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Nick's Flick Picks

Nick's Flick Picks is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Nick Davis.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
B
Boy! What a Girl (1947) Nick Davis Brief, giddy musical showcasing African-American comics, singers, and musicians to total, charming advantage.
Posted Feb 01, 2021  Edit critic review
B
Complices (2009) Nick Davis Partners has its fingers confidently on the pulse of what is heedlessly passionate and what is utterly desultory about late adolescence and extremely nascent "adulthood."
Posted Mar 28, 2018  Edit critic review
B-
The City of Lost Children (1995) Nick Davis City of Lost Children is unmistakably of its era: filled with oddball artifacts, and itself quite pointedly an oddball artifact, seeking approval on those very terms.
Posted May 16, 2015  Edit critic review
B
The Upside of Anger (2005) Nick Davis Upside is better-than-average as a mid-budget suburban film dramedy but positively gangbusters if you imagine it as a two-hour television pilot.
Posted Aug 06, 2014  Edit critic review
Within Our Gates (1920) Nick Davis Within Our Gates is full of surprises, following a multitude of characters and plotlines without settling into predictable allegiances.
Posted Feb 04, 2013  Edit critic review
A-
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) Nick Davis The movie is not a wild river but a humid delta of stagnant frustration and stymied movement, so it's all the more impressive that it's such a gripping spectatorial experience.
Posted Feb 08, 2012  Edit critic review
B+
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) Nick Davis For an audience that takes pleasure in the all-too-rare art of faithful adaptations that vivify rather than embalming their sources [...] Asquith's conservative handling is just what the confirmed and secret Bunburyist ordered.
Posted Feb 08, 2012  Edit critic review
B
The Laramie Project (2002) Nick Davis The Laramie Project is not really about Matthew Shepard but about this question of identification with Matthew, and of identification with the larger community of Laramie that admitted, sustained, eliminated, grieved, and civilly avenged Matthew.
Posted Feb 05, 2012  Edit critic review
C-
The Actress (1953) Nick Davis Sadly, if she was guilty of trying too hard or of trying in the wrong way, Cukor appears totally and uncharacteristically checked out... The Actress exposes the kinds of fraying seams that Cukor was usually so careful to conceal even in tattier projects.
Posted Feb 01, 2012  Edit critic review
B
Rumble Fish (1983) Nick Davis Rumble Fish is like a unisex Sweet 16 gift for children whose favorite hangouts are the pool hall, the Cinmatheque Franaise, and the rings of Saturn.
Posted Jan 22, 2012  Edit critic review
C
Tim (1979) Nick Davis Tim comes close to reproducing the plot of Doubt, in negative-space fashion. That is, for this go-round, we spend all our time with the uncomprehending kid (if he is uncomprehending?) and his teacher-nurturer-desirer.
Posted Jan 21, 2012  Edit critic review
C
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) Nick Davis The surprise and also the disappointment of The Long Kiss Goodnight is much simpler, and less politically inflected: it's badly made, or too close to badly made.
Posted Jan 21, 2012  Edit critic review
B
The Fountainhead (1949) Nick Davis The Fountainhead is by turns exciting, handsome, astoundingly awkward, fully committed, untowardly relentless, very strange, and a little creepy in its compulsive watchability.
Posted Jan 20, 2012  Edit critic review
B
Gaslight (1940) Nick Davis So much goes right in this film version, all without sparking a corresponding bump in my enthusiasm, that it's all the more obvious that I find some foundations of this text perennially problematic.
Posted Jan 16, 2012  Edit critic review
B-
Barfly (1987) Nick Davis As I write about Barfly, I do seem to be talking myself into greater admiration for it, or at least into a sense of welcome design beneath its superficial inertia.
Posted Jan 13, 2012  Edit critic review
C+
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) Nick Davis "There was no real Peter Sellers"... As a theme, it smells of the tired cop-out, somewhere in the same clubhouse of desiccated phrases as "I love you, but I'm not in love with you" and "In a crazy world, only the mad people are sane."
Posted Jan 13, 2012  Edit critic review
D+
The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937) Nick Davis In Rainer's case, The Emperor's Candlesticks seems unusually revealing, doffing the dropcloth from exactly the sort of peculiar, temporarily arresting artifact she was, guaranteed to inspire buyer's remorse.
Posted Jan 12, 2012  Edit critic review
C+
Twelfth Night (1996) Nick Davis I started watching the film by thinking, "They should film more of the comedies," and probably They still should, but I ended by thinking, "They really ought to hire movie directors to make movies."
Posted Jan 08, 2012  Edit critic review
B+
Heroes for Sale (1933) Nick Davis A Pre-Code Battle in Seattle... Heroes for Sale is not a perfect film, and not particularly interested in perfection, but really and truly, pretend this isn't a clich: they don't make 'em like this anymore.
Posted Jan 05, 2012  Edit critic review
C
The Little Drummer Girl (1984) Nick Davis Stark criticisms are unavoidable, even as I'm forced to admit that the film is one of those wrongly-assembled movies that is built on such an unusual Hollywood premise...that it eventually becomes halfway fascinating.
Posted Jan 05, 2012  Edit critic review
B-
The Glass Menagerie (1950) Nick Davis The Glass Menagerie has a lot going for it, even if director Irving Rapper (Now, Voyager) misses several opportunities to take the characters deeper.
Posted Jan 05, 2012  Edit critic review
B
Sleep Furiously (2008) Nick Davis A certain polite withholding, even if it masks some firm conviction or desire, seems to be a coin of the realm in Trefeurig, so it may well be apt that Koppel often films in a register very close to this one.
Posted Jul 28, 2011  Edit critic review
B
Cactus (1986) Nick Davis A qualified accomplishment ... Part and parcel of its limitations, though, is Cactus's genuine will to stand apart, offering rich textures and unexpected pleasures.
Posted Jul 17, 2011  Edit critic review
B-
Esther (1986) Nick Davis Merging straight Biblical storytelling with modern gimmicks, Amos Gitai half-succeeds at both... Even when he stutters or flaunts his affectations, you cannot write him off as having nothing to say.
Posted Jul 16, 2011  Edit critic review
C-
Opera do Molandro (1987) Nick Davis pera do Malandro is way more Love's Labour's Lost than Moulin Rouge!, both in formal execution and in its awkward orientation to World War II. The film means to be ersatz but perhaps not this much.
Posted Jul 14, 2011  Edit critic review
C-
Max My Love (1986) Nick Davis If you've wondered what kind of continental TV pilot Sherwood Schwartz might have devised from watching Zoo, here's your answer.
Posted Jul 12, 2011  Edit critic review
B
She's Gotta Have It (1986) Nick Davis Light, scrappy entertainment that flatters everything funky and fresh about Lee, tempting you to forgive what is stunted or abrasive in the film. A major swaying element is his own on-screen persona.
Posted Jul 11, 2011  Edit critic review
C
The Decline of the American Empire (1986) Nick Davis What Arcand has devised is a kind of Nia Vardalos movie in tenured-faculty clothing: Our Big Fat Bourgeois Salon ... It trades only the crudest ironies and screenwriting mechanics.
Posted Jul 10, 2011  Edit critic review
B+
The Sacrifice (1986) Nick Davis Visually potent ... humblingly vast ... [and yet] the movie oscillates between compelling our thunderstruck confidence and testing our patience with unfulfilled promise and highbrow clichs.
Posted Jul 08, 2011  Edit critic review
B
Menage (1986) Nick Davis Quite funny for the first half and deeply weird for the second, with a laudable courage of its own bizarre conviction throughout, even as it reveals a nasty undertone.
Posted Jul 08, 2011  Edit critic review
C+
After Hours (1985) Nick Davis [Scorsese's] tendency toward hollow showboating has rarely been more in evidence ... Ends as a tolerable but annoyingly atonal exercise made by artists with little if anything on their minds.
Posted Jul 07, 2011  Edit critic review
B
Mona Lisa (1986) Nick Davis The bracing peaks of image, acting, and narrative architecture handily win the day over a scenario that always feels more like a willfully engineered exercise than a fully plausible reality.
Posted Jul 06, 2011  Edit critic review
C+
Love Me Forever or Never (1986) Nick Davis Love Me Forever or Never may be more committed to its bright, calico surface and its abrupt transitions in focus and tone than it is to the relations between the two people on screen.
Posted Jul 01, 2011  Edit critic review
B+
Fool for Love (1985) Nick Davis The basic friction between Altman's lightness and Shepard's portentousness serves the movie in rich and ever-expanding ways, and not just because you can't ever predict how the narrative will swerve.
Posted Jul 01, 2011  Edit critic review
B
Hanna (2011) Nick Davis The movie feels alive in a thrilling way, sometimes even a funny way, even when its thrills are cheap, confused, or diaphanous.
Posted Apr 30, 2011  Edit critic review
C+
Scream of the Ants (2006) Nick Davis This side of Makhmalbaf is exhilarating at its best but still feels essential at its petulant and shapeless worst.
Posted Apr 04, 2011  Edit critic review
B+
Lourdes (2009) Nick Davis The withholding of judgment persists across Lourdes, which is comic, haunting, sweet, pious, unsettling, agnostic, and wholly deadpan at various moments.
Posted Mar 04, 2011  Edit critic review
B-
Black Swan (2010) Nick Davis Why tell this story in such elaborate terms? And why coax Nina just barely out from beneath her mother's thumb, only to pinion her just as harshly underneath Aronofsky's?
Posted Oct 13, 2010  Edit critic review
C+
The Housemaid (2010) Nick Davis The Housemaid just feels rudely conceived, unresolved, and maybe a little confused about which among its many ideas and impulses are the most interesting.
Posted Oct 11, 2010  Edit critic review
C+
Never Let Me Go (2010) Nick Davis Strangely, Romanek often feels disarmed of exactly these vital organs that might have made him a sturdy, sharp renderer of this story. One senses he's too saddened by the tale he is spinning to take a risk on a demanding image.
Posted Sep 18, 2010  Edit critic review
C+
Mugabe and the White African (2009) Nick Davis The filmmakers leave massive and sometimes reactionary holes in a film that could easily have pled a more accommodating and sophisticated yet equally airtight case.
Posted Sep 06, 2010  Edit critic review
C+
Valhalla Rising (2009) Nick Davis I appreciate Refn for pushing against conventions of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some grand, over-arching abstraction.
Posted Sep 04, 2010  Edit critic review
B
The Last Exorcism (2010) Nick Davis Any film that forges as unruly a connection as this one does with its audience deserves some applause, especially when the film belongs to a genre where all too many of its peers come across as rote or as thoughtlessly, remorselessly heartless.
Posted Sep 04, 2010  Edit critic review
B
Lebanon (2009) Nick Davis Not all films that attempt to govern their audiences so strictly, or so overtly advertise their own architectures of form and theme, have nearly the punch that Lebanon does.
Posted Aug 31, 2010  Edit critic review
C
The Square (2008) Nick Davis The Square gets plenty of early elements in place to promise something more special than it ultimately becomes... Even a strong first impression can't survive such a flailing resolution.
Posted Aug 30, 2010  Edit critic review
B
Make-Out With Violence (2008) Nick Davis Builds a real air of mystery around the captive girl, what she is, what she is or isn't capable of doing, and what we're invited to feel about her or her caretaker-captors... Made with real filmmaking flair.
Posted Aug 30, 2010  Edit critic review
C
Only When I Dance (2009) Nick Davis It becomes impossible to take Only When I Dance seriously as more than the superficial account of a frustratingly tentative bystander.
Posted Aug 22, 2010  Edit critic review
A
Borom Sarret (1963) Nick Davis Sembene's early short film encapsulates everything that is angry, witty, pellucid, and healthily, uncynically skeptical about his cinema.
Posted Aug 21, 2010  Edit critic review
B+
Animal Kingdom (2010) Nick Davis Almost every scene in Animal Kingdom includes some shot, some edit or avoidance of edit, some lighting effect, some performance gesture, or some sound element that breaks the scene out of the simplest grooves it might have obeyed.
Posted Aug 19, 2010  Edit critic review
B
Cairo Time (2009) Nick Davis A reflective, surprisingly subtle piece about character and about location, when I had expected either a completely anodyne travelogue or a dogmatic, 'Yes'-style disquisition.
Posted Aug 15, 2010  Edit critic review
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