Owen Gleiberman

"Sly," which takes a movie lover’s journey through Stallone’s career, shows you how he continued to shape his image onscreen, and how much of our blockbuster culture he created.

Keaton, in every scene, blends execution with humanity.

"His Three Daughters" always feel like a work of cinema. The exchanges hold and even rivet us

You know you’re watching a true pop star when that person’s identity — their very existence — smashes boundaries. Elvis Presley was a country boy who mixed country and rockabilly and the blues, and with his sneer and black hair and mascara he looked like no human had ever looked before. Prince was a one-man […]

A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels. With their Porsches and drugs and (by the decade’s end) their idolization of Gordon Gekko, they put the kill into making a killing. They were the new swingers of greed. Of course, they weren’t really rebels, but it […]

Is it a good movie? It’s the definition of no frills: one set (the courtroom), head-on lighting, shot language and editing that walk the line between elegant and minimal.

At moments you may think: Where are the arcs? But the arc is the whole movie — the tale of how the ebullient, soft-voiced rock ‘n’ roll idol who Priscilla thought she was falling in love with evolved into a pathological personality, and maybe he always was.

"Comandante," in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.

It’s a clockwork ritual of awards season. A movie in contention, one based on a true story, will be dinged for presenting a version of reality that isn’t real enough. The critical chatter often starts on Twitter, but it can come from anywhere, ultimately spreading to the mainstream media (by the time there’s a New […]

On July 19, the MPA ratings board handed an NC-17 rating to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’s acclaimed drama about a very unusual love triangle (a man, a woman, and a megalomaniacal romantic sociopath). The film was set to be released just two weeks later; Sachs and his distributor, MUBI, were understandably upset. The scene that triggered […]