Owen Gleiberman

The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.

In its minimalist quotidian way, Showing Up is a movie made by someone in masterly control of her medium.

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.

The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.

Mesmerizing.

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

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.

Argo is never less than wildly entertaining, but a major part of its power is that it so ominously captures the kickoff to the world we're in now.

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.

It's Swank, however, who's the revelation. By the end, her Brandon/Teena is beyond male or female. It's as if we were simply glimpsing the character's soul, in all its yearning and conflicted beauty.

To dismiss this movie for being ''offensive'' would be to offer it high praise.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.

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

Jaglom's scruffy style doesn't carry it through. He puts enough toxic insincerity on screen to singe, though.

In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.

"Andy Warhol" makes you see that beneath the gargoyle hipster mask, he filled that emptiness with an art of transcendent sincerity.

Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.

A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you.

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

As a movie, The Green Knight feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry.

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

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.

For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.

There are scenes in Spielberg’s version that will melt you, scenes that will make your pulse race, and scenes where you simply sit back and revel in the big-spirited grandeur of it all.