Owen Gleiberman

The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]

Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.

Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.

The Chronology of Water invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment.

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

It’s a heady, engrossing, indulgently sprawling profile of a modern athlete in all his glory and contradiction, but it’s also a film that leaves you with more questions than it should.

After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.

I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

The Lost City of Z is a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful. It makes no major dramatic missteps, yet it could have used an added dimension — something to make the two-hour-and-20-minute running time feel like a transformative journey rather than an epic anecdotal crusade.

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

In this offbeat buddy-cop comedy, Don Cheadle, as an FBI agent trying to stop a drug ring, makes the perfect foil.

A movie's refusal to judge bad behavior can be a subtle way of trumping the audience -- a passive-aggressive form of one-upmanship.

I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.

It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.

What’s missing from Jungle Fever, I think, is a vision of the positive. By that, I don’t mean some shallow ”optimistic” message but, rather, an organic and casual sense of pleasure as one of the sustaining currents of everyday life — even in a country as mired in racism as this one.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable.

Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness.

You giggle every so often, but you never give yourself over to the characters.

The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned.

Rolling Thunder Revue celebrates the let’s-try-it-on, let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the era, and as a time capsule the film is a gift that keeps on giving.

As long as Nair follows the two characters’ romantic moves or details the lives of their families (whose contrasting status on the ethnic-minority ladder marks them as both rivals and uneasy comrades), the movie is funny, observant, and deeply humane.

Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.

The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

Son Frère is hushed, clinical, grimly paced, and moving.