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
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
|
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
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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
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 83
It's a good bet the average American moviegoer, however familiar with the rhythms of cinematic global culture, has never experienced such a handsomely self contained world. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There are moments in Baran as wholesomely heart-tugging as any involving Charlie Chaplin and a blind girl, but the film is saved from aren't-kids-cute sentimentality by a warmth that isn't faked and a stately sense of composition. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
With its warring factions, citizen uprisings, guerrilla insurgencies, political intrigue, bloody warfare, family tensions, and homoerotic subtext, Coriolanus is one of the year's best political thrillers.- Posted Dec 7, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
This patient, righteous documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns recounts the story of justice undone (a serial rapist confessed) with extensive interviews, a thorough use of archival footage, and a less-than felicitous use of ominous-rumble music that unnecessarily insists, Isn't this an outrage?- Posted Nov 20, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The result is an engrossing chronicle of creative people under pressure, a movie about the madness of opera for which no knowledge of opera is required for full enjoyment.- Posted Jul 25, 2012
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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
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Greggory anchors Gabrielle in manly bewilderment and rage, while Huppert claws the title character's way to self-awareness. -
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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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Critic Score 83
DeVito doesn't hesitate to send the camera anywhere to goose the humor. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
As he rises to each challenge, you realize that von Trier, the most exalted of prankish sadists, has orchestrated the filmmaking equivalent of the story of Job. The Five Obstructions glories in art, life, and the faith that binds them. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 100
Steven Spielberg overcame the lumpy plotting of Peter Benchley's novel to create an efficient, graceful fright machine in Jaws. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Reprise is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility, sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Tsai builds this shimmering story with deft, deadpan wit and a warm, understated love of the absurd, both in life and afterlife. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The wry filmmaker has created an urbane society of family and friends as ridiculously pretentious and hypocritical as they are cultured, accomplished, and posh. -
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- Posted Dec 8, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
This audaciously issues-loaded indie drama works, improbably and entirely, on account of the marvelous, often familiar-looking, rarely starring character actor Richard Jenkins and his perfect performance as a stodgy, widowed economics professor. -
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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 83
Even at his coolest, Downey's Iron Man remains a ghostly, neurotic crusader -- one whose life, in the Marvel tradition, has become a grand spectacle of overcompensation. -
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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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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
Scott Brown 91
So Much So Fast (spanning five years) elegantly presents both a critique and a celebration of American optimism. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Among Gosling's many star-making qualities is his nuanced mastery, since "The Believer," of a facial expression of infinitely adaptable, imperturbable, sustained calm that can read as chilling or ardent, hard or soft, as the role demands.- Posted Sep 14, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The dramatic power, though, comes entirely from the eloquence of old people, shot in medium close-up, barely moving as they remember things. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Affliction -- a beautiful bummer, a magnificent feel-bad movie -- is American filmmaking of a most rewarding order. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Her memories lack the quality of revelation -- that is, up until the remarkable final section, in which she describes the last weeks in the bunker with Hitler and Eva Braun. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Lee's bigger theme isn't God or survival, but the awesome adventure of making the imaginary visible, the adventure of making movies.- Posted Nov 20, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie draws us into complicity with someone who may be on the verge of insanity, but only because he's living with the unbearable. -
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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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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.- Posted Dec 6, 2010
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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 83
Excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks -- vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Control goes past the clichés of punk rock-god gloom to offer a snapshot of alienation that's shockingly humane. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Andrew Wagner has made a lovely comedy of death and rebirth. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Spitting obscenities at the film's director, Jay Bulger, Baker recalls his days as: the '60s thrash caveman who gave Cream and Blind Faith their transcendent power surge; the pioneer of druggy hotel-room rampages; and the damaged purist who left the pop world for Africa. The movie salutes the rhythms and the wreckage.- Posted Nov 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, an ebullient sliver of a movie, follows a group of men and women in their early 20s, and for once the un-dialogue dialogue doesn't come off as an affectation. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Golden Army dazzles like something out of "Jason and the Argonauts." To make a comic-book fantasy this derivative yet this dazzling requires more than technique. It takes a director in touch with his inner hellboy. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth. -
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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
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What matters now, what Lumumba conveys, is the urgent chaos of revolution. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Art history majors may write in with corrections. Meanwhile, I'm declaring that the masterly, big-canvas biographical drama Chi-hwa-seon: Painted Fire is about the Jackson Pollock of 19th-century Korea. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 100
You may not like the terms Tarantino sets, but you have to admit he succeeds on them. -
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Critic Score 83
The brilliance of Michael Mann's Manhunter is that it appreciates that the true nexus of humanity is our shared closeness. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie. -
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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
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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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness. -
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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
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
Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power. -
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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
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition] -
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Critic Score 83
The biggest problem with Lone Star is that colorful Charley Wade isn't the center of the movie -- it's bland Sam Deeds. Cooper isn't a compelling enough movie star to carry us along some of the film's more languid twists and turns. -
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Critic Score 83
Some of the effects remain nicely repulsive; Freddy himself comes across as a genuinely nasty piece of work, far removed from his later incarnation. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 100
Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil. -
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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 100
It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack. -
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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
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
del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola. -
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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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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''- Posted Mar 21, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Each episode (originally made for British TV) works by itself, but there's a real payoff in following all three. (Nothing matches The "Wire," but this holds its own.) -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Well-made film. Indeed, discovering such a small pleasure is the kind of experience that rewards film lovers who browse with open eyes as well as hearts. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Through it all, Natalie Maines' decision to shirk humility, to stick by her guns, to the point that the group returns to that London concert venue in 2006 and she utters the same joke again, becomes a feisty and inspiring act of something there is only one word for: patriotism. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Notre Musique is Godard's post-9/11 statement, a meditation on how war emerges from the eternal, and hypocritical, duality of human perception -- the sense that it's always ''the other'' who dies. -
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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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- Posted Jul 11, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
There's nothing drab about the tormented place these men take each other to. You'll want to go along. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A fascinating and lovingly crafted musical documentary that nevertheless misunderstands its own subject. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk. -
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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
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This unsentimental, smartly assembled film is equally attentive to the cacophony of African poverty and the balm of harmony provided by these pied pipers of hope.- Posted Oct 1, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.- Posted Mar 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India's western Goa region -- and works in Hindi, primarily with novice actors. The result is a story both authentically specific and profoundly global. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music. -
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Critic Score 83
Travolta molds what could have been an equally obvious character into a substantial, tragic figure. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Anderson's big, showy flower of a movie unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint whiff of rot. -
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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
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
Owen Gleiberman 91
The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 100
It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
It isn't easy to get close to these two women. But the effort yields a rewarding take on the resiliency and therapeutic importance of friendship.- Posted Jun 3, 2013
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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
Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Rosetta is a character of raw pride in a film of lingering power. -
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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 100
True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The film excels in small scenes of cannily chosen Indian everydayness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.- Posted Jul 2, 2011
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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 83
This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Another grotty drama about junkie love? Well, yes...I make an exception for Jesus' Son. -
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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
Ty Burr 100
Has the effect of making the average Disney film look like just another toy story. -
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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
The result is a portrait that expertly mirrors its subject: Buck is shaped with the same economy, restraint, and unfussiness as the man, to unexpectedly inspiring effect.- Posted Jun 22, 2011
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it. -
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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
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
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
A memory of the automobile in which a father drove away from his family provides the title for Blue Car but no hint of the power of writer-director Karen Moncrieff's superb feature debut. -
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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 100
The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
In Shine a Light, a crackling concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones are now so old that they seem new again. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Martha Marcy May Marlene leaves a viewer hanging, quite literally, lost in an enveloping fog of mood without resolution. Olsen, meanwhile, definitely marks her arrival.- Posted Oct 19, 2011
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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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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
You could describe Margin Call as a thriller (it's wired with suspense), yet the tension all comes from words.- Posted Oct 19, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real. -
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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
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The daffy, innately British joke that propels the cheeky U.K. comedy hit Shaun of the Dead is that although real zombies have risen up -- slacker wankers Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his best pal and roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), are too slack, wankerish, and blitheringly British to notice. -
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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 100
Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants. -
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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 91
Intelligent conversation about the interplay of erotic and destructive urges takes place over cups of tea in fine bone china. Yet the movie is a radically modern story about sex.- Posted Nov 30, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The first hour of The Last of the Mohicans plays like a convoluted history lesson. I appreciate that Mann has enough respect for the audience's intelligence to sketch in this briar patch of conflicting loyalties. But he outlines the interlocking factions without really making it clear, in dramatic terms, what each one stands for.- Posted Jun 3, 2013
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Critic Score 83
There's something old-fashioned about Mud, but if you allow yourself to settle into its leisurely pace, it will reward you. If he were alive today, Mark Twain would approve.- Posted Apr 24, 2013
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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 100
Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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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
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
They also make joyful music, communicated, both by the singers and their playful, sensitive documentarian, with an authority that quite knocks off socks. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
This is a tough-minded story of change that happens in almost imperceptibly tiny increments - as true growth so often does in reality.- Posted Oct 24, 2012
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Critic Score 83
Mangold, who also wrote the script, has made a modern-day "Marty", a kitchen-sink drama that doesn't condescend to its characters. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The intense interviews and damning statistics (20 percent of all female personnel have experienced sexual assault) do the work of whipping up outrage.- Posted Jun 21, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Zigzags across the conventions of genre, occasionally driving on the shoulders of black humor -- it's a road movie for the way we process suspense today. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
Wide-ranging and beautifully edited -- it's a vivid evocation of a moment when even the ugliest guitar feedback could be taken as a serious political statement. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?'' -
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Critic Score 83
There could be a few more scares and laughs, but it's a blast to be drawn into this urban ecosystem that is, to us Yanks, itself a bit alien.- Posted Jul 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The title Terror's Advocate is both a statement of fact and a worrisome understatement in a documentary as slippery as its subject. -
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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
With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.- Posted Mar 16, 2011
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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
Owen Gleiberman 91
Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Lasse Hallström calms Irving's typically busy 1985 best-seller with a balm of the Swedish director's typically soothing lyricism. -
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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 83
When we finally see the time-lapse images his cameras took, they're awesome and terrifying - a meltdown out of a poetic horror film.- Posted Dec 5, 2012
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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 83
For kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs.- Posted Nov 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
An Inconvenient Truth can't, of course, reveal a future that is still up to us, but by the time you're done watching, the real question is, Which way on God's green earth would you want to err? -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
We're given an intimate seat to this wildly democratic - and creepily messianic - spectacle.- Posted Jun 13, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
This is a sensual, psychologically modern costume drama influenced by both "The Godfather" and gals' guides to empowerment. -
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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
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 83
Enchanted is festooned with extravagant set pieces -- there's a great number in praise of romantic gestures, and a ballroom scene to make even grown-up girls swoon. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band. -
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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
Owen Gleiberman 83
It's a David-and-Goliath tale, full of anger and disturbing accusation, but it's also inspiring. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
What the characters in The Witnesses -- and we, the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology. -
