Owen Gleiberman

What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.

Emotionally mesmerizing.

They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."

It's not art, but it's mighty fun.

Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?

You'll laugh - a lot - but you'll also shed tears of recognition at this funny, salty, strife-torn look at the agony and ecstasy of family.

Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick

This Is 40 isn't always hilarious, but it's ticklishly honest and droll about all the things being a parent can do to a relationship. And why it's still worth it.

If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.

Brashly engaging.

Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August.

Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.

Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

Living in Oblivion celebrates the very act of filmmaking as grand folly, a triumph of absurdist heroism.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.

An artful piece of exploitation vérité.

The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.

Has a fractured fairy-tale charm, even if it isn't a nonstop laugh riot.

Enchantingly witty.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you angry, and also sad, to live in a country where innovation could be contrived into an enemy.

Bateman deserves props for sustaining Bad Words as a little balancing act between sulfurously funny hatred and humanity.

Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.

This lone, fallen Nazi's obsessive distance from his actions is enough to give The Specialist a lingering chill.

An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.

Light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are lickety-split mad fun.

In Shoot Me, she wears her spiked cynicism like a cutting form of grace, and everyone around her (including audiences) gets healed by it.

Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity.

The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year.

El Bulli becomes a haunting celebration of the human desire to turn food into art - even if the results are consciously insane.

The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.

It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."

As compelling as it is bizarre.

A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play.

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.

Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since "Blair Witch" itself. It's also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.

Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why.

It's a crackerjack B movie worthy of comparison to such stylishly low-down, smart-meets-dumb, hyper-violent entertainments as the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown," Clint Eastwood's infamous police bloodbath "The Gauntlet," John Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13," and Arnold's own overlooked 1986 outing "Raw Deal."

The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.

Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."

The Cockettes weren't talented, exactly, yet the bedazzled flakiness of their passion takes you closer than just about any movie has to what was once really meant by the term ''free-spirited.''

Clooney certainly brings out the best in his actors, but his driving trait as a filmmaker is that he knows what plays - he has an uncanny sense of how to uncork a scene and let it bubble and flow.

A richly intimate sports fable.

There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.

The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''

The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it.

Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.

The film's darkly bedazzled view of the '70s is spurred by great dish from André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli, and Nile Rodgers, who set the stage for Halston's triumphs - and his jaw-dropping fall.

The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.

Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.

The 3-D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies.

As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.

Bilbo, as played by Freeman, suggests a sly-dog Dana Carvey without irony, and he is certainly overmatched, but that doesn't mean he's outplayed. Desolation is now his business.

Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control.

A nimble and supple and moving comedy.

The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday.

Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.''

Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon.

The revelation of Microcosmos isn’t just that the insect world has a complex and stirring order — it’s how close these bugs come to having minds.

Any doubts as to whether Sienna Miller is a gifted actress should be laid to rest by Interview.

After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.

The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up.

Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''

With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.

The film doesn't turn its issues into a glorified essay, but it does use them to give the audience a vital emotional workout.

It would be hard to imagine a moment when romantic passion seemed more desperate, more rapturous, more true.

This brave documentary takes on the topic of anti-Semitism in a relentlessly probing and original way.

Part of Me works hard to prove it's more than a glorified infomercial, and one reason it is more is that Perry has a startling story to tell.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films, but I watched Paranormal Activity 3 in a state of high anxiety.

For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.

Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.

At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.

Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy.

The movie might almost be winking at the fact that any single one of these performers could easily be the featured star of his or her own upper-crust period piece.

A spooky, moving documentary.

The finest rock doc since "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, is a 40ish indie-rock star who carries himself like a hip lawyer.

Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.

The Trip looks like a lark - and is - yet there's a sneaky resonance to the way it celebrates what acting means to these two rogue cutups.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn't let those other players in the political process off the hook: the voters.

Penn Badgley saunters around with an air of spooky self-possession, and he does a dead-on impersonation of Buckley's high-vibrato wail.

Rachel Boynton’s gripping doc shows you what happens when the greed of oil companies meets the chaos of postcolonial Africa.

A singular and haunting experience.

The film is a bit too chronological, but its historical reverence is true to gospel's joyful insistence on locating the spiritual in the everyday.

The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.

Even as a kid, I could see that Midnight Cowboy’s true subject isn’t decadence but loneliness...Midnight Cowboy’s peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.

The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.

You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.

Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors.

The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.

Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.

Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater.

Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.

Soderbergh is able to execute his games without pigeonholing his characters. He has made that rare thing, a modern-day noir with feeling.

Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.

Breathless and petite yet powerfully in-your-face, Fisher combines dizzy femininity and no-nonsense verve in the manner of a classic screwball heroine. She's like Carole Lombard reborn as a tiny angel-faced dynamo.

The film casts a hypnotic spell all its own. It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.

For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.

The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.

Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above.

The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.

The baby-voiced costar of "Chasing Amy" proves an effortless filmmaker, turning Lucy’s journey into the awakening of a soul.

Turns the tricks of psychology into duplicitous high play.

Days after I saw The Artist, I was still thinking (and grinning) about it, because the movie's real romance is the one between us, the jaded 21st-century audience, and the mechanical innocence of old movies, which here becomes new again.

The movie also captures Thompson's tragedy: the haze of drugs and bad writing that consumed him for no less than his last 30 years.

It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment.

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.

The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.

There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology.

The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.

An Inconvenient Truth can't, of course, reveal a future that is still up to us, but by the time you're done watching, the real question is, Which way on God's green earth would you want to err?

Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

It's scary good fun.

It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art.

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.

A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride.

On the eve of Wuornos' 2002 execution, Broomfield digs deep into her abusive hell of a background (beatings, incest, sleeping homeless in the frozen Michigan woods) as well as her quasi-psychotic defense mechanisms.

The Passenger isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression.

Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater.

Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.

The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon.

The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, the backwaters of showbiz, and true magic. It's a wee charmer that left me enchanted.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters.

In the end, the most impressive performance may be Spike Lee's. He uses skill without gimmickry, flash without fuss, to tap the mesmerizing soul of this pulp.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

On the Outs parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power.

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.

The end will haunt you.

Agreeably skewed fun.

The Fugitive is hardly Hitchcock — it never taps our emotions in a way that threatens to transcend the action — but it’s a mainstream thriller made with conviction, intelligence, and heat. In Hollywood, that used to be called professionalism. These days, it’s rare enough to look like artistry.

The movie is Mike's story, and Channing Tatum proves himself a true movie star. His Mike glides through the world with the ease of a god, and on stage he's electrifying.

Trekkies is hilarious, fascinating, and, at times, almost scary.

I will say that it's been a while since a romantic comedy mustered this much charm by looking this much like life.

You could describe Margin Call as a thriller (it's wired with suspense), yet the tension all comes from words.

If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe.

Crystal’s ordinariness — his utter lack of glamour — really works for him here. He’s far more pleasureful to watch in this sort of dramatic-comedy role than, say, Robin Williams, because his comfy, urban-shlemiel personality helps ground the jokes.

Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation.

A domestic tragedy of lacerating vision.

The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance.

Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.

This one, as thoughtful as it is rousing, scores a TKO.

A richly tender and moving experience.

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.

Told in a tricky flashback mode that's vivid even with a few too many temporal kinks, Don't Move is the sort of thing that Claude Chabrol was once praised for making with more pretension and a lot less less juice.

The film satirizes, and celebrates, an idea pivotal to both Hollywood and love: that in a world of impostors, the pretender with the most conviction can become exactly what he pretends to be.

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.

Horton's attempt to authenticate the painting in the face of a hostile art establishment becomes a study in forensics, taste, money, and class warfare.

The Help has a saucy, humorous side.

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.

[Stone's] filmmaking is so supple and alive, his obsession with the visual aspect of history so electrifying, that JFK practically roots itself in your imagination.

A fizzy and delirious high-camp message-movie musical that may just turn out to be the happiest movie of the summer.

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.