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(2009) |
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"[The moviemakers'] straightforwardness about ... sexual relationships is beyond refreshing[,] ... as if sugarcoating were chemically impossible."
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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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(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."
[movie review] |
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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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"The movie gains life entirely from the interplay among the actors, and both of the young stars are wonderful."
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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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"I could have happily sat through the first half a second time, though I was barely able to sit through the second half once."
[movie review] |
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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."
[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."
[movie review] |
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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."
[movie review] |
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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."
[movie review] |
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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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"[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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"Nacho Libre is all it needs to be--ridiculous from beginning to end."
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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."
[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."
[movie review] |
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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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"[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."
[movie review] |
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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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"[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."
[movie review] |
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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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(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."
[movie review] |
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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."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Whether the scenes add up to anything or not, however, Duris holds the screen like a natural."
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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."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[W]hatever advantage the moviemakers gain from their knowing detachment [from their impish, narcissistic protagonist] is discounted by the fact that they take for granted the greatness of In Cold Blood."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"The political ambitions of le Carré and ... Meirelles are quite insistent, but the story feels like a story, not like the truth—it's both far-fetched and predictable."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"The L.A. of Crash is a distorted scale model of the city that [writer-director Paul] Haggis treats as if it were the city itself."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[A]n epic without an epic hero, an epic of deserved defeat."
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(2005) |
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"The makers of Flightplan have trimmed all the meat off The Lady Vanishes as if it were fat and served us the bone."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Good Night, and Good Luck. isn't memorable, even in the short run, because it creates a desire for information that Clooney has no intention of fulfilling."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Herzog, who remains immune to Treadwell's projections and to his self-regard, works here as a poet of the first order [in Ruskin's hierarchy]."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[Roos']s writing is facile--he needs actors like Kudrow and Gyllenhaal to give his work depth and texture, and he seems to sense it without jealousy."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Niccol squeezes his cartoonish irony for pathos, as if retelling Superman from the dark side but softening it to make us lament, 'Poor Lex Luthor. Poor, lost Lex Luthor'."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[A] dream visit to the zoo. You aren't actually there, but you couldn't see more than this movie shows you if you were."
[movie review] |
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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"
[movie review] |
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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."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"The perennial golden touch in Hollywood is to make old stories seem new. In Mysterious Skin [writer-director Gregg] Araki "achieves" the opposite."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[Kore-eda has developed]a paradoxically quiet expressionistic technique, a virtuosic way to make the audience feel as if we were observing without intruding."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Victorian melodrama in feminist workduds."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[T]he movie approaches us as if we were both a primitive religious congregation and a benumbed action-picture audience, in either case a group in need of shocks."
[movie review] |
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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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"[If Solondz isn't] having fun relating Aviva's determinedly depressive misadventures then what has he invited us into the theater for?"
[movie review] |
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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."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"[A]n infantile fantasy ... of not just being daddy's favorite but being chosen, by some mysterious power, to inherit his gift."
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(2005) |
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"[A] polluted oasis for refugees from 'positive,' heartwarming, family-friendly entertainment."
[movie review] |
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(2005) |
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"Fellowes is so committed to the artistic means of naturalism, and so judicious, that his work is absorbing in a way that movies of broader scope almost never are."
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(2005) |
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"[I]f you go for the dimensionless, porny style, hey, unbuckle and enjoy."
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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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