Owen Gleiberman

A great many people appear to have come out of “Civil War,” Alex Garland’s a-house-divided-against-itself-can-kick-highly-equipped-military-ass dystopian combat thriller, feeling all shook up. They’re disturbed by it, unsettled by it. They experience the movie as if it were holding a violent mirror up to the simmering rage of America’s current political/spiritual/ ideological divide. Many critics have […]

"Sting" is a wee sliver of a horror film that’s tongue-in-cheek but also quite matter-of-fact in its creature-feature jokiness. It’s the monster-bug thriller as light dessert.

“The People’s Joker,” a scandalous IP-on-acid coming-out comic-book psychodrama, is a movie that has all the earmarks of an underground/ midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation. Vera Drew, who directed and co-wrote it, plays the title character, a mentally fractured aspiring stand-up comedian who bills herself as Joker the Harlequin. She wears a green wig parted down the middle, […]

"The Antisocial Network" is a lively lesson in digital history, one that leaves you with the disquieting feeling that some of the most influential outgrowths of Internet culture — like QAnon — were essentially flukes.

There had been drill sergeants in movies before Louis Gossett Jr. played one in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 (though for the life of me, I can’t remember any). There would be a lot of them afterwards. But it’s a role that Gossett made his own, and the movie role that, more than […]

For more than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween mask, a psycho in a goalie mask, a psycho with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psycho with S&M nails in his […]

Music movies are having a moment — if, indeed, they ever stopped having one. Take the pop-music biopic. There are times, like right now, when it surges in popularity, yet the form has never gone out of style. And music documentaries, a staple of the indie-film world, have only proliferated in the streaming era. This […]

"Sleeping Dogs," starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s overly glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it does keep you watching.

In "Shirley," John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.

In its way, "Plastic People" is a horror movie. It could have been called "Attack of the Killer Polymers."