Owen Gleiberman

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.

Cameron wants to take the audience ''back to 'Titanic,''' but the journey's magic is hemmed in, paradoxically, by the transcendence of his previous effort; surely he must know that a lot of us never left.

The camera loves Banderas -- a velvet stud -- as much as it did the young Clint Eastwood.

Though the events have a rambling overfamiliarity, there's a real story between the lines: the resentment over the U.S. occupation on the part of non-insurgent Iraqis.

Dour, absurdist, gruesomely awful.

What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.

Lawrence, as always, exerts the appeal of a con man too lightweight to buy into his own con. He'd be funnier, though, if he didn't insist on being the only funny thing in the room.

The movie is one soporific, depressed, deadeningly vague scene after another.

There's only one performer in the movie who looks completely at ease with what he's doing: the horse.

It's no exaggeration to say that the actors have less personality than the pipes, nail guns, grinding gears, decaying beams, and slowly spreading oil spills that are fused, with a kind of empty-dread technical precision, into Rube Goldberg torture devices.

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.

The most frightening thing about this movie is that King and Romero actually thought it was scary.

Offhand, I can’t think of an actor who could use a brain implant more. The trouble isn’t that Reeves talks like a surfer dude; it’s that he tries so hard not to talk like a surfer dude.

It's a heartfelt movie that could have used a zigzaggier undercurrent, though Olyphant, in the sort of role that Paul Newman used to swagger through, has a star's easy command.

Even from the safety of a movie seat, you can just about feel the stinging hardness of the surf. Blue crush? This is more like white smash.

A funny and madly arresting new documentary.

Proof that a thriller can be sleekly shot, expertly cast, paced with crisp professionalism...and still be a letdown if its twists and turns hold no more surprise than yesterday's weather report.

By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.

The film suggests Titanic in a giant wading pool.

The film evokes how homicide became the ultimate orgasm for kids who had turned themselves into zombies of flesh.

By the end, the main thing that's been abused is the audience's intelligence.

Roth, there's no denying, creates considerable suspense out of our desire to confront the forbidden.

With jokes this lame you won't have to worry as much about your children getting any bad ideas.

Had ''Boogie Nights'' been the tale of a California dreamer with a really long skateboard, the movie's delirious first half would have been ''Dogtown and Z-Boys,'' and its downbeat conclusion would be Stoked.

Just when you're sure that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo can't get any less funny, the movie douses the trailer's best gag, as that prosthetic leg turns out to be attached to Deuce's true love.

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

It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.

As heavy with message as any Hollywood delinquent drama of the late '50s.

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.

Zwick offers excitingly staged moments, but once you get past the novelty of WWII Jews acting this heroically macho, Defiance bogs down in a not very well-developed script.

The key to The Company is the quiet, focused rapture of Neve Campbell, who formally trained in ballet and performed all of her on-screen dances. The tranquil delight she takes in her body becomes its own eloquent form of acting.

The Muppets were once devilish and sly, but this ploddingly whimsical musical caper, which uses too many ’70s soul songs to signify its rainbow-demographic cred, is enough to make you want to see them get slapped around by the Teletubbies (at this point, a far funkier crew).

A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but no one does it better than Myers.

In Baker Boys, Kloves crafted a melancholy vision laced with ripe possibilities for pleasure and love. But the movie was (inexplicably, to me) a commercial disappointment, and Kloves, perhaps as a delayed response, has returned with a vision drained of joy, freedom, excitement.

Thorogood allegedly confessed on his deathbed (in 1993) that he killed Jones, and while the movie convinces us that this might have happened, it never truly reveals who Brian Jones was before he fell apart. His indulgence, and his demise, play out in a void.

[Stone's] filmmaking is so supple and alive, his obsession with the visual aspect of history so electrifying, that JFK practically roots itself in your imagination.

A fizzy and delirious high-camp message-movie musical that may just turn out to be the happiest movie of the summer.

Too poky and contrived to be a good movie, but its lushly serene atmospherics, given current events, make it a pure slice of sentimental comfort food.

This is the richest role Paltrow has had since ''Shakespeare in Love,'' and she rises to the challenge. She digs deep into Plath's mercurial nature, giving us a Sylvia who's fiercely independent and alive yet burdened with demons of insecurity that bubble up in a rage.

There are fine, fresh observational moments, but the film is much ado about not so much.

Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.

The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.

The Exorcist III has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk.

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.

A movie in which laughter and self-exploitation merge into jolly soft-porn ''empowerment.''

It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.

Control goes past the clichés of punk rock-god gloom to offer a snapshot of alienation that's shockingly humane.

The movie's freakazoid intensity gets to you, but there's something at once cramped and show-offy in Aronofsky's refusal to even slighty vary its atmosphere of shock-corridor burnout.

The only brazen thing about the film is how shamelessly it rips off "School of Rock."

With its this-is-really-happening vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.

The film is a jokey, nattering fiasco, as awful as Hudson Hawk. And yet, like that famous disaster, it never loses its aura of precocious self-satisfaction.

Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It's the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself.

The Farrellys may well be the new kingpins of adolescent slob comedy, but There's Something About Mary doesn't approach the witty anarchy of movies like "Animal House," "The Naked Gun," or "Hairspray."

An Australian crime caper that's one part ''Sexy Beast,'' one part ''The Full Monty,'' and three parts very flat soda.

Andrew Wagner has made a lovely comedy of death and rebirth.

Ritchie concocts a crime-jungle demimonde that's organically linked to the real world, and it's a damn fun one to visit.

There’s something weirdly innocent about Shanley’s ineptitude: He seems to be inventing the oldest cliches for the very first time. The movie doesn’t really hit bottom, though, until he has Ryan deliver an ickily earnest monologue about how her character is ”soul-sick.” I think she means, ”Pass the Pepto-Bismol.

Strenous yet flat, The Brothers Grimm is a let's-see-what-sticks spectacle that, coming from Terry Gilliam, is more grim than "Grimm."

The movie, while heartfelt and vividly shot, takes too many rote genre turns.

A fascinating and lovingly crafted musical documentary that nevertheless misunderstands its own subject.

A good movie? Hardly. But more than enough to pass a dog day afternoon.

It's a tale that reduces angst, not to mention love, to a generational tic.

It's the closest the movies have come in a while to the nudgy, knowing fairy-tale enchantment of "The Princess Bride."

Smart People, unlike "Sideways" or "The Savages," has a plot that's a little too rote.

In her sassy but scrubbed way, Bynes is a real charmer, and What a Girl Wants is a likable throwaway.

The Secret Life of Bees is a lesson -- or, rather, a whole series of them -- we no longer need to learn. Of course, it's also a divine-sisterhood-defeats-all chick flick, and on that score there's no denying that its clichés are rousingly up to date.

The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ''corny,'' ''romantic,'' and ''old-fashioned,'' that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.

How lame have high-concept, no-brain comedies gotten?

Turns out to be the portrait of a serial yo-yo dieter, an impression enhanced by the 60 year old Berlin, who suggests less a former depraved scenester than a calorie compulsive Martha Stewart grown bored with good taste.

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

Scrappy and rambling and overly earnest.

The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.

Hugh Grant has grown up, holding on to his lightness and witty cynicism but losing the stuttering sherry-club mannerisms that were once his signature. In doing so, he has blossomed into the rare actor who can play a silver-tongued sleaze with a hidden inner decency.

As skewed, prismatic, and free of fluff as the man himself.

Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.

By the time Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is over, it may send more than a few viewers scurrying off to the bookstore. They'll surely want to see what all the fuss was about.

It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself.

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."

This is, after all, not just Robert Redford. It's Redford in the nobly burnished self-mythologic perfection of his late-middle-aged golden god-ness.

The cast is a pitch-perfect assemblage of pretty young things, but James Van Der Beek, as a slit-eyed dorm stud, proves that he can be an actor of cruel force.

The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.

It's a messy, entertaining documentary rooted in -- though not limited to -- the iconically indulgent years of Fellini's later career.

Bloodless and false.

Lurie hits closer to the bone here than he did in his ham-handed "The Contender" (2000).

A highly calculated act of mischief that sounds like a stunt cooked up for Howard Stern's radio show.

A sentimental epic that forgets to include the sentiment

Don't let the Carl Hiaasen pedigree fool you: Hoot is an Afterschool Special too crummy to give a hoot about.

When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.

Bluntly put, Neil Young’s music now has too much integrity and not enough hooks, and so does Year of the Horse. The rough-grain Super-8 images, while a nifty visual correlative to the Crazy Horse sound, deny us the fundamental pleasure of a concert movie — a sense of intimacy with the band’s performance.

The film should have been called ''Lock, Stock and Two Wilting Barrels.''

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

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

It’s really one of the very first, very early Gen-X movies (the true first one, to me, is 1978’s terrific Over the Edge), and I was struck all over again by the freshness of what it captured: these four prematurely jaded adolescent girls, led by Jodie Foster as the sensible one, living like baby adults, cut off from their parents and the past, bonded only by attitude, consumerism, and the pop-culture decadence they share.

Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.

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

It's no coincidence that The Box plays like the world's murkiest Twilight Zone episode. It's loosely based on ''Button, Button,'' a short story by Richard Matheson, who wrote some of the series' greatest scripts.

The movie is funny when it's nasty, as when Ron and Veronica trade insults at the anchor desk. Most of the time, though, it's not nasty enough.

Jack Frost is so treacly and fake it makes you feel like you’re trapped in a winter-wonderland paperweight.

Feminist sanctimony, it turns out, looks much the same forward and backward.

In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.

Shepard's charisma has always reached back to an earlier time, so it's easy to accept him as a kind of pre-counterculture hero - Eastwood without the sneer - who aged into the era of tabloid scandal.

During the fight scenes, it sounds as if a hundred watermelons were being clobbered at once. Other than that, it’s business as usual, with the all-American Speakman proving the most generic vigilante this genre has spawned yet.

A hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum.

Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.

A gory, pulpy wink of an action thriller, was spun out of a parody trailer Rodriguez directed for the '70s-trash homage "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was sublime. As a feature, Machete is more fun than it isn't, but its deadpan mockery of exploitation clichés often slips a bit too close to being the real, schlocky thing.

The movie is cheesy, tacky, and gimmicky. But as directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), it's also prankish and inventive enough to be kind of fun.

As a love-jones soap opera, Brown Sugar feeds right into Dre's nostalgic crankiness.

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.

Aspires to blasphemy but achieves only banality.

The House of Sand's director, Andrucha Waddington, lays on the Awesome Visual Poetry and throws in a welter of story gimmicks, but it's all a bit too fancifully arid.

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

You giggle every so often, but you never give yourself over to the characters.

It's doubtful that even a real actress could have triumphed over the rusty tinsel of Glitter, a hapless, retro-'80s ''Star Is Born.''

I wish I could say that the film is half as intriguing as it sounds, but A Woman, a Gun... lacks the Coen brothers' precision, their diabolical game-board cleverness. It's a remake in shaggy outline only.

The movie, quite simply, goes to sleep whenever Zatoichi isn't fighting. When he is, it's a pulp dazzler.

The essential spark of surprise is missing. The mechanics of ''breathless'' suspense are blanketed by an atmosphere of creeping caution.

For all the nimbleness of its first half and the chemical zing of Pitt and Jolie, the film devolves into a fractious and explosive mess, hitting the same note of ''ironic'' violence over and over.

As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated.

Simon Pegg has what it takes, but he's saddled himself with a script (co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black) that Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer.

As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick.

Toy Story 3 is a salute to the magic of making believe.

A movie in which the easy socio-racial paradoxes have been diagrammed with more care than the relationships

When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.

The movie has a few jokes, but it could have used some of the canny, real-world logic that made Rain Man so convincing (and funny).

Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.

An idiot variation on Frank Capra's ''Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,'' might have been thrown together in even less time than it takes Sandler to get dressed in the morning; it feels sort of like the dumbest corporate comedy of 1987.

Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence.

Whether you respond to this movie may come down to the question of how far you think people are willing to go to realize their desires. Damage says that they’ll go all the way — past honor, past rationality, past sin. The movie may not always convince, but when it does it’s a cataclysmic peek into the erotic abyss.

Easy A has some agreeable fast banter, but it's so self-consciously stylized that it wears you out.

A melancholy romance that has the distinction of being the first film set among San Francisco dotcommers that knows it's about the end of the boom.

If I respect Downfall more than I was enthralled by it, that's because its portayal stops short of revelation. Once you witness Hitler's denial, the film has little more to say about him.

It turns out that speeding along dirt roads isn't nearly as photogenic - or as varied - as surfing is.

There's nothing corny, however, about the climactic shoot-out, which Costner has staged superbly as an extended logistical mini-war that surges and rifle-cracks with bloody abandon through what feels like every building in town. Call it dances with guns.

Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.

It's an enjoyable ramble, with a feel for what made the early days of rock as wild as any that followed.

The two stars are like cool kids pretending to be tortured poets pretending to be cool. Neither can match the screen presence — the shameless self-infatuated ebullience — of Matthew Lillard, who does a wickedly grotesque turn as Brock Hudson, a kind of goggle-eyed Puck manqué in the film's dead-on send-up of "The Real World."

Plato's Retreat was a buffet of bodies, and the film catches the moment America could think that was tasty.

Shot in vivid black and white, the movie is like "Village of the Damned" directed by Ingmar Bergman, only without Bergman's intensity.

In its low grade way, this blithely brutal cops and drugs thriller is an efficient hot wire entertainment.

The movie is a footnote as well, a minor reference back to the days when people yearned for a cinema that was serious and erotic at the same time.

The routinely scripted but kinetic Stone Cold is a throwback to Roger Corman’s Hell’s Angels flicks, in which beer-swilling denim-and-leather-clad freedom riders straddled their Harleys to terrorize the American heartland.

If it's possible to be a rip-off with wit, Disturbia qualifies.

A blatant re-spin of ''The Fast and the Furious'' that also happens to be a far better movie.

The tale itself is so spectacularly perverse, and the film stays so authentically close to the personalities involved, that you don't feel dirty -- you feel cleansed.

The movie wants you to giggle and say, ”Yup, we sure are saps, aren’t we?”

This is just silliness run mildly wild.

Emotionally mesmerizing.

Without that heightened racial antipathy-turned-camaraderie, there's not a whole lot to Cop Out besides watching Kevin Smith pretend, with a crudeness that is simply boring, that he's an action director making a comic thriller about cops versus a Mexican drug gang (yawn).

The movie is too cute to lose its head in the music. It never generates its own ecstasy.

They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.

At once brasher and more frivolous, she's a lot less compelling fighting for the welfare of lab-test animals than she was crusading for her own dignity.

Hopping from Germany to Turkey and back again, Akin is out to capture the ways that a globalized world can tear up our hearts, and repair them, too.

Leaves you with the dismaying sensation that Levinson, who should probably be off making his own version of ''The Player,'' has instead crafted a comedy of self-loathing, burying himself in a movie that deserves to be Vapoorized.

Hill knows how to zing the audience, and his ”existential” approach to action remains edgy and enjoyable. But it also seems guided, more than ever, by a blockbuster imperative: Whatever happens, don’t let that roller coaster stop.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

It's not every day that one of our rogues' gallery of iconic psycho killers gets to be played by a creepy and fascinating actor -- in this case, Jackie Earle Haley taking on the role of Freddy Krueger.