|
| 1. |
|
05/13/12 |
Poor |
 "...the story merely adheres to contrived, predictable views of how the abused process and cope with grief... tackily leans on the horror of child abuse to goose audiences." |
| 2. |
|
05/06/12 |
Moderate |
 "Yam Laranas's style largely consists of references to directors with better moves... his story is fixated on the sort of retrograde psychoanalysis that went out with the last scene of Hitchcock's 'Psycho.' " |
| 3. |
|
04/30/12 |
Poor |
 "...smug... the film's cruelest insult may be its insipid sense of resolution, a trite depiction of the restoration of the nuclear family allowing everyone to trump their obstacles..." |
| 4. |
|
04/17/12 |
Moderate |
 "Though the film is light on anthropomorphization, its aesthetic is nothing if not infantile. Meryl Streep intermittently gives dry expression to generic pronouncements..." |
| 5. |
|
04/17/12 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "...isn't unlike walking through an arts and crafts store... it's tempting to cut Polley some slack for whipping up a story whose every conceit is so obviously constructed." |
| 6. |
|
04/08/12 |
Poor |
 "Justice will be served, and predictably so.... By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle -- or wish you were watching 'The Help' instead. At least that was a more artful lie." |
| 7. |
|
03/04/12 |
Poor |
 "...a really noisy remake of an Uruguayan film that was also shot in one continuous take.... a story that's less frightening than it is risible." |
| 8. |
|
02/05/12 |
Moderate |
 "...a shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba... feels ripped from the pages of Oscar Hijuelos's 'The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,' a more vivid but equally problematic totem..." |
| 9. |
|
02/01/12 |
Moderate |
 "...old hat... For every subdued touch, such as a dead woman's becalmed voiceover, the film trips over a stock concession to genre cliché..." |
| 10. |
|
01/08/12 |
Weak |
 "...quickly reveals itself as an amateur hour that would make even Lamberto Bava blush... a hodgepodge of plot holes and pointless divergences." |
| 11. |
|
12/13/11 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "The film's elegant moroseness, like the propulsive, sometimes discordant, volume of Trent Rezor and Atticus Ross's experimental score, seems intended to distract us from the fact that these two characters are banal stock types." |
| 12. |
|
12/04/11 |
Weak |
 "...the purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on 'The Omen.' " |
| 13. |
|
10/06/11 |
Weak |
 "...articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction..." |
| 14. |
|
09/30/11 |
Moderate |
 "...the film is a lesson plan for God's wayward sheep. First it regurgitates facts about the links between violence and the father's absence from the home, then proceeds to show us how its [protagonists] proceed to better themselves as fathers so that their children won't become like the blacks whose furrowed brows are the only interest the filmmakers show in their wasted lives." |
| 15. |
|
09/28/11 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "...this is character assassination, plain and simple, a calculated attempt on Broomfield's part to place a roadblock in Palin's 2012 bid for the White House." |
| 16. |
|
09/28/11 |
Very Good |
 "Polanski's customarily remarkable visual aesthetic gives the couples' war of semantics the feel of something brutalizingly physical..." |
| 17. |
|
09/24/11 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "...sometimes in Almodóvar's cinema, as in 'The Skin I Live In,' looking isn't always the same as seeing." |
| 18. |
|
09/24/11 |
Moderate |
 "...a film of few epiphanies and even fewer insights... it reflects the nihilistic world view of its maker, in this case von Trier's depressed view of life as not worth living." |
| 19. |
|
09/21/11 |
Moderate |
 "Empathy's a bitch in 'Machine Gun Preacher,' but its moral toll is not something the by-the-numbers story cares to elaborate on." |
| 20. |
|
09/07/11 |
Weak |
 "...there's scant room in Steven Soderbergh's drama for human feeling, only audience-stoking alarmism." |
