Owen Gleiberman

The power of The Social Network is that Zuckerberg is a weasel with a mission that can never be dismissed. The movie suggests that he may have built his ambivalence about human connection into Facebook's very DNA. That's what makes him a jerk-hero for our time.

Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.

Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.

With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.

Brie Larson, as the caring but tormented Grace (who's pregnant and doesn't know if she has the faith to have her baby), and John Gallagher Jr., as her gentle-dweeb fellow worker Mason (who fears his love can't save her), show you what emotionally naked acting is all about.

The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.

E.T. is ultimately a tale of love, and the film becomes a cathartic leap into pure feeling. [2002 re-release]

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

King in the Wilderness is a searing film because it takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from the mountaintop. You glimpse the real glory of who he was: not a walking monument but a human being with fear, humor, guts, and (amazing) grace under pressure.

In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.

The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

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

Hoop Dreams is an astonishing emotional experience — it has highs, lows, and everything in between.

May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.

La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled.

An extraordinary film; it may be the most haunting documentary since ''Crumb.''

The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.

As riveting as its title.

Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.

Mesmerizing.

She's an Everywoman you can believe in, showcased in the kind of deft comedy of feminine passion - where deep despair meets Wilson Phillips - that a great many people have been waiting for. Now that Wiig and company have built it, will they come?

Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.

Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers.

A haunting and incandescent work of art.

One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.

The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.

Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.

Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male.

Nothing more (or less) than an enchanting light comedy of romantic confusion... It's a movie that understands love because it understands pain.

Disciplined script -- bitingly funny.

The one truly thrilling movie I've seen so far this year.

The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.

Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them.

There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.

In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.

Leaves you shaken and ecstatic at the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.

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

In Amour, these two actors show us what love is, what it really looks like, and what it may, at its most secret moments, demand.

It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of.

The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.

The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.

A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is like that.

A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.

Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.

What’s magical about Kane — the sheer transformative thrill of invention — is there in every shot, every performance, every narrative surge.

The thriller that's exciting, cathartic, and powerfully disturbing. Prisoners is that type of movie. It's rooted in 40 years of Hollywood revenge films, yet it also breaks audacious new ground.

The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.

In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.

All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.

Easy Money is not merely an early-career curiosity. It's one of the best underworld films I've seen in years, and Kinnaman gives a fantastic performance in it.

Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.

The movie is rich with class tension, and if Allen nails the moods of the wealthy, he also gets surprising, dynamic performances from Hawkins, Cannavale, and Andrew Dice Clay as the folks who have no money but may have a fuller sense of what life is.

Killing them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you.

Most of us consider Marilyn Monroe a born star with modest acting skills, but Love, Marilyn deepens the argument that the ditzy, dim-bulb ''Marilyn'' was every inch a performance, and a brilliant one.

It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.

The new film, which unfolds in real time over the course of 80 minutes, is a deeper, darker, altogether more memorable experience. It doesn't extend the characters so much as fulfill them.

Sweet Land is a movie of extraordinary tenderness, in which Reaser and Guinee, using a language of looks, make you happy to think about what love once might have been.

One of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be.

It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.

A succulently entertaining movie that invites you to splash around in the dreams and follies of folks so rich they're the 1 percent of the 1 percent. It's like a champagne bath laced with arsenic.

Describing Woodstock as a concert movie is a little like calling Notre Dame a house of worship. In its scope and grandeur, its feel for the paradoxical nature of an event in which half a million middle-class bohemians created their own scruffy, surging community — a metropolis of mud — Woodstock remains the one true rock-concert spectacle, a counterculture Triumph of the Will. [1994]

Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered

The film sweeps us up like a thriller, forcing us to at least ask whether terrorism like the ELF's (which targeted property, never human lives) might ever be justified.

It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between.

It's a film of jaw-dropping virtuosity and pleasure, one that leaves you revved, enthralled, tickled, moved, and amazed.

Harrison Ford as the President of the United States is such a perfect piece of casting that it's at once a fantasy and a joke: The joke is how perfect the fantasy is. [25 Jul 1997, p. 48]

It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.

Lindhardt, sweet and childish and achingly vulnerable, gives a stunning performance.

By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.

Even when "Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning.

Titanic floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith.

The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.

Lords of Dogtown is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile."

By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.

As vividly imagined as The Crucible is, it’s up to the actors to animate the stern Puritan cadences of Miller’s dialogue. They bring it off spectacularly.

Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.

An exquisitely fun documentary.

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 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.

Paris Is Burning is the most passionately empathetic piece of documentary filmmaking I’ve seen since Streetwise, the brilliant portrait of homeless teens in Seattle, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Penelope Spheeris’ sly and galvanizing heavy-metal collage.

A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy.

Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.

David Simon, creator of "The Wire," who argues that the targeting of minorities, fused with mandatory sentencing, has turned the war on drugs into ''a holocaust in slow motion.''

The beauty of Two Girls and a Guy is that it presents us with a hero so craven, so indefensible in his duplicity, that his twin victims leapfrog past vengeance into an almost physical state of curiosity.

The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. “One Battle After Another” is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.

A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.

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.

It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.

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.

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

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

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

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

Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.

It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.

A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.

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

Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.

Sensational and accomplished.

A madcap gem.

Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.

Munich, Steven Spielberg's spectacularly gripping and unsettling new movie, is a grave and haunted film, yet its power lies in its willingness to be a work of brutal excitement.

Fincher has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can't see.

A spooky, heartbreaking documentary.

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

Fast, convulsive, and densely exciting new British gangster thriller.

The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.

A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.

David Gordon Green's captivating winter-chill tragedy, is a tale that encompasses murder, divorce, adultery, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, and the disappearance of a small child. In other words, it's downbeat enough to make the recent Oscar-nominated films look like party games.

A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.

The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.

A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.

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

The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.

The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.

Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.

It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.

Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

This story of a 12-year-old boy who drops through the net of middle-class life invites us-in each shimmering frame-to gaze upon the world with a child's freshly awakening vision.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.

It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.

It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.

I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

Oren Moverman's Rampart is a terrific film: tense, shocking, complex, mesmerizing.

It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.

The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places the audience right up there in space along with them.

With an authenticity that is tender and merciless, the movie shows you what it looks like when youth rebellion becomes a form of fascism.

Potent and eye-opening documentary.

A marvelous movie.

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.

The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned.

A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.

It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.

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

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

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.

A candy store for film buffs.

Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.

Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.

There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.

Ricky is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is such a miracle of an actress that she makes you respond to the innocence of Sherry's desperate, selfish destruction.

Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear.

It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there.

Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.

Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

At 88 minutes, Tabloid is short and sweet (it's pure movie candy), but by the end we've forged an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her unapologetic fearless/nutty valor. And that's what really makes a great tabloid story: It's a vortex that's also a mirror.

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.

Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high.

It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

The effect is ecstatic; she sounds like the holiest of trumpets, with every note piercingly bright yet as soft as velvet. Listening to Franklin, you feel like you could ride that voice into the heavens. She’s not just a singer, she’s a human chariot.

He (Spurlock) takes Comic-Con seriously. He talks to Kevin Smith, Harry Knowles, and other famous grown-up geeks, but mostly he follows a handful of people whose dream it is to pass through the fan/professional looking glass and carve out a place for themselves in the industry of fantasy.

The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star, and it doesn't let Charlie off the hook for his cruelty or self-pity.

The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.

Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.

Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.

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.

Beautifully edited, Go Tigers! is an enthralling look at the drama that can transpire in the autumn of one small town on any given Friday.

Of the idiosyncratic ''little'' movies that Soderbergh has made to clear his head (Full Frontal, Schizopolis), this is the first that truly connects.

Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since "Ed Wood": a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

Jim Carrey's performance is an impersonation on the level of genius.

Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.

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

Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.

Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody.

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.

Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.

It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.

Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

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.

A love poem to the New York City of the '50s and '60s, when Smith, the visionary of camp (Andy Warhol stole from him), more or less invented performance art.

It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.

It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.

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.

True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

Beautiful, wise, and poker-faced comedy of discombobulation.

The film is at times harrowing to watch, yet it's also wry and delicate and absorbing. It's infused with the messy excitement of imperfect passion.

It's cleansing to see the facts laid out with intimacy and rigor, and the film earns the comparison it makes to the squelching of due process for some of today's terror suspects.

Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is.

Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.

Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.

Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they're brought off with such casual aplomb that they're funny, too.

Spencer is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance.

Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."

She's a teller of hilarious gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor ever were. Yet while they were consumed by their demons, Rivers is just the opposite.

Into Darkness is a sleek, thrilling epic that's also a triumphantly witty popcorn morality play. It's everything you could want in a Star Trek movie.

A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

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

A voyeur's delight.

Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years.

Awesome documentary.

At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

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.