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Blogcritics.org

Blogcritics.org is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Alan Dale.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
3/4
O. Henry's Full House (1952) A. J. Hakari While some of its five mini-movies are better than others, even the lesser ones have something to say...
Posted Aug 15, 2009  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Harper (1966) A. J. Hakari In short, Harper is no fun when it has its game face on, which happens more frequently as the movie progresses.
Posted Aug 15, 2009  Edit critic review
3/4
Room Service (1938) A. J. Hakari ...the boys have no trouble turning the premise into something that suits their style just fine.
Posted Aug 15, 2009  Edit critic review
3/4
Coogan's Bluff (1968) A. J. Hakari The film hearkens to a time when justice was simple, when bad guys were bad guys and needed to be caught, without miles upon miles of bureaucratic red tape involved.
Posted Aug 15, 2009  Edit critic review
3/4
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) A. J. Hakari From its gender-bending subtexts to its pitch perfect atmosphere, there's much ado about this film that makes it a strange and unexpected treat.
Posted Aug 15, 2009  Edit critic review
Gigantic (2008) Brian Fitzpatrick If you like quirky romantic dramas, I highly recommend Gigantic.
Posted Apr 06, 2009  Edit critic review
Gigantic (2008) Brandon Cozart Rarely is the story of boy meets girl told in a fresh, unassuming, quirkily adorable fashion. Gigantic accomplishes this.
Posted Apr 06, 2009  Edit critic review
Confusions of an Unmarried Couple (2009) Alan Dale [The moviemakers'] straightforwardness about ... sexual relationships is beyond refreshing[,] ... as if sugarcoating were chemically impossible.
Posted Jan 01, 2009  Edit critic review
Closer (2004) Alan Dale Marber looks at farcical giddiness with a hard-won sobriety.... Closer is a voguish farce that, rather than making you wish you were like the characters, makes you wish that you hadn't been.
Posted May 28, 2007  Edit critic review
Notes on a Scandal (2006) Alan Dale The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity.
Posted Apr 17, 2007  Edit critic review
L'Amour Fou (1969) Alan Dale The irony is subtle ... but irresistible for anyone interested in narrative paradox. L'Amour fou is one of the few movies, and one of the best, to deal directly with a literary subject.
Posted Mar 13, 2007  Edit critic review
Dreamgirls (2006) Alan Dale I could have happily sat through the first half a second time, though I was barely able to sit through the second half once.
Posted Feb 15, 2007  Edit critic review
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) Alan Dale It's theatrical genius: Cohen has devised a split-level act in which being hooked off the stage by his in-the-movie audience makes for success with his at-the-movie audience.
Posted Jan 05, 2007  Edit critic review
Strangers With Candy (2005) Alan Dale [R]eplicate[s] in a raunchy cartoon how the chaos of our experience correlates more than we may care to admit to the chaos of our personalities.
Posted Jan 05, 2007  Edit critic review
The Queen (2006) Alan Dale To give the narrative depth, bite, or oomph, as naturalism, irony, or romance, or some combination ... Morgan would have to have invented more (as Shakespeare and Schiller did with their historical royalty)....
Posted Dec 31, 2006  Edit critic review
Stranger Than Fiction (2006) Alan Dale [J]ust the kind of numbskull movie that critics call 'smart'.
Posted Dec 31, 2006  Edit critic review
The Last King of Scotland (2006) Alan Dale [T]he movie's emphasis on Nicholas's misadventures, as if the audience couldn't get into the story of Uganda without an educated, white, middle-class European as a protagonist, is a huge let-down in its own terms.
Posted Dec 18, 2006  Edit critic review
Flags of Our Fathers (2006) Alan Dale There's not a fully realized personality in 132 minutes. Though it's based on a non-fiction book, Flags of Our Fathers is too thinly imagined for naturalism, and when Eastwood squeezes the material for greater significance, it crumbles.
Posted Dec 03, 2006  Edit critic review
Infamous (2006) Alan Dale [Covering] the same period of the author's life as Bennett Miller's Capote..., Infamous is not only the more entertaining movie, it's the more sophisticated, and the more emotional, as well.
Posted Dec 03, 2006  Edit critic review
The Departed (2006) Alan Dale The movie gains life entirely from the interplay among the actors, and both of the young stars are wonderful.
Posted Nov 01, 2006  Edit critic review
Ask the Dust (2006) Alan Dale Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject. [His] canniness as a writer and casual sophistication do wonders for the actors.
Posted Nov 01, 2006  Edit critic review
Shortbus (2006) Alan Dale [Shortbus] will give adults who aren't put off by zoo-naked sex more to talk about, even in disparagement, than anything showing at the Cineplex.
Posted Nov 01, 2006  Edit critic review
Intolerable Cruelty (2003) Alan Dale As Miles, Clooney doesn't make any direct emotional appeal to the audience and yet his high style is so smashingly effective that Miles stands open to us: macher, lover, patsy.
Posted Sep 26, 2006  Edit critic review
Fargo (1996) Alan Dale [Marge is] a good cop because everything abnormal stands out like a stain against her white-on-white sanity.... [H]er incomprehension [of criminality] is not only her strength as a detective, it justifies the deadpan style of the movie.
Posted Sep 26, 2006  Edit critic review
Frida (2002) Alan Dale [A]s in soap opera, drama is synonymous with the torments of love. Hayek is a brave, tireless performer, ... but given the script she can only play Kahlo the "beguiling personality" she liked to think of herself as ... rather than Kahlo the artist.
Posted Sep 26, 2006  Edit critic review
About Schmidt (2002) Alan Dale [Y]ou laugh with a growing sense of dread because it makes you feel what it's like to realize it's too late to help yourself.
Posted Sep 26, 2006  Edit critic review
The Loved One (1965) Alan Dale Perhaps the only way to enjoy it is to accept that saying something offensive is better than saying nothing at all. The Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One might have agreed with that, at any rate.
Posted Sep 15, 2006  Edit critic review
World Trade Center (2006) Alan Dale The movie's real mistake is to take as its focus the single least unusual aspect of September 11--the fact that the murdered and wounded loved their families and were loved back.
Posted Sep 01, 2006  Edit critic review
Friends With Money (2006) Alan Dale [I]t's hard to distinguish [Holofcener's] more tentative approach to narrative [here] from an identity crisis. Maybe that's why McDormand's material has by far the most bite.
Posted Jul 30, 2006  Edit critic review
The Break-Up (2006) Alan Dale [I]t combines a naked desire to please the audience with a try-anything approach of the kind that made Wedding Crashers such a desperate stab at entertainment.
Posted Jul 30, 2006  Edit critic review
Nacho Libre (2006) Alan Dale Nacho Libre is all it needs to be--ridiculous from beginning to end.
Posted Jul 26, 2006  Edit critic review
The Great New Wonderful (2005) Alan Dale [Maggie] Gyllenhaal ... slips into character with greater ease than any other young American actress now in the movies.
Posted Jul 26, 2006  Edit critic review
Mikey and Nicky (1976) Alan Dale Considering the gross overextension of the shoot and the indulgence of the actors, ... it makes perfect sense that the movie feels like the result of a game of 52 pick-up rather than the realization of a design.
Posted Jul 21, 2006  Edit critic review
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) Alan Dale If ... the heroine is going to be as immune to temptation as Andy is ... then the spiritual dimension better be staggering ... because the narrative will have no suspense.
Posted Jul 21, 2006  Edit critic review
The Proposition (2005) Alan Dale The Proposition depicts male brutality, both within and without the confines of the law, in a beautifully measured way that doesn't kill the intensity of the narrative--wild contrasts, ironic similarities, and all.
Posted Jun 28, 2006  Edit critic review
The Graduate (1967) Alan Dale Nichols takes an ad hoc approach to comic irony and the movie seems to have been enshrined by American audiences because each moment in isolation "works," no matter that they tend to cancel each other out.
Posted Jun 25, 2006  Edit critic review
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) Alan Dale Sometimes it seems that nobody ever has any idea what it is he's chasing after, and so the chase never ends.... It's a good day when you can laugh about it, which is what The Heartbreak Kid lets you do.
Posted Jun 25, 2006  Edit critic review
Bloody Sunday (2002) Alan Dale Bloody Sunday demonstrates an historical thesis formulated in retrospect, which fits oddly with Greengrass's continuous-present technique.
Posted Jun 24, 2006  Edit critic review
United 93 (2006) Alan Dale Greengrass is a refined political artist, but United 93 goes pretty much entirely for gut reactions.
Posted Jun 24, 2006  Edit critic review
Guilty of Treason (1949) Alan Dale Guilty of Treason is a B-movie, budget and soul, and yet its political judgments are grounded in an accurate journalistic evaluation of a deplorable reality.
Posted May 03, 2006  Edit critic review
The Prisoner (1955) Alan Dale What Guinness does with his eyes alone ... provides a seminar on acting. And that's just from the neck up.
Posted May 03, 2006  Edit critic review
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) Alan Dale [Sophie and Hans] embody the adolescent faith that any political action is better than none, and the movie couldn't treat them more glowingly if their actions had been effective.
Posted May 03, 2006  Edit critic review
Kapò (1959) Alan Dale Pontecorvo is not the visionary firebrand of The Battle of Algiers here. He cares about the subject passionately--as a Jew, and as a Communist leader in the Italian Resistance--but he turns it into pap.
Posted Apr 18, 2006  Edit critic review
16 Blocks (2006) Alan Dale The movie isn't good enough for him, but all the same [David] Morse manages to give as fine a performance as the material allows. Finer.
Posted Apr 11, 2006  Edit critic review
Naked Among Wolves (1963) Alan Dale Naked Among Wolves, an epic of Soviet-bloc, Remember-the-Alamo! heroism, is as phony as the war was long.
Posted Mar 22, 2006  Edit critic review
Life Is Beautiful (1997) Alan Dale Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator--he lets the liberating nonsense triumph.
Posted Mar 22, 2006  Edit critic review
The Pianist (2002) Alan Dale [I]t takes six or seven people to keep one half-dead Jew alive.... Wladyslaw's situation is extraordinary but what's happening on screen doesn't really feel so extraordinary. There's almost no emphasis, no point of view.
Posted Mar 22, 2006  Edit critic review
Fateless (2005) Alan Dale No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic.
Posted Mar 22, 2006  Edit critic review
Munich (2005) Alan Dale [T]he brow-scrunching and ethical debates don't grow out of the assassinations, they merely follow them, and are not only inadequate but irrelevant.
Posted Feb 27, 2006  Edit critic review
Syriana (2005) Alan Dale Gaghan piles one storyline on another but is only interested in suggesting where they trend, working like a (cynical) editorialist who has made up a few examples to support his views.
Posted Feb 27, 2006  Edit critic review
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