Owen Gleiberman

A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.

The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.

By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.

As it becomes clear that Ball, in essence, has just restaged American Beauty with a socially conscious paint job, the sensationalism of Towelhead looks more and more like a dramatic tic.

Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.

Deeply rich and strange new romantic comedy.

It's a mad cycle of arrogance and despair, and Bloody Sunday etches it onto your nervous system.

Phantom Thread sweeps you up and carries you along, much more, to my mind, than “The Master” did. Yet it’s a thesis movie: the story of a bullying narcissist who lacks the ability to have a relationship, and the outrageous way he’s schooled into becoming a human being. It’s the story of a control freak made by a control freak.

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.

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen.

Even when "Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning.

A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

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

Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.

An extraordinary film; it may be the most haunting documentary since ''Crumb.''

It's a film of jaw-dropping virtuosity and pleasure, one that leaves you revved, enthralled, tickled, moved, and amazed.

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.

Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

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 wonderful movie, a delicate and touching drama that takes us deep inside the eccentric competitive mystique of grandmaster chess.

A film of droll and dry observational precision, its emotional minimalism is almost fetishistic -- and, by the end, a tad frustrating.

When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.

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.

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

The result is a playful, elusive movie that isn't so much heartwarming as soul-cleansing.