|
| 1. |
|
06/01/11 |
Weak |
 "...ultimately undone by that old paradox of Hollywood movie production: If you're given an enormous budget, you have to spend every penny..." |
| 2. |
|
06/21/11 |
Poor |
 "...crass and uncharacteristically threadbare... the craft is sometimes shoddy, the photorealism is there solely for our kneejerk admiration..." |
| 3. |
|
06/28/11 |
Good (Not Great) |
 "...the most enjoyable and the most offensive parts (often the same scenes and sequences) extend from the mind of a man with a very particular visual sense." |
| 4. |
|
07/13/11 |
Outstanding |
 "David Yates has evolved into the greatest director of blockbuster cinema since Steven Spielberg..." |
| 5. |
|
07/24/11 |
Very Good |
 "...shrewd, slickly made... distinguishes itself from its genre compatriots by prizing theme and place over referentiality and hip, out-of-the-box grindhouse-ness." |
| 6. |
|
07/31/11 |
Poor |
 "...starts to feel cheap and patchwork as an unfolding drama.... the work of a filmmaker who's painted himself into the corner with congealed blood. The final atrocities feel like just another run around the block." |
| 7. |
|
08/14/11 |
Poor |
 "There's a half-good movie buried in here somewhere... a punishingly earnest, abjectly humorless, and lethally stupid slog..." |
| 8. |
|
08/17/11 |
Poor |
 "...a crap movie that seems to have come by its crappiness honestly -- the downtown version of 'Clash of the Titans,' with no evidence of improvement..." |
| 9. |
|
09/11/11 |
Very Good |
 "What you want to know about 'Drive' is that its three big, action set pieces are impressive and exciting." |
| 10. |
|
09/15/11 |
Weak |
 "...downright weird, that one-in-a-thousand kind of remake (like Gus Van Sant's 'Psycho') that's consciously engineered to be more like the original than different." |
| 11. |
|
09/24/11 |
Very Good |
 "...the plot amalgamates shreds of autobiography and religious/institutional/this-is-what-it's-like subject matter to lend it an air of respectability.... has an intelligent, delicate approach." |
| 12. |
|
09/29/11 |
Moderate |
 "...presents the apocalypse not so much as an exercise in genre play as an exercise in airing the auteur's predilections, an auto-therapeutic exorcism of the artist's demons." |
| 13. |
|
10/05/11 |
Very Good |
 "...a Lumet-esque, cold-concrete melodrama..." |
| 14. |
|
10/10/11 |
Weak |
 "...seems almost to have been produced spontaneously... culled from the ether with the words 'Customers Who Also Liked 'Dogtooth' and 'Winter's Bone' Liked This'..." |
| 15. |
|
10/10/11 |
Poor |
 "...fused together with cutting so spatially incoherent as to compete directly with a Michael Bay movie..." |
| 16. |
|
10/16/11 |
Weak |
 "...a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef." |
| 17. |
|
10/16/11 |
Moderate |
 " 'Pina' is just a document, with no auteur-derived interference standing between you and the immersive, theatrical experience of Bausch's works." |
| 18. |
|
10/17/11 |
Outstanding |
 "As it gained momentum, what I began to see writ across 'The Descendants' was an overlay of decisions and feelings and inner turmoil: unseen cinema." |
| 19. |
|
10/21/11 |
Very Good |
 "...if you consider yourself an open-minded viewer, you'll find yourself slowly overcome with the opium dream of Bourbon-era France... it dazzles." |
| 20. |
|
10/24/11 |
Moderate |
 "...it doesn't even have the slick, narrative efficiency of one of the 'Kung Fu Panda' movies, nor the go-for-broke insanity that 'Madagascar' managed to get away with." |
