Owen Gleiberman

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

By the end of I Am Another You, what starts off as a celebration of reckless freedom turns into a revelation of a broken yet soaring soul: the story of a life that resists being judged as much as it does being pigeonholed.

An exhilarating hall-of-mirrors look at what happens when global art fame turns anonymous, artists become objects, fans turn into artists, and the whole what's-sincere-and-what's-a-sham spectacle is more fun than art was ever supposed to be.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

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

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.

At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

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.

A puzzle of a highly rarefied order. At times it's enthrallingly clever and subtle; at others it's borderline incomprehensible.

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

Wiseman reveals the victims of domestic abuse in all of their pity and terror.

The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.

Young, wizened yet valiant, his voice still braying at the moon, delivers these songs of aging and loss as if caught in a beautiful dream of what lies waiting for him on the other side.

The film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.

As enjoyable as most of Unforgiven is, Eastwood's shades-of-gray moralism feels like a whitewash.

At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. It's a ride for the gut AND the brain.

It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.

The Past, is hugely ambitious — it's Farhadi seizing his moment — yet it's also a wrenchingly intimate tale of lives torn asunder by forces within and without them.

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

An insider nostalgia trip for graying art punks. It could have been called ''When We Were Cool,'' and it's finally so cool that it freezes you out.

The plot is déjà vu all over again, another variation on the proletarian-joker-goes-yuppie formula used in Trading Places, The Secret of My Success, and Opportunity Knocks. In Taking Care of Business, the formula gets boiled down to its bare bones. The movie is nothing but a series of executive signifiers — it should have been called The Trappings of My Success.

Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut]

It's doubtful you'll ever see a combat documentary that channels the chaos of war as thoroughly as this one.

What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.

At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.

Though it’s far from the last word on ZZ Top, “That Little Ol’ Band From Texas” fills in the nuts and bolts, giving you enough of a glimpse of how it all happened to make it seem like a down-home rock ‘n’ roll mirage come true.

Fruitvale Station is great political filmmaking because it's great filmmaking, period.