For 4,827 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
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,916 out of 4827
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Mixed: 1,362 out of 4827
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Negative: 549 out of 4827
4,827
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Mr. Lazarescu is that rich and riveting a film of universal small human moments and big-system failure. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The picture was made in 1969 and is only now being released in the U.S., in a beautiful restoration supervised by original cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male. -
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Critic Score 100
It boasts a more consistent tone, better special effects (such as villains throwing buses around like paper planes), and even an affecting love story. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Half Nelson offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
"Andy Warhol" makes you see that beneath the gargoyle hipster mask, he filled that emptiness with an art of transcendent sincerity. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Maggie Gyllenhaal is such a miracle of an actress that she makes you respond to the innocence of Sherry's desperate, selfish destruction. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, "Flags of Our Fathers." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It's a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The serious accusations are leavened by the moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There are moments in A Little Princess--particularly Cuaron's Indian play-within-the-play, which is nearly avant-garde in its conception--when you may just want to clap from pleasure. My advice to you is: Go ahead, you're a grown-up. [26 May 26 1995] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Way ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A funny and madly arresting new documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The Savages is terrific -- a movie of uncommon appreciation for the nature and nurture that go into making us who we are, a perfectly calibrated drama both compassionate and unsentimental. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The gorgeous music includes Ralph Vaughan Williams' wafting tone poem ''The Lark Ascending'' -- apt in describing an artist who might well be part bird. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Beautiful, wise, and poker-faced comedy of discombobulation. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Brims with life and loveliness even as it meditates on the loss of childhood. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The result is an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This is one of the year's best. To paraphrase the Wild Thing named KW, I could eat it up, I love it so. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Don't tell Walt Disney, but Hayao Miyazaki really holds the keys to the magic kingdom. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please! -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Another must-see marvel of horror, comedy, and impeccable filmmaking by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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 -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Yet another outstanding little movie in the exciting Romanian New Wave. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Beautifully led by birdlike Sylvie Testud as an ailing young woman in a wheelchair, every character (pilgrim and helper alike) exhibits a soul. And shaped with confident talent by the Austrian filmmaker, every serenely composed shot matters. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There's also no romanticizing on the part of the director, who proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness (even in the midst of scenes of violence), creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor for whom prison turns out to be a twisted opportunity for self-definition. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
One of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Jaoui neatly, gently, firmly slips political commentary into Let It Rain's articulate mayhem. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It took writer-director Samuel ''Shmulik'' Maoz nearly 30 years to make this disturbing, visceral, personal film. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This warm, funny, sexy, smart movie erases the boundaries between specialized ''gay content'' and universal ''family content'' with such sneaky authority. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This is essential viewing for understanding our world. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.- Posted Oct 27, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.- Posted Dec 6, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.- Posted Nov 27, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Tiny Furniture is proof, against steep odds, that there are no small stories, only small storytellers.- Posted Dec 11, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Damien Chazelle's extraordinary black-and-white retro dream of a feature debut.- Posted Dec 12, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.- Posted Dec 29, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.- Posted Jan 5, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.- Posted Feb 15, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty before language fails her. She does even better: She herself becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the world.- Posted Feb 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The Wizard of Oz remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's-really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood.- Posted Feb 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Temperamentally in sync with her "Wendy and Lucy" director, Michelle Williams plays one of the toiling wives. And the actress, with her calm center, compresses the entire history of frontier wifeliness into the concentration with which she gathers firewood and loads a musket.- Posted Apr 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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?- Posted May 11, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year - of many years.- Posted Jun 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jun 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jul 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Nothing more (or less) than an enchanting light comedy of romantic confusion... It's a movie that understands love because it understands pain.- Posted Jul 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This enveloping dream of an epic narrative experiment comes from the great Chilean-born, France-based filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained).- Posted Aug 4, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A movie masterpiece...is Lars von Trier's ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end.- Posted Oct 19, 2011
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- Posted Nov 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.- Posted Nov 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.- Posted Nov 3, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.- Posted Nov 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Oren Moverman's Rampart is a terrific film: tense, shocking, complex, mesmerizing.- Posted Nov 23, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Dec 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Dec 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Loosely based on real events, this harrowing, superbly made drama by fast-rising filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode) is Mexico's 2012 submission for Best Foreign Language Film - rightfully so.- Posted Jan 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This is a great film, and a triumph of creativity and courage over repression.- Posted Feb 27, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.- Posted Mar 7, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
No one charts the wilds of childhood more precisely than the Dardennes.- Posted Mar 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).- Posted Mar 21, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Apr 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Trier's compassion for what it takes to survive, mixed with the love he bestows on Oslo, is rewardingly profound.- Posted May 23, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The movie is small, local, and idiosyncratic. Then again, it's also a thing of beauty and originality - and for that, sustained huzzahs are in order.- Posted Jun 27, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jul 11, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jul 11, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jul 25, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.- Posted Aug 29, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Lindhardt, sweet and childish and achingly vulnerable, gives a stunning performance.- Posted Sep 6, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction.- Posted Sep 14, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Sep 19, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Oct 3, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.''- Posted Oct 3, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
An exhilarating puzzle, one of the grand cinematic eruptions of the year.- Posted Oct 24, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
One of the year's most original and emotionally profound movies masquerades as the tiny story of a young couple who take a backpacking trip in the Caucasus Mountains the summer before their wedding.- Posted Oct 24, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Flight opens with one of the most harrowing in-flight-disaster depictions of all time.- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Nov 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.- Posted Nov 14, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Killing them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you.- Posted Nov 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Nov 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Once in a long while, a fresh-from-the-headlines movie - like "All the President's Men" or "United 93" - fuses journalism, procedural high drama, and the oxygenated atmosphere of a thriller into a new version of history written with lightning. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's meticulous and electrifying re-creation of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is that kind of movie.- Posted Dec 5, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Jan 2, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The film, by seasoned cinematographer Dror Moreh, is a feat — of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.- Posted Feb 6, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Feb 7, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Critic Score 100
Director Bruce Beresford's tightly focused adaptation retains all the impact of its Pulitzer Prize-winning stage original. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give exceptional performances as the aging widow and the sage black chauffeur who enlightens her in the segregated South.- Posted Feb 20, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted Mar 27, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted May 15, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
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.- Posted May 22, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest.- Posted Jun 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Crystal turns in his best (read: least sappy) performance in ages, getting through an entire movie -- most of it, anyway -- without mugging. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
So sharp and dryly urbane in its mod-Brit take on the noir, noir, noir, noir world of gambling, dames, and pulp fiction, it makes higher-profile attempts like ''Rounders'' look blah, blah, blah, blah. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The fetching cast (including Jennifer Beals as a histrionic girlfriend), while a long way from Gwyneth and Matt stature, nevertheless reflects Stillman’s enhanced status as an established indie talent. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
There's a bravura recklessness to Beautiful People that perfectly fits its subject. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
While Rodriguez punches through the indie clutter to announce herself as a superb new movie talent, so Kusama scores big points in her first main event. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
As compelling as it is bizarre. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
It's a tiny, sunny character study about a fat guy who's an unlikely chick magnet. And as such it's a pip. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The most unexpectedly audacious, exhilarating, wildly creative adventure thriller I've seen in ages. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Jaoui handles her crowd of vivid characters so naturally, and shoots her scenes so unobtrusively, that the diagrammatic cleverness of the plot never overwhelms the intelligence of the observations. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The charm and art of De Felitta's gentle domestic sketch expand far beyond biographical borders. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Feels delightfully organic, eccentrically rambling, the found artistic collage of a woman who herself loves to collect. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A suspenseful and delightfully creepy French drama. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Even blood, spilled so freely, has a distinctive intensity of red in this beautiful and harrowing film. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
This lone, fallen Nazi's obsessive distance from his actions is enough to give The Specialist a lingering chill. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Acompelling, cant free drama about clashing class systems and challenged family relationships that's all the more engrossing for its organic, near documentary style. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Fonteyne edges closer than most to capturing the mysterious rhythms of liaisons -- pornographique, romantique, and otherwise. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The nonprofessional cast of Bahman Ghobadi's remarkable, slow, rough edged feature reveals a simple, piercing grimness and determination framed by the gray, icy landscape of Iranian Kurdistan. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Leconte (''Ridicule'') gives his heart to the luck of romance, to the dream state visual style of Fellini, and, most lyrically, to the passion of the dagger point swoon. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment. -
