Owen Gleiberman

Homicide is engrossing, at least for a while, but the truly personal movie it wants to be remains locked up in Mamet’s head.

Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.

After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.

The enthralling spirit of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film.

Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.''

The new Arthur is a feathery screwball satire, competent on its own terms, yet as the movie went on I found it increasingly hard to separate the character's self-indulgence from that of the actor playing him.

The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit.

The Cove is the rare documentary specifically designed as a thriller.

If this is the sound of a new generation, then it may be the first generation cautious enough to embrace friendship as mightier than love.

The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.

This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like.

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

It's an energetic stunt of a movie, and it wants to make us sweat like it's 1974.

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]

The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.

It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.

The one figure in Revenge of the Sith who taps the true spirit of Star Wars is Ewan McGregor: With his beautiful light, clipped delivery, he plays Alec Guinness' playfulness, making Obi-Wan a marvel of benevolent moxie.

It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.

In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.

With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please!

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.

Hoffman and Thompson are each good enough to bring out a glow in the other.

The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.

A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

The movie, building on “The Witch,” proves that Robert Eggers possesses something more than impeccable genre skill. He has the ability to lock you into the fever of what’s happening onscreen.

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