Owen Gleiberman

A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.

Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

This story of a 12-year-old boy who drops through the net of middle-class life invites us-in each shimmering frame-to gaze upon the world with a child's freshly awakening vision.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.

It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.

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

A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.

It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.

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.

Oren Moverman's Rampart is a terrific film: tense, shocking, complex, mesmerizing.

It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.

The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places the audience right up there in space along with them.

With an authenticity that is tender and merciless, the movie shows you what it looks like when youth rebellion becomes a form of fascism.

Potent and eye-opening documentary.

A marvelous movie.

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

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.

The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.

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.

A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.

It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.