 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
3.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Structured like a comedy, but outfitted with only the most tedious sexual-identity riffs, generic characterizations, and no singular point of view."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"As fine-looking a 3D stop-motion fantasy that four years of top-flight craftsmanship can produce."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A much duller tale than its Irish literary festival setting would suggest."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Troell's lens doesn't consistently uncover the beauty and character we're asked to believe his heroine finds with hers."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"The crude-dude genre staples are mechanically rendered: gay panic in a biker bar, mescaline-fueled dreams, highway chases, and cancer."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Grounds the life-and-death struggles of the downtrodden in the quotidian: where to sleep, how to get clean, who to love."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"It'd be tempting to call it ambitious if the large emotions felt by its subjects were transmitted in terms other than the increasingly common tropes of the family-therapy doc."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"The problem is not the farfetched contrivance of Humpday, but how unmoored it seems from anything but self-satisfied cuteness."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A drearily tame learning-and-growing homosocial comedy."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A baroque high comedy of endemic corruption, Il Divo doesn't treat the early-'90s scandal that brought down Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti as a tragedy, thriller, or tale of long-delayed comeuppance, but with resigned wit and florid carica"
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A literary fantasy with a charm deficit."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Local Color is a sappy brick to the audience's forehead."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"To the annals of romantic stalker comedies, the appallingly creepy Management adds pretension and may blaze new, jaw-dropping territory: the predatory Beast totally rehabilitates Beauty."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A jokey mess so far from the humane, satirical alchemy of Three Kings that a revocation of the producer-star's cinematic passport to the land of military-industrial japery seems in order."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"At best a cute anecdote that scrapes by at just over 70 minutes."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Baldwin took a similarly fanciful history-mining approach for Tribulation 99, but Mock Up on Mu is more than twice as long and determinedly more obscure."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Chooses not to follow the money but one man's evolution in the pursuit of principle."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Director Katherine Dieckmann, who demonstrated some natural comic rhythms and efficiency with actors in Diggers, is here unable to surmount the sitcom dreariness of her first original screenplay, apparently a "write-what-you-know" misjudgment."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"An enviro-doc that doesn't soft-pedal the fact that the calculated, consciousness-raising media event it chronicles is a conceptual stunt, No Impact Man manages to present its New York do-gooder couple as both likably idealistic and inevitably conf"
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"moothly compelling with its sleek, mass-produced shapes and beautiful minds that fetishize ergonomics and the ideal of perfectability."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"A twee Danish comedy that alternates trite New Age psychological moves with outbursts of cartoonish violence."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"One can at least partly embrace the concept that outing pols who torpedo gay rights is defensible and still find Dick's film too frequently a would-be sensationalistic bit of tut-tutting for queer Dems and their politically-connected friends."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Pippa Lee is conceived as a portrait of a woman's long-delayed emotional blossoming, but its dopey, privileged-set fantasy winds up as obvious as crawling through Keanu's open window."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"This immersive tour of the mortal manipulations fueling Europe's 17th-century cultural capital supplies wit and intellect while it starves the emotions."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Revanche is almost fatally reluctant to get its hands dirty, its milieu shifting on a violent twist from a grimy Vienna brothel to the rural exurbs for buckets of guilt, angst, and frequently clumsy metaphors."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Sergei Loznitsa's choice to intersperse footage of smiling farmers and dogma-spouting steelworkers with folk dancers and village choirs throughout Revue doesn't feel flippant, or even discordant."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna reunite in Rudo y Cursi to denigrate rubes from Jalisco as slow-witted provincial brothers and banana plantation workers whose unlikely rise to soccer stardom supplies the purported comedy."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Sex Positive uses the dual activist/sexual outlaw persona of "safer sex" pioneer Richard Berkowitz as a prism through which to view the life-and-death struggles of an era."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"At its best a winning anecdote of adolescent male awkwardness adapting to the big city."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"This Star Trek essentially turns out to be a war film, with the occasional philosophical timeout to discuss love, friendship, and duty until the next bone-crunching fistfight or multi-weapon rumble with the Romulans."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
1.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Director Kevin Macdonald can't begin to approach the paranoid genre mastery seen in the films of John Frankenheimer and Alan Pakula."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"An immigrant's saga more than "a baseball movie," Sugar ultimately runs headlong away from the clichés that mar formula sports-related narrative films."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Taxidermia is merely slimy biological vaudeville."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"If you're looking for an adultery- and revenge-fueled family melodrama so subdued that it keeps a hit-and-run fatality, cuckoldry, and murder entirely off screen, Three Monkeys is your movie and Nuri Bilge Ceylan your not-so-genre-inclined auteur."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Unmade Beds, with its occasionally twee chronicling of pogoing in funny hats and heart-to-hearts between NSA lovers, portrays its seekers as planets aspiring to bubblehood, or at least one tandem leap into the void."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"The lost-world aura of the film's clumsy youths provides an inexorable dig into Brezhnev-era diffidence."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
3/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Gives a convincing, contagious taste of its protagonist's playful optimism."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2.5/4 |
|
(2009) |
|
"Even more so than in the previous film, The Yes Men Fix the World indulges in faux-naïve disappointment."
[movie review] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
|
|
| |
2/4 |
|
(2008) |
|
"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] |
|
Slant Magazine |
|
|
