|
| 1. |
|
05/15/12 |
Poor |
 "...unrelenting and, in its perverse fashion, unmissable. You don't dare to look away in case you fail to spot a new piece of claptrap being riveted into place. The whole thing makes Michael Bay look like Ken Loach." |
| 2. |
|
05/14/12 |
Good |
 "...not very funny. It also fails to scare.... Still, Burton's film has something rare to its credit: it is possessed by magic... Burton is an alchemist of childish fancies..." |
| 3. |
|
05/14/12 |
Weak |
 "...hopelessly antiquated, greeting with very British giggles, and without a trace of honest curiosity, the needs of the women it seeks to honor." |
| 4. |
|
05/07/12 |
Very Good |
 "...a gleeful exercise in overkill... but at its heart is a consummate depiction of a permanent type -- the proud and prickly male, thrown back on his desperate wits." |
| 5. |
|
05/07/12 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "If you are not a Marvel fan, then watching 'The Avengers' will feel like being mugged by a gang of rowdy sociopaths with high muscle tone." |
| 6. |
|
04/16/12 |
Weak |
 "...has Spurlock gone soft?... The answer, I fear, is yes. The best thing about the film is that it will save you from going to Comic-Con.... it feels desultory and uninquiring..." |
| 7. |
|
04/16/12 |
Good |
 "...reminds us of the longing and the indignation from which reggae music leaped... does a grand job of turning the volume back up. I only wish it had found more time to stop and listen." |
| 8. |
|
04/02/12 |
Very Good |
 "...in many respects, a beautiful film.... what really grips the movie, for all its amused glances at Swiss Guards and ceremonial pomp, is the prospect of a single soul in crisis." |
| 9. |
|
04/02/12 |
Good |
 "...peculiarly weightless and capricious.... casts an unaccountable spell -- a cool, thin-blooded charm.... Whit Stillman is a lightly mocking modernist with growing distaste for the modern." |
| 10. |
|
03/12/12 |
Very Good |
 "...choppy, unbalanced, hysterical, quick to discern hysteria in its characters... Yet here's the thing: the movie works, and, though it cries out against so much, you sense that the one thing it does not cry is wolf." |
| 11. |
|
03/12/12 |
Outstanding |
 "The real reason to see 'The Kid with a Bike' is that it offers something changelessly rare and difficult: a credible portrait of goodness." |
| 12. |
|
03/05/12 |
Weak |
 "...locks us into a landscape of pleasantly salaried white professionals... some sign of mental reach would have been welcome, even if it extended only as far as their children." |
| 13. |
|
03/05/12 |
Very Good |
 "...turns not to the drama of suffering (there is no howling here, and not a drop of tears) but to its tedium -- the time-stretching blankness of hospital stays, and the laziness of post-medication fatigue." |
| 14. |
|
02/20/12 |
Poor |
 "...unstinting in its duties toward the frighteningly obvious." |
| 15. |
|
02/20/12 |
Very Good |
 "...the constant, inescapable shove of the past leaves 'Bullhead' feeling less like muscular melodrama and more like a sad saga of distress and loss." |
| 16. |
|
01/30/12 |
Weak |
 "We don't want to hear any more about ancient constitutional crises. We want to watch a three-way with a former King of England, in a bungalow. Madonna, of all people, missed a trick." |
| 17. |
|
01/30/12 |
Fair |
 "What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte." |
| 18. |
|
01/16/12 |
Outstanding |
 "Not since 'Shindler's List' has Fiennes's icy stare been put to better use... the task that Fiennes has set himself is to liberate the story from the theatrical while preserving the dramatic bite. In that, he succeeds, with brio..." |
| 19. |
|
01/02/12 |
Moderate |
 "If you find it convenient to think of Iran more as a bad dream than as a perceptible place, this is the film for you." |
| 20. |
|
01/02/12 |
Outstanding |
 "You feel for almost everyone involved, yet you don't quite know what to think, and there is something strangely exhausting in watching the most minor events.... The miracle of 'A Separation' is that it doesn't spare any of its characters, nor does it seek to indict them. It is a democratic portrait of a theocratic world." |
