Owen Gleiberman

Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.

Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening, a movie that pulls into focus 30 years of porn in America. It also pulls no punches.

Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis.

A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.

If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it.

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.

Ryder, good as she was in The Age of Innocence, gives her first true star performance here. Beneath her crisp, postfeminist manner, Lelaina is bristling with confusion, and Ryder lets you read every crosscurrent of temptation and anxiety, the way her tentative search for love slowly grows into a restless hunger. Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul.

Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed with supreme love and insight by Lisa Cortés, is the enthralling documentary that Little Richard deserves.

It's Ejiofor's extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together.

In the Shadow of the Moon finds new resonance in the moment when America redefined progress -- but also when it heeded the siren song of a world so desolate it reminded you what a paradise ours truly is.

It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.

This is Robert Redford doing what too many stars should do and don't: taking a chance. And reinventing his art. It's an extraordinary thing to see.

A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.

A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made.

As he rises to each challenge, you realize that von Trier, the most exalted of prankish sadists, has orchestrated the filmmaking equivalent of the story of Job. The Five Obstructions glories in art, life, and the faith that binds them.

A funny and madly arresting new documentary.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a beautiful and transporting experience — the best, I think, of Disney’s serious animated features in the multiplex era.

A wonderful movie, a delicate and touching drama that takes us deep inside the eccentric competitive mystique of grandmaster chess.

If ever there were an actor ripe to ''McConaughnesize'' his career, it's Jude Law — and guess what, he has done it, spectacularly, in Dom Hemingway.

To call Match Point Woody Allen's comeback would be an understatement - it's the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made "The Player."

It's a mad cycle of arrogance and despair, and Bloody Sunday etches it onto your nervous system.

It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

To say that Eastwood, who directed, has done a first-rate job of adaptation fails to do him justice. What he's brought off is closer to alchemy.

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is the rare movie that might be called a spiritual documentary.