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3.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Perhaps as a result of channeling Ozu, Denis's incipient humanism comes through more directly than in her existentially forbidding The Intruder or even her acclaimed, baroque Herman Melville remix Beau Travail."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Mathieu Amalric's glorified cameo as a thumbsucking baby-behavior fetishist is evidence that Kreuter uses her silly streak to enforce simplistic narrative roles: adolescent and gender-dysphoric cybernauts cool, all others ludicrous."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(2007) |
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"Where the original was defiantly not a concert film, but a chronicle of the astonished hubbub surrounding the first hipster folksinger, the follow-up's treasure lies with seven intact live performances."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"The heart of Mottola's autobiographical paean to young male mortification lies in the one-on-one scenes between his able leads, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"An unholy genre mutation undreamt of on the isle of Dr. Moreau, An American Affair piggybacks the pubescent sexual awakening sapfest onto the JFK assassination conspiracy thriller."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"A revelatory howl against the still-gestating, $8 trillion-and-counting financial-services industry bailout, American Casino follows the money that changed hands, or account columns, at every step of the subprime home-loan scam."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"American Journey works only sporadically as a supplement to the cultural moment it chronicles, and the passionate, serendipitously intimate breadth of Frank's lens."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2/4 |
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(2009) |
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"American Violet has the necessary anger to engage its subject but also the generic topical-telefilm aesthetics that often render it glib and inauthentic."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Structured like a comedy, but outfitted with only the most tedious sexual-identity riffs, generic characterizations, and no singular point of view."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(2007) |
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"This watchable but indulgent curio blings up the petty vanities and ambitions of the criminal class, and lays greater themes in their graves."
[movie review] |
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Stylus Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(2008) |
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"For all the use of first takes and jerky camera moves, the John Cassavetes invoked by Baghead is not the indie pioneer saint but his Faustian thespian-husband character in Rosemary's Baby."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Director and co-writer Joseph Cedar loses all goodwill accumulated by his competent, plausibly close-knit cast with heavy-handed use of clichés."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1994) |
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"A still relevant call for communion among diverse African-American communities, and an elegy for an activist-artist."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(2008) |
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"The directors balance portraying an everyday sense of the adolescents' wartime anxiety with the more commonplace juvenile relief."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1970) |
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"Camp it up, Mary, the Boys have been culturally rehabilitated, remastered and are drunk-dialing your number."
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(1970) |
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"The sizzle of the bon mot%u2013tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film's momentum."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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B+ |
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(2006) |
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"The mythic nuttiness gets under your skin just as these archetypal figures gradually penetrate each other’s subterfuges, skulls, and orifices.
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[movie review] |
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Stylus Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"An anti-conspiracy lampoon of conspiracy thrillers, the Coens' Burn After Reading paints its floundering Washington inhabitants as intractably or even fatally stupid."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"A largely sentimental documentary of the final months of the Valhalla of New York punk clubs and the failed attempts to save it."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3.5/4 |
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(1987) |
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"Sembene never descends into the one-note shrillness of Spike Lee at his worst."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1987) |
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"A key postcolonial work of remembrance from Africa's father of film gets proper dissemination"
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2/4 |
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(2007) |
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"As for the nuts-and-bolts of political strategy, Nichols navigates them as prosaically as he did in his last treatment of a sybaritic pol, the trivial Primary Colors."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Choke makes its source material's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink absurdism broader, less expressive and cheaply reductive."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(1967) |
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"Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film's efforts to sentimentally "humanize" him by psychological revelation are clumsy."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1967) |
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"The slick gospel of Luke is delivered with star sheen and ensemble luster in this middling package."
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(2009) |
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"As fine-looking a 3D stop-motion fantasy that four years of top-flight craftsmanship can produce."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"This incarnation of Johnny Got His Gun is a mismatch of medium, text and talent."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1951) |
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"Supplying even screenwriter North's translation of "Klaatu barada nikto," this classic's new package has all a fan needs save for a model ship."
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3.5/4 |
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(1951) |
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"Iconic from the get-go."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Stephan Elliott is determined to contemporize a playwright whose rhythms, concerns, and craft are all permanently bonded to the '20s art of British sophisticated escapism, art being short for "artifice.""
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"A much duller tale than its Irish literary festival setting would suggest."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Akin's Head-On infused its hellish misfit romance with in-your-face violence; here even two violent deaths are rendered discreetly to the point of bloodlessness."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"With a plot recalling the fevered fictions of Jim Thompson, late Polanski, and Isabel Allende, The Fish Child banks on the sizzle of its pair of young female stars and their enactment of class and erotic tensions to flavor its Sapphic noir melodram"
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Troell's lens doesn't consistently uncover the beauty and character we're asked to believe his heroine finds with hers."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Exasperating for its mundane narrative of youthful non-courtship camouflaged by Manhattan street-video naturalism, The Exploding Girl occasionally suggests mumblecore with less improvisation and heaps of undergrad preciousness in place of snarky ir"
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"The crude-dude genre staples are mechanically rendered: gay panic in a biker bar, mescaline-fueled dreams, highway chases, and cancer."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2009) |
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"Suggests that either video artist Michel Auder culled the wrong footage from a lifetime of compulsive camera-wielding for this "fictional autobiography," or was saddled by fate or egoism with an inapt subject."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Handicapped by an unavoidable postscript that even nonfans are apt to recall: the eventually fatal injury in the Preakness Stakes to Derby winner Barbaro."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"How dismally arch and self-satisfied can a Chelseacore sex comedy get?"
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1973) |
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"Downbeat '70s crime with Beantown vowels, and a Hollywood icon's masterful melancholy."
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3.5/4 |
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(1973) |
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"It's a slug's-eye view of autumnal Greater Boston, remote when not sleazy; even when Mitchum and Boyle attend a Bruins hockey game, it's in the nosebleed seats."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Lacking characters as cartoonishly entertaining as the bee geeks in Spellbound, director Caroline Suh doesn't dig deep enough."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Frost/Nixon is a trivial afterword to a historical footnote, a showbiz story inflated into a retroactive therapy session for one of 20th-century America's biggest knaves."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1/4 |
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(2008) |
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"The anomic gloom that envelops Frownland, a miserabilist, micro-budgeted 16mm freak show, fatally impedes its seeming aspirations to the mercurial grit of Cassavetes."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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(1927) |
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"The newly burnished look of a silent-cinema landmark demands a fresh gaze at Keaton's least characteristic great film."
[dvd review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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4/4 |
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(1927) |
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"The General isn't likely to be the favorite opus of the star's purist fans, but it's the one with the trappings of ambition and historical poesy"
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"An unwieldy spoof-thriller of clashing styles that undermine each other like a parade of double agents."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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3/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Glass's status as one of America's most venerated and mocked highbrows matches gracefully with his peripatetic cultural and spiritual life."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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1.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"A character study of a Nazi quisling that's frequently too muddled to reach even the level of banality."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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2.5/4 |
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(2008) |
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"Gran Torino being a Clint showcase helmed by the Last Movie Star himself, Walt's reformation is nearly inevitable, but skirts being cloying on the strength of the 78-year-old icon's raspy brusqueness."
[movie review] |
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Slant Magazine |
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