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DAILY VARIETY Movie Reviews

Daily Variety
2218 reviews, averaging 58.1% positive

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1.
Men in Black III
Andrew Barker
05/21/12 Good "...survives with the original's spirit largely intact.... so openly nonsensical, with its own rules so arbitrarily applied, that scrutiny is a killjoy.... at its best when it simply owns its own absurdity."
2. 05/18/12 Good "Good-humored and endearing, full of energy and color if not quite Pixar-level invention... A bit crammed but not too crowded, zipping along at a well-modulated, rarely frenetic pace..."
3.
Moonrise Kingdom
Peter Debruge
05/16/12 Good "...a universally appealing tale of teenage romance... Wes Anderson's stylized approach masks the young actors' inexperience, while embracing a familiar genre..."
4.
Bill W.
John Anderson
05/16/12 Good "...sturdy bio-docu.... a sensational story that many will think they know, but don't... the story itself overcomes the occasional misfire..."
5.
Piranha 3DD
Leslie Felperin
05/12/12 Fair "It's got killer fish, stereoscopy and boobs aplenty. Less tongue-in-cheek than its 2010 predecessor and more tongue-hanging-out-drooling..."
6.
The Dictator (2012)
Peter Debruge
05/11/12 Good (Not Great) "...non-offending... Rather than challenging audience prejudices, Baron Cohen exploits them by presenting this ruthless world leader as an object of scorn and ridicule -- the easiest of targets."
7. 05/10/12 Good (Not Great) "Helmer Kirk Jones ('Nanny McPhee') does a solid job negotiating the material and managing the few tonal shifts when an occasional dark moment emerges..."
8.
The Philly Kid
Dennis Harvey
05/10/12 Moderate "...delivers the basic goods, if not much more, as formulaic, functional guys'-night-in entertainment, providing employment to many shirtless, no-necked actors.... plot points fall into place with efficiency if little surprise."
9.
The Cup (2012)
Joe Leydon
05/10/12 Good "...sustains interest through the smooth efficiency of its storytelling and the engaging performances of its lead players."
10.
The Road (2012)
Rob Nelson
05/09/12 Good (Not Great) "...eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem."
11.
Girl In Progress
Boyd Van Hoeij
05/09/12 Fair "...never finds its own groove, alternating between high-school dramedy and overworked-single-mom narratives without ever really becoming a mother-and-daughter story until the closing scenes."
12. 05/08/12 Good (Not Great) "Half posthumous love letter, half historical re-enactment... revisits Israel's near-mythic 1976 hostage rescue at Entebbe through the eyes of those who survived it, and one who didn't..."
13. 05/07/12 Fair "...an extravagantly empty postmodern artifact, an object lesson in the perils of camping up a property that had no shortage of camp appeal to begin with."
14.
Nesting
Dennis Harvey
05/07/12 Moderate "A comedy about acting your age, or not... The leads are likable enough, particularly the droll Todd Grinnell, but the material simply isn't strong enough to let them create full-blooded characters."
15.
Dragon Eyes
Dennis Harvey
05/07/12 Good "Maintaining an admirably straight face, this fist-flying flashback is good fun for fanboy types who take its myriad absurdities with the requisite grain of salt."
16.
LOL (2012)
Joe Leydon
05/06/12 Poor "...a shapeless and charmless teen-skewing trifle stocked with trendy slanguage and social-network gimcracks that make it seem like something four years past its expiration date.... plays like a mash-up of three or four segments of an ABC Family sitcom..."
17. 05/06/12 Very Good "...follows novelist W.G. Sebald's path with only occasional detours, while intermittently glimpsed talking heads fade in and out of artful black-and-white landscapes."
18. 05/03/12 Weak "...a contrived suspenser... Samuel L. Jackson offers a performance that could be labeled Swift's Premium and sold by the pound.... more than a few melodramatic scenes are quite funny, intentionally or not."
19. 05/02/12 Good "...one of Amos Kollek's more affecting films.... about confronting perceived failure and depression, being grateful for what one has, and getting a clue as to the degree of one's own unhappiness."
20.
Portrait of Wally
John Anderson
04/28/12 Very Good "...isn't just about stolen art: It's about cultural skulduggery, political sleaze, institutional hypocrisy and the virtues of persistence.... helmer Andrew Shea finds a lot of ugly stuff..."

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