Owen Gleiberman

In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world.

A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.

There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.

Presents Glass as a masterfully corrupt fabulist who convinced himself of the ultimate seductive lie, which is that there can't be anything wrong with telling people what they want to hear.

They’ve done it. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).

An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.

The film reminds you that the real salvation of cinema will always come from those who understand that making a movie should be a magic trick good enough to fool the magician himself into believing it.

The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.

Burns, by trusting the audience, has created a darkly authentic political thriller that does exactly what a movie like this one should do. It leaves you chastened and inspired.

It's hard to think of the last time a Pixar film made you go ''Wow!'' That's part of why The LEGO Movie is such outrageous and intoxicating fun.

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made.

The Wizard of Oz remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's-really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood.

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary.

Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.

A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life.

Bold and brilliant.

To see Gone With the Wind on a big screen again is to weep for the fearlessness with which Hollywood once believed the sublime was possible.

Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.

The movie is so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that at times it appears to take in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese.

This documentary about the triumph of the New Hollywood employs a treasure trove of interviews and clips to create a rich understanding of the many forces -- cultural undertows, really -- that flowed together to fill the void left by the dying studio system.

If you see only one movie this year about a twisted, cuddly, courageous, fatally diseased, self-mutilating love slave, make sure that movie is Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.

I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever.

The movie is grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln's presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as though by time machine.

A gripping documentary that uses voluminous period evidence — unedited news footage, tape recordings of SLA leader Cinque's rants — to brilliantly reconstruct the entire freak event.

In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.

It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest.

Voluptuously engrossing.