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(2004) |
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"Marber looks at farcical giddiness with a hard-won sobriety.... Closer is a voguish farce that, rather than making you wish you were like the characters, makes you wish that you hadn't been."
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(2006) |
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"The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity."
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(1968) |
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"The irony is subtle ... but irresistible for anyone interested in narrative paradox. L'Amour fou is one of the few movies, and one of the best, to deal directly with a literary subject."
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(2006) |
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"I could have happily sat through the first half a second time, though I was barely able to sit through the second half once."
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(2006) |
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"It's theatrical genius: Cohen has devised a split-level act in which being hooked off the stage by his in-the-movie audience makes for success with his at-the-movie audience."
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(2006) |
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"[R]eplicate[s] in a raunchy cartoon how the chaos of our experience correlates more than we may care to admit to the chaos of our personalities."
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(2006) |
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"To give the narrative depth, bite, or oomph, as naturalism, irony, or romance, or some combination ... Morgan would have to have invented more (as Shakespeare and Schiller did with their historical royalty)...."
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(2006) |
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"[J]ust the kind of numbskull movie that critics call 'smart'."
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(2006) |
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"[T]he movie's emphasis on Nicholas's misadventures, as if the audience couldn't get into the story of Uganda without an educated, white, middle-class European as a protagonist, is a huge let-down in its own terms."
[movie review] |
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(2006) |
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"The movie ... debunks the [government's] use of the boys as symbols and then turns them back into symbols, though of something else. There's not a fully realized personality in 132 minutes."
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(2006) |
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"[Covering] the same period of the author's life as Bennett Miller's Capote..., Infamous is not only the more entertaining movie, it's the more sophisticated, and the more emotional, as well."
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(2006) |
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"The movie gains life entirely from the interplay among the actors, and both of the young stars are wonderful."
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(2005) |
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"Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject. [His] canniness as a writer and casual sophistication do wonders for the actors."
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(2006) |
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"[Shortbus] will give adults who aren't put off by zoo-naked sex more to talk about, even in disparagement, than anything showing at the Cineplex."
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(2003) |
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"As Miles, Clooney doesn't make any direct emotional appeal to the audience and yet his high style is so smashingly effective that Miles stands open to us: macher, lover, patsy."
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(1996) |
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"[Marge is] a good cop because everything abnormal stands out like a stain against her white-on-white sanity.... [H]er incomprehension [of criminality] is not only her strength as a detective, it justifies the deadpan style of the movie."
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(2002) |
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"[A]s in soap opera, drama is synonymous with the torments of love. Hayek is a brave, tireless performer, ... but given the script she can only play Kahlo the "beguiling personality" she liked to think of herself as ... rather than Kahlo the artist."
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(2002) |
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"[Y]ou laugh with a growing sense of dread because it makes you feel what it's like to realize it's too late to help yourself."
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(1965) |
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"Perhaps the only way to enjoy it is to accept that saying something offensive is better than saying nothing at all. The Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One might have agreed with that, at any rate."
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(2006) |
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"The movie's real mistake is to take as its focus the single least unusual aspect of September 11--the fact that the murdered and wounded loved their families and were loved back."
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(2006) |
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"[I]t's hard to distinguish [Holofcener's] more tentative approach to narrative [here] from an identity crisis. Maybe that's why McDormand's material has by far the most bite."
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(2006) |
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"[I]t combines a naked desire to please the audience with a try-anything approach of the kind that made Wedding Crashers such a desperate stab at entertainment."
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(2006) |
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"Nacho Libre is all it needs to be--ridiculous from beginning to end."
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(2006) |
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"[Maggie] Gyllenhaal ... slips into character with greater ease than any other young American actress now in the movies."
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(1976) |
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"Considering the gross overextension of the shoot and the indulgence of the actors, ... it makes perfect sense that the movie feels like the result of a game of 52 pick-up rather than the realization of a design."
[movie review] |
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(2006) |
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"If ... the heroine is going to be as immune to temptation as Andy is ... then the spiritual dimension better be staggering ... because the narrative will have no suspense."
[movie review] |
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(2006) |
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"The Proposition depicts male brutality, both within and without the confines of the law, in a beautifully measured way that doesn't kill the intensity of the narrative--wild contrasts, ironic similarities, and all."
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(1967) |
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"Nichols takes an ad hoc approach to comic irony and the movie seems to have been enshrined by American audiences because each moment in isolation "works," no matter that they tend to cancel each other out."
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(1972) |
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"Sometimes it seems that nobody ever has any idea what it is he's chasing after, and so the chase never ends.... It's a good day when you can laugh about it, which is what The Heartbreak Kid lets you do."
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(2002) |
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"Bloody Sunday demonstrates an historical thesis formulated in retrospect, which fits oddly with Greengrass's continuous-present technique."
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(2006) |
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"Greengrass is a refined political artist, but United 93 goes pretty much entirely for gut reactions."
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(1949) |
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"Guilty of Treason is a B-movie, budget and soul, and yet its political judgments are grounded in an accurate journalistic evaluation of a deplorable reality."
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(1955) |
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"What Guinness does with his eyes alone ... provides a seminar on acting. And that's just from the neck up."
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(2005) |
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"[Sophie and Hans] embody the adolescent faith that any political action is better than none, and the movie couldn't treat them more glowingly if their actions had been effective."
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(1959) |
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"Pontecorvo is not the visionary firebrand of The Battle of Algiers here. He cares about the subject passionately--as a Jew, and as a Communist leader in the Italian Resistance--but he turns it into pap."
[movie review] |
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(2006) |
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"The movie isn't good enough for him, but all the same [David] Morse manages to give as fine a performance as the material allows. Finer."
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(1963) |
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"Naked Among Wolves, an epic of Soviet-bloc, Remember-the-Alamo! heroism, is as phony as the war was long."
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(1998) |
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"Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator--he lets the liberating nonsense triumph."
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(2002) |
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"[I]t takes six or seven people to keep one half-dead Jew alive.... Wladyslaw's situation is extraordinary but what's happening on screen doesn't really feel so extraordinary. There's almost no emphasis, no point of view."
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(2006) |
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"No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic."
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(2005) |
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"[T]he brow-scrunching and ethical debates don't grow out of the assassinations, they merely follow them, and are not only inadequate but irrelevant."
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(2005) |
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"Gaghan piles one storyline on another but is only interested in suggesting where they trend, working like a (cynical) editorialist who has made up a few examples to support his views."
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(2005) |
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"Allen develops characters and situations here as if he had jotted the major points down on the back of an envelope and then used the envelope as his shooting script. The movie is so thin-textured it's ludicrous."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Allen presents the side-by-side stories as if to compare the comic and tragic views of experience, and it might work but for the fact that the two [playwrights] come up with dissimilar plots featuring different characters played mostly by different actors"
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(1989) |
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"Allen starts with a sketchy premise and after working it through for 107 minutes he still has no more than the premise he started with."
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(1983) |
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"Allen is one of the most recognizable, and least protean, performers.... [P]erhaps ... someone else as Zelig ... could have got the idea across without the blandly explicit dialogue and brought more dimensions to the role, besides."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[T]he movie plays like any soap opera about a love that cannot be--the weeper mechanism is entirely familiar from hetero movies.... Brokeback Mountain isn't a gay western, it's a gay Back Street."
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(1963) |
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"[The movie suggests that a] young man will either become like his corrupt elders, and presumably get a trophy woman of his own, or drown.... To Polanski, surviving in such a society, in such a world, is not the same as winning."
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(2005) |
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"[T]he maddening thing is not just that we hardly need another movie adaptation of [Oliver Twist] ... but that there are other Dickens books that haven't been given the major movie treatment that would better suit Polanski's temperament."
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(2005) |
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"[A]dapted ... by Deborah Moggach and directed by Joe Wright with as much feel for what it means to be a novel as any adaptation of one I can think of."
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