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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Monos (2019) Mark Jenkins To watch this fierce drama is to be welcomed to the jungle.
Posted Sep 13, 2019  Edit critic review
Hustlers (2019) Andrew Lapin It's an astute commentary on the money moves we all need to make to survive.
Posted Sep 13, 2019  Edit critic review
Dear Ex (2018) Andrew Lapin Love in this movie is expressed in odd ways, but it is still genuine.
Posted Feb 03, 2019  Edit critic review
Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life (2018) Linda Holmes It is aggressively affable and very broad, and sometimes that's just what you need.
Posted May 31, 2018  Edit critic review
Begin Again (2013) Linda Holmes For a movie that could have come off like a Hollywood version of something beautiful and tiny, it's actually quite successful.
Posted Sep 13, 2013  Edit critic review
The Double (2013) Linda Holmes It's a very odd, genuinely offbeat film (there were a noteworthy number of walkouts, though that can have as much to do with the timing of other screenings as the reaction to the film), but it burbles and crackles with imagination.
Posted Sep 13, 2013  Edit critic review
Silver Linings Playbook (2012) Bob Mondello Writer-director Russell is just the guy to bring out (and then calm) the manic dysfunction in these folks.
Posted Jan 22, 2013  Edit critic review
8.5/10
Into the Abyss (2011) Ian Buckwalter Herzog unforgettably shows how when you pull tight the straps on men who've lain down to die, it leaves a mark.
Posted Dec 08, 2011  Edit critic review
7/10
Brighton Rock (2010) Bob Mondello Where the first film had a lawyer spouting Shakespeare, this one mostly has visual panache - crosses and crucifixes rather than dialogue about religion.
Posted Aug 26, 2011  Edit critic review
8/10
Point Blank (2010) Bob Mondello Director Fred Cavay has a reputation in France for getting the audience's pulse pounding, and in Point Blank, he does that while mixing in some intriguing social themes and character types that are usually outsiders to the genre.
Posted Jul 28, 2011  Edit critic review
5/10
Everything Must Go (2010) Ian Buckwalter Writer/director Dan Rush takes one simple concept from Raymond Carver's spare, evocative, and extremely short story - a sad alcoholic with his furniture on the lawn - and fills in the blanks. Too many of them, as it turns out.
Posted May 12, 2011  Edit critic review
The Taqwacores (2010) Mark Jenkins Unapologetically episodic, the movie is designed to awe and shock... and to plunge viewers into a world whose fury is half exotic and half typical of any group of unruly adolescents.
Posted Feb 23, 2011  Edit critic review
5.9/10
The Way Back (2010) Ian Buckwalter There's an enjoyably old-fashioned brand of adventure at work here, when Weir doesn't handcuff himself with Red scare politics and maudlin sentimentality. The former outweighs the latter, but only just barely.
Posted Jan 21, 2011  Edit critic review
7.5/10
The Time That Remains (2009) Ian Buckwalter The silence of the character played by director Elia Suleiman lends the role a kind of invisibility that seems meant as an analogy to his view of the Arab presence in Israel. He's present, yet absent.
Posted Jan 07, 2011  Edit critic review
Night Catches Us (2010) Mark Jenkins The movie evokes its time and place so potently that it almost doesn't matter that Hamilton's script proves unequal to her vision.
Posted Dec 03, 2010  Edit critic review
Let Me In (2010) Mark Jenkins Stylish and effectively creepy, if mostly secondhand.
Posted Oct 02, 2010  Edit critic review
Barry Munday (2010) Scott Tobias A deeply off-putting independent comedy.
Posted Oct 02, 2010  Edit critic review
8/10
Despicable Me (2010) Bob Mondello It's all thoroughly adorable, and with an overlay that's nearly as odd as Carell's accent: Despicable Me looks a lot like other computer-animated pictures...
Posted Jul 09, 2010  Edit critic review
Observe and Report (2009) Mark Jenkins That playlist proves that Observe and Report was shaped by a hip sensibility. Shame that sensibility didn't have more effect on the script.
Posted Jul 07, 2010  Edit critic review
Gran Torino (2008) Mark Jenkins Gran Torino is less a sleek hybrid than a multigenre pileup.
Posted Jul 07, 2010  Edit critic review
Moon (2009) Bob Mondello Start calculating the costs to Lunar Industries of its singular form of devaluing, and Moon's central premise stops making sense.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Dreamgirls (2006) Bob Mondello The energy is so high in sequences like this -- and there are lots of them -- that it almost doesn't matter that we've seen this story before, in Ray and other film biographies about the "heartbreak" of musical stardom.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Lymelife (2008) Mark Jenkins For all its emphasis on suburbia and its discontents, Lymelife never quite convinces that its story's environs are essential -- or even all that interesting.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Seven Pounds (2008) Mark Jenkins Reactions to the movie will largely depend on whether or not viewers decide this time that the divine Mr. Smith has overreached. I say he has -- but I can't tell you why.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Treeless Mountain (2008) Mark Jenkins While this minimalist tale could have been heartbreaking, what's most affecting is not the kids' plight but their pluck.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) Mark Jenkins Married, a father and pushing 40, Smith is no longer a trustworthy chronicler of 20-something slackers. He still can devise an impressively gamy set piece, but he's misplaced the humanity of his best work.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Orphan (2009) Nathan Lee The movie is, as these things go, enjoyably trashy.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Knowing (2009) Nathan Lee A slog through lazy writing, indifferent acting and blase direction with no hope of anything but chaotic violence as reward.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Tetro (2009) Mark Jenkins A dazzling stylistic exercise, Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro pays tribute to great bygone European filmmakers.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Bolt (2008) Mark Jenkins The latest generation of animated flicks is a sort of latter-day vaudeville revue. Kiddies who take Bolt to heart may conclude not only that dogs really do have superpowers, but also that everybody's in showbiz.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
The Reader (2008) Mark Jenkins A British movie of a well-reviewed German novel about issues both moral and bookish.
Posted Jul 06, 2010  Edit critic review
Grown Ups (2010) Mark Jenkins Despite occasional attempts at plot and character, this is basically a roast with scenery.
Posted Jun 25, 2010  Edit critic review
2/10
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009) Ian Buckwalter This is a movie so in love with its own supposed cleverness that it never realizes it's not all that clever.
Posted Jun 09, 2010  Edit critic review
Ondine (2009) Ella Taylor Ondine plumbs the country's most resonant fairy tale and plays impishly along the borders of postcard fantasies of Ireland.
Posted Jun 03, 2010  Edit critic review
The Warlords (2007) Mark Jenkins Doesn't make fighting look graceful, easy or fun, and that's a mark of its courage.
Posted Apr 02, 2010  Edit critic review
9/10
In the Loop (2009) Bob Mondello Blistering satire ... scabrous laughs. And it's so easy to imagine that this really is how governments make earth-shaking decisions.
Posted Jul 24, 2009  Edit critic review
8/10
Humpday (2009) Bob Mondello The film ends up being about not just a really idiotic dare, but about the bounds of friendship and the bonds of marriage — and about much more besides.
Posted Jul 10, 2009  Edit critic review
7.5/10
Herb and Dorothy (2008) Bob Mondello Briskly and engagingly cinematic. ... [Their compulsive collecting seems] at once crazy, smart, generous and enormously endearing.
Posted Jun 10, 2009  Edit critic review
8/10
Departures (2008) Bob Mondello Multiplexes are crowded with noisy summer films, from which Departures will represent a sophisticated and elegant departure.
Posted May 28, 2009  Edit critic review
4.9/10
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) Bob Mondello Those movies where people get sent to an island somewhere, then discover that everyone's a clone, or a reactor is melting down? Imagine all of that happening at once, only everybody is indestructible.
Posted May 01, 2009  Edit critic review
8.5/10
12 (2007) Bob Mondello The stories the jurors tell, of course, are different ... filled with arguments that reference local tensions and situations possessing a distinctly Chekhovian flavor.
Posted Mar 05, 2009  Edit critic review
3/10
An American Affair (2009) Bob Mondello If you can get past the exploitation-of-minors thing, there's a tawdry exuberance to moments like the one in which the twerp and his overage girlfriend drunkenly splash paint on each other.
Posted Feb 26, 2009  Edit critic review
8.5/10
Coraline (2009) Bob Mondello Selick puts his real faith not in the gimmickry that Coraline's audiences will think they've shown up for, but in the stronger virtues that they'd likely view as old-fashioned: character, and story, and so on.
Posted Feb 06, 2009  Edit critic review
3.5/10
New in Town (2009) Bob Mondello Broad accents, broader slapstick and a willful shrinking from anything remotely original. ... Also much condescension, toward both the characters and the audience.
Posted Jan 30, 2009  Edit critic review
7/10
Good (2008) Bob Mondello Good is pretty schematic — betraying its theatrical roots, perhaps. It's also a little drawn out. But it demonstrates the surprising power of character flaws in drama.
Posted Dec 29, 2008  Edit critic review
Waltz With Bashir (2008) Mark Jenkins Israeli writer-director Ari Folman's powerful, innovative film is composed largely of nightmares, all but the final one rendered in graphic-novel style.
Posted Dec 25, 2008  Edit critic review
3/10
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Bob Mondello Dunno about the Earth, but time certainly stands still for a goodly portion of Scott Derrickson's expensively produced but utterly boneheaded remake.
Posted Dec 11, 2008  Edit critic review
4/10
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) Bob Mondello The faux-naive point of view probably worked better in the novel; the literalness of film renders certain of the story's conceits ... overly precious.
Posted Nov 07, 2008  Edit critic review
8/10
Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008) Bob Mondello Without their guns, the men prove surprisingly helpless. And when a [mediator] tells them that if they want the women to stop treating them like children, they must behave responsibly, you sense a corner has been turned.
Posted Nov 07, 2008  Edit critic review
4.5/10
The Other End of the Line (2008) Bob Mondello It's not fair to ask that a romantic comedy be entirely realistic — but some level of plausibility would make the jokes go down easier, as would a touch of delicacy in the writing.
Posted Oct 30, 2008  Edit critic review
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