indulgent about it — it’s an ardent piece of documentary classicism.

Gas Food Lodging is really about the same thing Thelma & Louise was about: It’s a portrait of working-class women betrayed and abandoned by men. Yet I vastly preferred this movie’s generous and buoyant tone.

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

Working in their rigorously lyrical drama-as-documentary style, the Dardennes place the audience on the hamster wheel of Tori and Lokita’s lives, in a way that’s both harrowing and immersive.

A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.

Displays a promise it doesn't, in the end, live up to. See it for Swinton's embodiment of unadulterated maternal will.

Spitting obscenities at the film's director, Jay Bulger, Baker recalls his days as: the '60s thrash caveman who gave Cream and Blind Faith their transcendent power surge; the pioneer of druggy hotel-room rampages; and the damaged purist who left the pop world for Africa. The movie salutes the rhythms and the wreckage.

So obsessed with wowing you, in every corner of every frame, that as a movie it doesn't quite breathe.

By the end of the movie, you realize that these two have devised nothing less than a media-age alternative to the Nixon era’s dirty tricks. The War Room is a giddy celebration of clean tricks.

It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, an ebullient sliver of a movie, follows a group of men and women in their early 20s, and for once the un-dialogue dialogue doesn't come off as an affectation.

The movie has a hushed sensual resonance, but it turns faith into an endurance test.

The movie is rich with class tension, and if Allen nails the moods of the wealthy, he also gets surprising, dynamic performances from Hawkins, Cannavale, and Andrew Dice Clay as the folks who have no money but may have a fuller sense of what life is.

You may not agree with everything Dorothy Lewis says in “Crazy, Not Insane,” but you come out of the movie alive to the place where evil and insanity meet and then fall back apart.

It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.

The Golden Army dazzles like something out of "Jason and the Argonauts." To make a comic-book fantasy this derivative yet this dazzling requires more than technique. It takes a director in touch with his inner hellboy.

Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.

The Freshman has its moments — I enjoyed Paul Benedict’s performance as a pompously self-infatuated film professor — but mostly it plods along like that lizard. Still, whenever Brando shows up the screen just about twinkles.

The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.

The film presents a psychological, almost novelistic portrait of how Bourdain evolved as a person during the years of his celebrity.

A gripping and incisive documentary.

Costner's surfer-bum affectlessness works here; he turns the Mariner into the world's most jaded lifeguard.

Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.

It takes this fabled, high-swoon moment of pop-music history, almost all of which we now view through a mythological lens, and humanizes it in an exhilarating way.

The songs of the South African freedom fighters were a literal call to arms. The music succeeded -- magnificently. The movie, on the other hand, is only so-so.