For 4,829 reviews, this publication has graded:
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68% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.6 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,918 out of 4829
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Mixed: 1,362 out of 4829
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Negative: 549 out of 4829
4,829
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The tonal elegance of this black comedy set in a dark time -- is boldly dependent on performances that tug at taut lines of moral complexity. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Hanks towers as a near naked, near biblical man. Zemeckis tells his story -- the screenplay is by William Broyles -- with a control magnificent in what isn't shown as much as in what is. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The Cockettes weren't talented, exactly, yet the bedazzled flakiness of their passion takes you closer than just about any movie has to what was once really meant by the term ''free-spirited.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Watch for the director's own mother, Lili Kosashvili, a standout as Zaza's fierce, stately mama. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The script is a steady accretion of small stabs to the heart, propelling the gorgeous performances of Berling, Regnier, and especially the 76-year-old French cinema veteran Bouquet, whose every faint smile is killing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A crowd-pleaser in the deepest sense, mixes heartbreak and happiness together until you don't even want to see them apart. -
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Critic Score 91
Who knew that Brat Packer Sheedy would shine as a heroin-addicted photographer who had too much fame too early? -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
High school reunions should only be this satisfying. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power. -
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Critic Score 91
With its stylized black-and-white sequences and fast-paced melodramatic plot, this homage to film noir is both intense and purposely self-conscious. -
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Critic Score 91
For all its scenes of degradation (five minutes of which have been shorn for an R-rated cut; we recommend the original NC-17 version), Bad Lieutenant is a deeply moral movie. It's not pretty-it's not even very realistic-but it does matter. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
One of the great virtues of Disney's most elegant animated ''classic'' in years is how blessedly sermon-free this zippy, dignified retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ripping 1914 yarn is. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A stirring action movie -- in the international manner of ''The Fast Runner'' or ''No Man's Land." -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What matters now, what Lumumba conveys, is the urgent chaos of revolution. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The subtle selectivity of Leconte's eye, how he moves with great control from gesture to gesture, is matched by the disciplined intensity of the performances. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The charming movie, already an international success, seduces. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The result is a movie, and Cannes Palme d'Or winner, of riveting power and sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker -- and star, too. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Remains a majestic explosion of pure cinema. It's a hallucinatory poem of fear, projecting, in its scale and spirit, a messianic vision of human warfare stretched to the flashpoint of technological and moral breakdown. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A surreal, elegantly melancholy, and yet witty ensemble story. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
It's all very French, very intricate, and -- this is Rivette's magic -- seemingly as light as air. -
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Critic Score 91
There's a word for an actress who can go from nervous to winsome to raunchy to romantic in a heartbeat and get you to adore her the whole time. The word is star. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Trekkies is hilarious, fascinating, and, at times, almost scary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen. -
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Critic Score 91
Neither the stars' harmonious interplay nor director Anand Tucker's insistent urbanity of camera work can disguise that the cello drama is melodrama. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A warm embrace of tradition and boisterous, ethnographically rich local culture. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Gorgeously shot tableaux of random adolescent brutality are interrupted by flashes of computer garble and chat-room talk, backed by ''Lily's'' music, with its blend of Debussy-like arpeggios and Enya-like sighing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The film satirizes, and celebrates, an idea pivotal to both Hollywood and love: that in a world of impostors, the pretender with the most conviction can become exactly what he pretends to be. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Lynch's first movie since ''Blue Velvet'' that truly envelops you in its spell. It's a piece of celestial Americana -- his journey to the light side of the moon. -
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Critic Score 91
It's the electric interplay between Pacino and Depp that will make it a Mob movie classic. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Mitchell directs and stars in the riotous, loving, and only occasionally pathos-milking film adaptation of his own acclaimed Off Broadway play, with great up-your-ante music and lyrics by Stephen Trask. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Turns out to be a supple, intriguing, and beautifully staged movie. It features Dillon, in his most forceful performance since ''Drugstore Cowboy.'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The movie might almost be winking at the fact that any single one of these performers could easily be the featured star of his or her own upper-crust period piece. -
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Critic Score 91
Unfolds with such unforced inevitability that absurdity never condescends to sticky adorableness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A quietly dazzling microcosm that's always just this side of eerie, just that side of tragic. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Bean's commitment to serious theological examination is exciting, Gosling's performance is riveting, and this fiery and imperfect feature shines as a demonstration of independent filmmaking at its most uncompromising. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 91
From the opening shot of a burnt-orange GTO cruising a high school parking lot to the strains of Aerosmith's ''Sweet Emotion,'' Richard Linklater's film nails mid-'70s adolescence so precisely that you'll need Clearasil by the end credits. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Lathan, charismatic and beautifully strong, holds the screen in every scene. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What matters for today's hero is the good fight, and Gladiator KOs us with a doozy. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Expertly sinister, office-as-devil's-playground French thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Emotional presence and a sophisticated understanding of commitment-phobia (as something other than a comedic punchline or an excuse for sex scenes) distinguishes this intense, contained drama, as does the unforced, sensual, and sensitive cinematography of Uta Briesewitz. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
It's ''Moskowitz's March,'' really -- and it ends in stirring victory -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Lives happily ever after because it's such a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The old-world-meets-new mesh is incarnated in the movie's soundtrack, a joyful effusion of disco Bollywood that, by the end of Monsoon Wedding, sent my spirit soaring out of the theater. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Serendipity has no business working, but it does. And by the way, Eugene Levy has no business almost stealing the show, but he does, too. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A fast, loose, and very funny parody that pulls off the not-so-simple feat of tweaking Trekkies and honoring them. -
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Critic Score 91
This genteel period piece invites a typically Mametian tension between its characters' stylized manners and their underlying motivations. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A funny, shrewd, no-bull family comedy about the relationship between mothers and teenage daughters that allows Curtis the comedian to remember her days as a slinky starlet while making use of her wisdom as the mother of an adolescent girl herself. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Realer and more consequential than much being packaged for TV and movies these days as ''reality,'' the fictional In This World unfolds with the deceptive dispassion of a documentary, but builds with a sure sense of dramatic epic. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Using newsreel footage, clips of artistic propaganda (e.g., joyful proletarian farm ballets), and interviews with survivors, the movie draws us into the annihilating fervor of an era in which purge followed upon purge, in escalating waves of terror and control. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar). -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
If ''Finding Nemo'' is an awesome Pixar superpower, The Triplets of Belleville is a charming, idiosyncratic, self-governing duchy with huge tourism potential on the other side of the animated-movie planet. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Has a fractured fairy-tale charm, even if it isn't a nonstop laugh riot. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
On the eve of Wuornos' 2002 execution, Broomfield digs deep into her abusive hell of a background (beatings, incest, sleeping homeless in the frozen Michigan woods) as well as her quasi-psychotic defense mechanisms. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating. -
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Critic Score 91
Kineticism and suspense, combined with strongly conceived characters....Made Cameron a talent to watch. [13 Jan 1995, p. 67] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
That the story is so oldfashioned and domestic and the family so average and secular is, in its way, the wind beneath this Broken Wings. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The first Irish creation I've seen in ages to pull off the high-difficulty feat of trafficking in grit, drollery, and emotion without turning to blarney as a crutch. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The clammy power of Young Adam lies as much in the frank, emotional nakedness the actors bring to their roles under Mackenzie's care as in the baroque hopelessness of the plot. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
André Téchiné's beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed drama Strayed has less to do with the events and moral choices of the era that continue to shape French identity than with the timeless psychological effects of finding oneself unmoored from the familiar. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe. -
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Critic Score 91
This gonzo satiric thriller is a riveting portrait of early-60's paranoia. [15 Nov 1996, p.82] -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
There are no zombies out of ''28 Days Later'' to alleviate the slow creep of realistic doom in this chilly, tense corker. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
As a sharky, gay TV journalist investigating the story, Tom Selleck charms by playing in contrast to his own determinedly hetero persona. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A smashingly effective documentary -- I found it more resonant than ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' -- yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Although the talent of a kid with the last name of Culkin may not, at this point, register as such a novelty -- Rory follows brothers Macaulay and Kieran -- there is something precociously mature but natural about the work of this youngest Culkin sibling that stands apart. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Consider Primer a successful lab experiment with, as they might say in techie chat rooms, significant indie-cred applications, IMHO. Oh, and :-). -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What blows us away is the power of Ifans' moist puppy eyes and chilling smile as a true believer undeterred by reality. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression. At the same time, it offers something we rarely encounter in a whirling martial-arts extravaganza: a romantic passion that's woven into the very fabric of the action. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Under the direction of "Bend It Like Beckham's" Gurinder Chadha, this festively busy and exuberantly multicultural charmer is its own intriguingly postmodern creation. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Janet McTeer displays Amazonian power while Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into her role as a high maintenance creature with a ferocity that leaves little room for her usual acting tics. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's not every comedy that can make you laugh with ridicule and cringe in empathetic horror at the same time. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This patient, perceptive, nonjudgmental love story about age difference is the first to convincingly explain the temporal physics of May-December romances. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Her death was shocking; this well-made telling of her life is inspiring. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Up and Down captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
But while this piquant, tapas-like movie (a 2003 film- festival favorite only now being released) asserts that landscape is a kind of destiny from which one cannot escape, Sorin takes delighted, serious interest in how far a person can advance psychologically, even if all roads lead back to a home at the end of the world. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This sincere, delicate, and intrinsically religious comedy may also become that most unexpected of blessings - Danny Boyle's first family classic. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Told in a tricky flashback mode that's vivid even with a few too many temporal kinks, Don't Move is the sort of thing that Claude Chabrol was once praised for making with more pretension and a lot less less juice. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The blessings of salvation have rarely felt so mixed, the parameters of Lolita-hood so elusive - which is exactly Martel's specialty. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
We do live in a fraught world of interconnections, Bier makes clear, and what happens far away matters, in unexpected ways, close to home. -
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Critic Score 91
Bounding out of the gate like a greyhound, Unleashed needs only its first 30 seconds or so to elevate itself well above the average action potboiler. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
On the Outs parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Funny, ungirdled romp - a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The home-studio recording sequences in Hustle & Flow are funky, rowdy, and indelible. Brewer gives us the pleasure of watching characters create music from the ground up. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
There are many places a visitor may go astray in 2046 -- places where the filmmaker appears to be a bit at loose ends too. Still, Wong's invitation -- ''Let's get lost'' -- is irresistible. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Wilkinson once again astonishes with his ability to convey weakness and strength, hypocrisy and gallantry, cruelty and compassion in the same male animal. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and king-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), has something to astonish everyone. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The deliriously enjoyable noir comedy-thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang does nothing by halves and everything by doubles. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.) -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Of all the shocks in the riveting and timely political thriller Paradise Now, the most unsettling may be the dignity bestowed on a pair of prospective Palestinian suicide bombers. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The Passenger isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers? -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 91
Zathura is a rarity: a stellar fantasy that faces down childhood anxieties with feet-on-the-ground maturity. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The result is a wacked kiddie Rashomon in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. Hoodwinked's most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's a fearless and brilliant racial-historical satire, done in a meticulous re-creation of the Ken Burns mode, that chronicles the last 150 years of America as if the South had won the Civil War. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Duck Season unfolds with a slaphappy logic that only looks casual. In fact, every unfinished conversation and banal picture on the wall (one's of ducks) matters as four little people share one memorable little day. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow). -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The jazzish score, by Lee's music man, Terence Blanchard, is typically intrusive. But the mood is right, the twists are new. And with one casting inspiration, Inside Man furthers the rising stardom of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity). -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Pulling the bandage of sentiment cleanly away from oozing concepts like ''heroism'' and ''our nation's war on terror'' in the aftermath of recent wounds, here's a drama about the most politically charged crisis of our time that grants the dignity of autonomy to every soul involved. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
"Old Boy's" vivid star Choi Min-sik plays a terrible schoolteacher -- yet another damned soul in Park's inflammatory, inimitable movie inventory of hell on earth. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood. -
