Owen Gleiberman

In Last Man Standing, Broomfield comes close to answering the questions — of guilt and recrimination — that have hung over these murders for too long.

It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant.

“Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”

Given its gnarly small focus, Hopper/Welles is surprisingly entertaining to sit through.

[A] smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama.

The Broken Hearts Gallery pushes all the rom-com buttons but does it knowingly, with a spirit that embraces killer cynicism and then comes out the other side.

A tight, nifty, and unsettling little parable of the pathology of fame in our time.

For a long time now, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” has been two movies, and the hypnotic film-geek documentary 78/52 is an ingenious and irreverent master class in both of them.

It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.

A richer, stronger, and more moving piece of work [than Philomena], a historical detective story that carries the kick of a true-life “Da Vinci Code.”

The Survivor is a Holocaust movie that’s fresh enough to make you laugh between the tears, the gasps of terror, the long road out of the inferno.

Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.

In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.

The film flashes back to the poisoning, and it could be the most sickening and calamitous suspense-thriller episode you ever saw.

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.

I’d never spent a minute thinking about how these two put their act together, but the evolution of their career, which took shape with not much more calculation than the comedy bits they often improvised, turns out to be a story at once fascinating and enchanting.

The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.

Isabelle Fuhrman infuses Dall with an ambiguous glower of ambition that’s scary and human.

A gripping and incisive documentary.

It’s a very tasteful heart-tugger — a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace, and has something touching and resonant to say about the current climate of American bullying.

Boundaries, to be sure, delivers you to a place you know you’re going, but there should always be room for a movie that does that this well.

Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.

It’s a rapturous piece of nostalgia — a film that devotes itself, in every madly obsessive frame, to making you feel happy in the guileless way a movie still could back in 1964.

It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.

Encanto is a lively, lovely, lushly enveloping digitally animated musical fairy tale.

The action in Road House is beyond brutal; at moments, it’s vicious. Yet if the movie is far more violent than your average action film, in its slightly crackpot bare-knuckle way it’s also more humane.

Fire of Love, which has been directed by Sara Dosa with a discursive, let’s-try-it-on lyricism, is like one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about fearless outliers, only this one is touched with romance.

Hustle doesn’t rewrite any rules, but the film’s wholesome seduction is that you believe what you’re seeing — in part because of the presence of players from the aging legend Dr. J to Trae Young to Kyle Lowry and several dozen more. But also because Sandler plays Stanley with an inner sadness, a blend of weariness and resilience, and a stubborn faith in the game that leaves you moved, stoked, and utterly convinced.

Dano, it’s immediately clear, is a natural-born filmmaker, with an eye for elegant spare compositions that refrain from being too showy; they rarely get in the way of the story he’s telling. The tale itself is resonant and absorbing, though in a highly deliberate way.

A sleekly unnerving thriller.

Essential and absorbing documentary.

The Lovers is a comedy of Middle American doldrums that leaves you rooting for its characters instead of smirking at them.

Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.

Nureyev delivers Nureyev’s life in all its ecstasy and tragedy. As a documentary, it’s not definitive, but it’s good enough to leave you thrilled and haunted by this man who, at the height of his artistry, seemed to leap off the earth and leave it behind.

The key to the new movie’s appeal, apart from the fact that Tom Holland acts with far greater confidence and verve in the title role, is that the entire film is a bit of a fake-out, and I mean that in a very positive way.

It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.

Mank is a tale of Old Hollywood that’s more steeped in Old Hollywood — its glamour and sleaze, its layer-cake hierarchies, its corruption and glory — than just about any movie you’ve seen, and the effect is to lend it a dizzying time-machine splendor.

An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Creed II has been made with heart and skill, and Jordan invests each moment with such fierce conviction that he makes it all seem like it matters.

After all the despair, the piling up of glitzy delusion, there’s a feeling of redemption to it connected to what a good movie can do.

The movie is simply Lumet and his films, which turns out to be an astonishingly satisfying experience, because he’s an incredible talker, with the same earthy electric push that powers his work.

It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.

Zenovich, the director of “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” offers just what you want from a documentary like this one: She brings us closer to events that have been covered many times, deepening — or overturning — what we think we know about them.

Now You See Me 2 is more like a giddy piece of cheese from the ’80s, a chance to spend two more hours with characters we like, doing variations on the things that made us like them in the first place. The revisit, in this case, is well-earned.

Time to Choose may come off, at moments, like the “Koyaanisqatsi” of environmental devastation, but it is also a dreadfully beautiful achievement. It shows us what the building blocks of climate change look like.

The Rehearsal is engrossing, but it’s not a major vision.

You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.

In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is a capricious and touching surrealist kiddie ride that, in its sugar-high way, is as much a celebration of friendship as the “Toy Story” films.

Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.

In The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is the kind of lavishly impassioned all-stops-out biopic you either give into or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby.

A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.

“Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.

All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.

The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.

Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch.

Let Him Go isn’t subtle, but as a genre film it’s original and shrewdly made, with a floridly gripping suspense. And Lane and Costner give it their all in a casual way that only pros this seasoned and gifted can. They turn the movie into an unlikely thing: a touchingly bone-weary romance steeped in vengeance.

It’s a sharp, lively, and engrossing movie, one that provides a fascinating running commentary on how the world of “The Sopranos” came into being. Yet we can’t help but notice the difference in tone.

Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.

The Bleeding Edge needs to be seen, so that it can change hearts and minds.

Palmer, though she has the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA, in her film debut, simply sizzles. She’s a volcano of camp fury. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a helmer of hip-hop videos making his feature-film directing debut, and while it might seem his main task is to keep the comedy crackling, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he imparts to it.

The surprise is that “Skull Island” isn’t just ten times as good as “Jurassic World”; it’s a rousing and smartly crafted primordial-beastie spectacular.

Snake Eyes, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”), has style and verve, with a diabolical family plot that creates a reasonable quota of actual drama. The movie is also a synthetic but infectiously skillful big-studio hodgepodge of ninja films, wuxia films, yakuza films, and international revenge films.

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.

The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.

“Alex Wheatle” is like a sketch for the biopic it might have been, but by the end you feel you’ve glimpsed the key fragment of a life.

Turner’s damaged conviction holds Dark Phoenix together, giving it a treacherous life force.

It’s a fractious, blood-soaked drama about the will to survive that feels like “Earthquake” crossed with “Lord of the Flies.” What’s gripping is that you watch it and think, “If I were in this movie, what would I do?”

The dense but undeniably enjoyable saga doubles as a moving father-daughter tale and ultimately seems far more interested in exploring the robber baron spirit of 20th-century capitalism than its consequences.

You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.

The Fire Inside gives us that catharsis; it’s a real rouser. Yet the film is rooted in a sobering grasp of the trauma that can be the flip side of triumph. The arc of the drama is built around an enormous curveball it throws at the audience. And that’s when the movie really gets good.

Landline is a dramatic comedy about a family full of secrets, and what’s mature — and, in its way, reassuring — about the film is that it views this state of affairs as an all-too-natural one.

The tension that drives Here Before is our curiosity as to whether or not the film is taking place in the world of the uncanny. In a way we want it to be, because that would make it scary fun; in another way we don’t want it to be, because that would make it corny scary fun.

The film is weightless and super-goofy — a blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia. It zips right along, it makes you smile and chortle, it’s a surprisingly sweet-spirited love story.

If it’s sometimes a rambling, indulgent experience, it’s also a beautiful one.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.

The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. The Post celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today.

I’d call it a deftly sincere and canny portrait, one that works precisely because it takes the time to sweat the small stuff.

Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.

In Lost Girls, Liz Garbus takes the serial-killer thriller and turns it on its head, insisting that we see the victims as larger than the crimes that destroyed them.

The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.

What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.

It’s a multimedia immersion, filled with rare footage of Zappa from his teenage years on and assembled with the loving dexterity we’ve come to expect from Alex Winter as a filmmaker.

A Woman, a Part knows how to hold an audience, and it’s got a fresh, if commercially limited, subject: What happens when hipsters get old.

As a filmmaker, Baker is a graceful neorealist voyeur who thrives on improvisation, and his storytelling, in The Florida Project, is mostly just a series of anecdotes. But that turns out to be enough.

Taylor’s voice is singular in its expressiveness — she is insolent, mournful, sexy, outraged, dripping with debauched delight, and always casually candid. Her words invest even the most familiar events with a revealing intimacy.

It’s not a comedy, but as you watch it you can almost see Woody Allen standing off to the side, chuckling at the human folly he’s showing you.

The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.

Even more than the first “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion” is a thriller wrapped in a deception tucked inside a riddle. It is, of course, a murder mystery with multiple suspects, but it’s one that comes with byways and flashbacks and bells and whistles, not to mention two whodunit homicides for the price of one.

It’s a sleekly witty action opera that’s at once overstuffed and bedazzling.

Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).

Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will.

The movie is no cheat. It’s a tasty franchise delivery system that kicks a certain series back into gear.

Made You Look is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?

In the fresh bopping beauty of their punk romantic sound, they kicked open a door of perception. They said to a generation: We got the beat, and you can too.

The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.

It’s a moving film, but it leaves a hole in one’s outrage.

Macdonald’s multi-faceted portrait of Houston allows us to touch the intertwined forces that did her in.

Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.

“Nightclubbing” is a raw inside slice of punk nostalgia and punk history.

It’s better to let us imagine what we can’t see. But what we do see in “Endurance” is quietly staggering.

X is a wily and entertaining slow-motion ride of terror that earns its shocks, along with its singular quease factor, which relates to the fact that the demons here are ancient specimens of humanity who actually have a touch of…humanity.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

It’s a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip-hop.

The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.

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.

If Bergman Island is a roman à clef about Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, it’s an oblique one. If it’s a “Before” film, it’s one that embeds a crucial element of emotional exploration in the educated guesswork of the audience. If it’s a cinephile shell game made with disarmingly clever sincerity — and I would say that’s just what it is — it’s one that leaves you grateful to have paid a visit to this island.

What makes Oklahoma City a haunting experience is that the movie, in laying out the road that led to his humanity withering and dying, demonstrates a disquieting continuity between the anti-government wrath of Timothy McVeigh and the fervor of anti-government wreckage that has just been given a new credibility in America.

With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?

The Laundromat is Soderbergh at his most playful, and also Soderbergh at his most wonkish, and damned, in this case, if the two don’t chime together.

Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.

Highly entertaining documentary about the folk-pop troubadour of Canada.

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

It’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.

It’s a touching and original piece of bare-bones sentimental humanism, and Schoenaerts is terrific in it.

It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.

Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.

It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.

Under the Influence is a very absorbing, very disquieting, very meaningful-for-our-time documentary.

The Panama Papers captures and celebrates a different concentration of power: that of the journalists who’ve begun to band together by thinking globally, following the money as it travels — and does its best to hide — around the world.

It’s an elegantly oblique movie, even for Kiarostami, whose art thrums with quiet ethereal metaphor.

It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we’ve always lived. And there’s a dark side to it. It’s “Sex and the City” filtered through a sobering reality check.

It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.

Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.

Athlete A is a testament to their perseverance, and to the courage of all those who stood up in court to face the man who had violated their humanity. But it’s also a testament to the obsession that gave cover to their abuse — to a culture that wanted winners at any cost.

It’s both a highly entertaining movie and, by the end, a haunting one. It revels in Dalí’s artifice even as it mercilessly peels away his layers.

DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants.

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

As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.

Penna works in what you might call a gratifyingly prosaic style. He doesn’t wow you (though the film, in its level way, is elegantly shot). But he doesn’t cheat you, either, so you come to trust the gravity of his nuts-and-bolts storytelling.

Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.

In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.

The great strength of The New Radical is that it’s not on its subjects’ side (or totally against them either). It’s the rare documentary that lets you decide.

It’s a movie that reels the audience in and keeps it hooked: with smart little kicks of surprise.

"Devo,” in its way, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too serious about any of this. Instead, the film traces the rocky road on which this unlikeliest of hit bands became a success.

Blockers isn’t really about these girls losing their virginity. It’s about how they seize control of their destinies, one triumphantly lewd zinger at a time.

Lively, confessional, and entertaining.

No film drama can make us “know” PTSD, but by the end of Thank You for Your Service, you feel as if the agony, and bravery, of our soldiers has become less remote and more tangible. Hall’s filmmaking is crisp, assured, and, at times, quietly audacious.

Where Bad Moms plunges into zesty new satirical terrain is in capturing the ruthless one-upmanship of the mommy-wars era, when all the progressive thinking of the last 40 years has only ratcheted up the perfectionistic demands on children and parents alike.

The American Meme is a film I very much recommend, since it’s both highly entertaining and an essential snapshot of the voyeuristic parasitic American fishbowl.

Now Ray has directed his second film, the abysmally titled Breach, and it's a bona fide companion piece, another true-life tale of duplicity gone secretly insane.

Salt knows how to stay one step ahead of you in devious, if jaw-droppingly contrived, ways. The movie is fun, dammit. So who cares, really, if it's trash?

Though the film gets a bit repetitive, in its moving climax Lior does more than just have his bar mitzvah -- he earns it.

A crowd-pleaser, all right, but, for all its appeal, a naggingly sanctimonious one.

Squeezes fresh laughs out of what is, in essence, a rather startlingly post-Freudian, nature-trumps-nurture view of child development.

Very much a kiddie ride, Stuart Little 2 is lively without being hyperactive -- it's a bouncy mouse caper with a wee bit of soul.

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.

Premium Rush earns its place as end-of-the-summer escapism, but I can't say that it's more than a well-done formula flick. At this point, it's just one more movie-as-ride. But this one at least lives up to its title.

As an achievement in macabre visual wizardry, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride has to be reckoned some sort of marvel.

As visual spectacle, Avatar is indelible, but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.

Dunst, in her finest performance yet, has now transcended her fellow teen stars. She is arguably the first actress of her generation poised to take on Gwyneth and Julia.

There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

Enjoyably dirty-minded sendup of when-ballet-met-hip-hop youth musicals.

Fun, and believable, on the most important level: It convinces us that Jaden Smith has what it takes to fight his way to the top.

Fear of a Black Hat never achieves the dizzying cinema verite swirl that made Spinal Tap such a timeless satire. Many of the jokes are too literal (a goof on Vanilla Ice named Vanilla Sherbet). Still, Cundieff has what nearly every commentator on the rap scene has lacked: a first-class bull detector.

Little more than a rambling chain of combative buddy mishaps, but the interplay between Vaughn and Favreau, who does great double takes of thrusting chin frustration, spins you through the weak patches.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is undeniably disturbing, especially that video scene and when it shows us (however discreetly) a body being hacked up in a bathtub. Yet the critics who’ve hailed it as a landmark are going overboard. Henry is just a superior B-movie with an artsy-clinical title.

An ingratiatingly scrappy little movie. It's been cobbled together out of a great many conventional crises (drugs, abusive boyfriends, heartless girlfriends, a looming record deal), yet there's a tough and appealing vitality to the way that it embraces the petty ego-tripping and party-down squalor of the rock lifestyle and stands apart from it at the same time.

These are standard youth-movie dilemmas, but they're brought to life by the high-energy cast and the musical numbers, which Ortega shoots with electrifying pizzazz.

If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.

Overall it's more amusing than hilarious.

It's really a one-joke movie, but the joke is a good one.

Carries little in the way of passion or revelatory charge.

Sweetgrass is austere enough to make Frederick Wiseman's films look like Jersey Shore episodes, yet it has its own suspense.

It's like "Deathtrap" crossed with "Cribs" as staged by Stanley Kubrick.

Embarrassingly entertaining.

As directed by series creator Rob Thomas, the movie, like the show, is entertainingly fast-talking in a tidy, faux-serious way. Kristen Bell, if anything, has only gained in appeal.

The movie has been shot with a pleasingly overripe visual flair, and on its own terms it’s fairly entertaining. Yet it isn’t about anything so much as its own explosiveness.

The affair itself, in its genteel way, does catch fire, but it's the end of the affair that needs to move us to rapture, and the movie, instead, just drifts away.

What's infectious in Soul Power is the almost shocking optimism of its America-meets-Africa '70s world-beat vibe.

The Flintstones is a big, shiny package of comic nostalgia, as much a theme park as a movie.

Being Julia flirts too heavily with soap opera clichés, but it has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.

Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.

Back in his day, Mr. Peabody was a dog whose over-civility had bite. Now he's a genius you want to cuddle with.

Branagh shows us the comedy of a man who is too clever to understand that in the guise of dreading fatherhood, he is really at war with how much he longs for it.

Younger, in his debut feature, is as canny as he is derivative.

If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.

Catching Fire is smoothly exciting but a bit of a tease.

Depp portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.

I knew perfectly well, after a while, what Sinister was going to scare me with. But I got scared anyway.

The trouble is, nothing about this couple is particularly rooted in Los Angeles. The love affair has a bland, generic feel. What's more, the picture lacks verve.

At times too restrained, yet there are moments it captures the erotics of intimacy in a way that makes most American love stories look downright unfree.

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

At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

The races are scorchingly shot, and they lend the movie a zest.

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

A lively, disposable hybrid of the sincere and the synthetic.

For all the praise that has been heaped upon it, is a quasisatisfying, half realized vision.

Chicago 10 is well worth seeing, if only because a good half of the film is devoted to extraordinary footage of the four days of rage that spawned the trial.

At times, Now You See Me suggests Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" made with a throwaway wink.

In the end, Scent of a Woman offers little more than lumbering simulation of Rain Man's nimble magic. But Pacino's performance-scabrous, tender, ripely theatrical-is a master showman's trick.

And so even if you're held (as I was) by the acting, you may find yourself fighting the film's design. It reflects a certain lack of faith in your audience to take a performance as authentic as De Niro's and reduce it to the level of a glorified reach-out-and-touch-someone commercial.

Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of "Re-Animator," pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.

Paced a bit too glacially for my taste, yet it's worth sitting through for its trick ending, a twist of events as ominous as the landscape.

Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.

Might have been richer, tougher, more honestly liberal if it had revealed a few more shades of gray among the men.

Every actor registers...In a film of minor ambition, they're all worthy company.

Vacancy is a schlock surprise: a no-frills motel-hell slasher film -- with a bit of soul.

The Upside of Anger is overly therapized, yet Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.

Heartbreaker is like a caper comedy meets "The Bodyguard" - it's winsome and accomplished fluff.

For Sandler, it's not just when he grew up. It's the garden of idiotic innocence, something that, in Grown Ups 2, he is helping to keep alive.

I wish I could say that Wattstax was an ecstatic soul celebration, but most of the performances, while enjoyable, fall short of memorable.

In its wildly overwrought, burrito-Western way, is about as close to a home movie as you're likely to see in a megaplex.

Lawrence makes you believe in the character you're watching. He does an amazing little piece of acting.

A spectacularly turbulent portrait of the chaos and bloodshed that have come to define Haiti.

This trio is like a looser, funnier version of the family of wrecks in Woody Allen's ''Interiors.''

The film keeps throwing things at you, like a colorful ape pirate (Peter Dinklage) and a fun hallucination sequence. That said, the laughs are starting to feel prehistoric.

In the hands of director and co-writer Shana Feste (Country Strong), Endless Love has become a solidly engaging neo-'50s romantic melodrama.

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.

The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.

Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin.

The movie is scattershot (intense at some moments, slack at others), but it earns its docu-style creepiness, and Karpovsky's stretch as an actor is daring and authentic.

There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. Last Days mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be.

The dialogue veers into digressions about ADHD, the cruddiness of mainstream dog food, and much else. That these asides prove more fun than the central action is what gives Hit & Run its flavor: tasty at times, even if the film evaporates as you watch it.

It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.

A tricky-bordering-on-gimmicky film noir with a glaze of soft-core kink.

You know you're in the hands of a born filmmaker when he floods a scene with danger and excitement and, at the same time, tempers it with something more delicate -- a languor of the everyday.

Will Miss Perfect fall for the Leader of the Pack? It helps that he's played by Thomas McDonell, who's not only a dead ringer for the young Johnny Depp but also has a comparable charisma.

Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don't arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.

Good has a stagy fustiness, but it's worth seeing for Mortensen, who makes this study of a "good German" look creepily contemporary.

It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.

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

The fun of 21 is the way that this sharp, hyperaware star in the making, his face as readable as a mood ring, pours us into an adrenalized cocktail of fear, desire, and mental buzz.

A big, fat, juicy spitball lobbed, with mostly dead-on aim, at the teen-smarm clichés that have accumulated like so much earwax over the last three years.

It's conventional stuff, only executed with a smart, improv-y verve.

The best thing about RED 2, like its predecessor, is its lightness of tone. Too many movies with comic-book roots come on too seriously, even when the comics themselves have a loose, fast, jocular wit about them.

More than ever, Johnny Knoxville and his boys belong to a very elite club of idiocy. They martyr themselves for our diversion, driven at every moment to ask: Are you not entertained?

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

A classy romantic cocktail distinguished by its tart yet breezy bite.

Jim Carrey entertains himself mightily in Liar Liar, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Zahedi is ruefully funny and savage in his self-exposure.

This is a B movie rooted in gut-level stirrings of power and retaliation.

Plays like an unusually ritzy festival circuit audition film, though McQuarrie, it must be said, aces the audition.

With Bullock doing a variation on her Miss Congeniality geek-tomboy-who-has-to-bloom character, and McCarthy letting her acidly oddball observations rip, the two actresses make their interplay bubble.

If The Matrix Reloaded is a trip through high-toned mediocrity, not nearly as suggestive or cohesive as ''The Matrix,'' it's one of the most wizardly mediocre movies I've seen in quite some time.

The movie, for all its half-baked visual marvels, remains remarkably faithful to Lewis' story, and the innocence of his passion begins to shine through. It's there, most spectacularly, in Aslan, the lion-king messiah.

A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.

A testament to the discipline, humor, and life of kids who swing.

Admit it: It's not every horror film that can make you feel preached at and slimed at the same time.

It's a toasty, star-packed ensemble comedy in which a handful of lonelyhearts attempt, with some success, to come out of their shells, and it's going to make a lot of holiday romantics feel very, very good; watching it, I felt cozy and charmed myself.

Slick, reasonably amusing, never asking its audience to swallow anything too wild for consumption.

It's like "Capturing the Friedmans" scrubbed to a happy ending.

Face becomes a study of the immigrant embrace of freedom in America - a bridge built over time and generations.

The sequence serves no real purpose beyond dazzle for dazzle's sake, but when you're watching it, that's purpose enough.

Eastwood is now playing a man whose will is stronger than his body, and it's that tension -- between anger and frailty, steel and decay -- that powers the movie.

The Well-Digger's Daughter pushes a number of nostalgia buttons at once, most of them pleasing.

Cairo Time is affectingly gentle, with Juliette slowing down to open up -- a gossamer transformation that Clarkson makes tangible.

On paper, the movie sounds unbearably schlocky, but Costner plays Garret the reluctant backcountry prince as mythic but also foxy and life size.

From what we can tell, Brown was a dancer, all right, in life as well as on the field -- a dancer with a powerful forearm, one that Lee covers in protective padding.

The one performer who seems at home with the gravity of it all is Emma Thompson.

A good but far from great movie because it portrays truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.

The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.

What’s finally missing from Bugsy is the dirty, low-down kick of the crime genre — the quality that marked last year’s The Grifters, and that was there in The Godfather, too. Levinson would like to be bad, but his approach is reverent, ironic, tasteful. He’s made a gangster movie that, for all its lithe pleasures, enunciates too well.

Gerron's terrible film was never shown in the places it was meant for, but in Prisoner of Paradise it reveals a queasy corner of the Nazi mind that tried to imagine a concentration camp as it fantasized the inmates might have.

As a comedy, 50 First Dates is standard Sandler, but as a love story it left me pleasantly buzzed, if not quite punch-drunk.

In About Last Night, Hart blows up, to hilariously oversize proportions, the eternal male desire for freedom. He’s raunch on wheels.

The surprise of Superman Returns is that it isn't a funky, ambitious conceptual reimagining, like last summer's "Batman Begins." This really IS your father's Superman; it re-creates - and updates, though just barely - the universe Donner invented.

Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.

A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.

The tiny scale and armchair talkiness mark the movie as a bit of a folly, an act of idealistic hubris in today's commercial marketplace, yet that's its (minor) fascination too.