Rotten
| Rotten 30%
| The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) | "
A landmark cinematic event in 280 words, or one for every $500,000 of weekend box office." — New Republic Posted Nov 24, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 85%
| Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) | "
Making a bad movie this good is harder than it looks." — New Republic Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 91%
| Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009) | "
[I]f Precious has a crucial flaw, it is that it is at once too bleak and too hopeful in its closing scenes: too bleak in the history it unearths, and too hopeful that the mere fact of the unearthing will make that history go away." — New Republic Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 38%
| 2012 (2009) | "
[J]ust as the cyclones and tsunamis of The Day After Tomorrow ultimately succumbed to a bad case of narrative frostbite, 2012's ludicrous thrills begin burning themselves out by the movie's midpoint." — New Republic Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 93%
| The Damned United (2009) | "
One of [its] primary pleasures...is that, in choosing a topic as narrow and parochial as the fate of an English soccer club, Morgan has relieved himself of any duty to persuade us that the events he describes are of world-historical import." — New Republic Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 70%
| Where the Wild Things Are (2009) | "
Where the Wild Things Are may not be a great film for children (or, at least, most children). But it is something rarer still: a great, and unsparing, film about childhood." — New Republic Posted Oct 15, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 86%
| A Serious Man (2009) | "
Humor and empathy alike have trouble flourishing in the grim narrative soil the Coens provide, in which every cosmic joke is a black one." — New Republic Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 89%
| Zombieland (2009) | "
[E]verything Jennifer's Body was not--fast, funny, and fully aware of the obligations and opportunities inherent in the genre." — New Republic Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 28%
| Fame (2009) | "
Way back in 1980, when the Oscar-winning theme song of the movie Fame declared "I'm gonna live forever," it was easy to believe the lyric was an example of artistic license. Now, it's not so clear." — New Republic Posted Sep 25, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 76%
| The Informant! (2009) | "
[Damon] occupies his equivocating antihero utterly, capturing the Walter Mittyish self-delusion, the desperate desire to please, and the bottomless conviction that, whatever his transgressions, he's still one of the good guys." — New Republic Posted Sep 18, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 45%
| Jennifer's Body (2009) | "
[T]here's something a bit sour about the whole enterprise, a lack of fun that becomes more evident as the injuries and indignities piled upon poor Needy accumulate, and gradually crowd out the film's early tongue-in-cheekiness." — New Republic Posted Sep 18, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 63%
| Extract (2009) | "
[Extract] resembles its titular foodstuffs: less a fully realized comedy than the distillation of one. The ingredients are there, and the recipe as well, but Judge evidently forgot that the whole dish still needed cooking." — New Republic Posted Sep 4, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Inglourious Basterds (2009) | "
The true moral universe in which the film unfolds is that of the spaghetti westerns...: a world in which the strong are above the law and the way to tell the good guys from the bad guys is not by their acts but by the kind of hats they wear." — New Republic Posted Aug 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 82%
| Thirst (2009) | "
[U]nlike most exercises in hematic excess--Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance, or Tarantino's Kill Bill--Thirst offers not the consolations of camp but the intensity of opera." — New Republic Posted Aug 14, 2009 |
Fresh
| N/A | Thirst (1979) | "
[U]nlike most exercises in hematic excess--Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance, or Tarantino's Kill Bill--Thirst offers not the consolations of camp but the intensity of opera." — New Republic Posted Aug 14, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 90%
| District 9 (2009) | "
District 9 succeeds brilliantly as an exercise in style, but the style promises a level of substance the film never quite delivers." — New Republic Posted Aug 14, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) | "
Sometimes, a film defies conventional narrative and artistic standards so utterly that it seems unfair to judge it by them.... Consider this a tone poem in 40 scraps of dialogue." — New Republic Posted Aug 11, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 75%
| Julie & Julia (2009) | "
[T]he whole enterprise has a whiff of marketing to it. Did the filmmakers worry that Child wouldn't be 'relatable' to contemporary women? Was there a fear that the 18-35 demographic would decline to show up if it didn't have an onscreen representative?" — New Republic Posted Aug 7, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 68%
| Funny People (2009) | "
The movie...feels like the work of an artist in transition, an attempt by Apatow to see how far he can push his foul-mouthed bromances toward earnest drama before finally having to let go of the dick jokes." — New Republic Posted Jul 30, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 15%
| The Ugly Truth (2009) | "
I think it's safe to say that the concerns about sexism in cinema that Heigl voiced so ardently after her career-making turn in Knocked Up have ebbed in direct proportion to the increases in her subsequent paychecks." — New Republic Posted Jul 28, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| The Hurt Locker (2009) | "
Like her protagonist, Bigelow is both a meticulous technician and a ballsy showoff. And, like him, she has ice water in her veins." — New Republic Posted Jul 24, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 87%
| 500 Days of Summer (2009) | "
Captures with such immediacy the elation and anxiety of new love, the tingle and the terror, the profound sense that you have never been more alive and the occasional wish that you could die on the spot." — New Republic Posted Jul 24, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 67%
| Bruno (2009) | "
It's an odd cop-out for so fiercely gifted a comedian.... This is not a man who is doomed to be Allen Funt, or for that matter, Ashton Kutcher. He doesn't need to rely on the easy titillations and voyeuristic pull of reality TV." — New Republic Posted Jul 10, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 67%
| Public Enemies (2009) | "
If John Dillinger had not existed... Michael Mann would have had to invent him." — New Republic Posted Jul 3, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 19%
| Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | "
If it sounds as though the script (credited to Ehren Kruger, Robert Orci, and Alex Kurtzman) was written in serial-novel form during an all-night mescaline bender, well, I have no evidence that it was not." — New Republic Posted Jun 26, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 66%
| Away We Go (2009) | "
You may very well enjoy Away We Go more than I did. But rest assured that you will never love this movie as much as it loves itself." — New Republic Posted Jun 16, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 52%
| The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) | "
Pelham is not merely a film that may induce seizures in those who are susceptible; it is a film that seems engineered to approximate the experience of a seizure for those who are not." — New Republic Posted Jun 12, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 61%
| The Girlfriend Experience (2009) | "
There are layers upon layers here--a porn star taking on a serious acting role in which she plays a woman whose job is to make herself an object of male fantasy--but it's unclear whether Grey is aware of any of them." — New Republic Posted Jun 8, 2009 |
— | Fresh 91%
| Ordinary People (1980) |
Click here to read article — New Republic Posted Jun 3, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| Up (2009) | "
[A] kid's adventure yarn embedded in a grownup tale about grief and regret, purposes lost and rediscovered." — New Republic Posted May 29, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 32%
| Terminator Salvation (2009) | "
Intensity need not be the enemy of personality, but in Bale's work it too often has been." — New Republic Posted May 22, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| Angels & Demons (2009) | "
[T]he film does not conclude with Langdon being elected Pope himself, but, watching the spiraling inanities of the last 20 minutes, one might be forgiven for thinking it would be the next logical step." — New Republic Posted May 15, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 95%
| Star Trek (2009) | "
In his daft, dizzy reinvention of a moribund franchise, Abrams has found a way to be referential without being reverential, to conjure nostalgia without being constrained by it." — New Republic Posted May 8, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) | "
Though Jackman is capable, as always, in the title role, there's no real weight to his travails, which play more as exposition than tragedy." — New Republic Posted May 1, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 55%
| The Soloist (2009) | "
[Director Joe Wright's] treatment of the material is so literal that at times the film seems like a syllabus for Remedial Cinematic Technique 101." — New Republic Posted Apr 24, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 84%
| State of Play (2009) | "
[A] film that has spent an hour and forty-five minutes puffing itself into a battle for the Soul of American Democracy feebly hisses its way to a deflated conclusion." — New Republic Posted Apr 17, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 50%
| Observe and Report (2009) | "
[T]he upbeat ending--which comes on the heels of a genuinely shocking climax--is so incongruous that, as with The King of Comedy, it almost seems we're being dared to question whether it is real or delusion." — New Republic Posted Apr 10, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Sin Nombre (2009) | "
Fukunaga's gift lies not in inventing clever reversals, but in declining to provide us with the typical cinematic cues that advertise what's coming." — New Republic Posted Apr 3, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Adventureland (2009) | "
One of Mottola's best jokes involves Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus".... [I]t's hard to imagine a better use of nostalgia: to remind us of the many things we miss from a particular time, and the one reason we would never, ever want to go back." — New Republic Posted Apr 3, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 72%
| Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) | "
At the altar... Susan sprouts to just under 50 feet tall, taking out the church roof and steeple in the process. Next time, raise higher the roof beam, carpenters." — New Republic Posted Mar 27, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 18%
| The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) | "
[W]hite people haven't learned much in the quarter-century since Eddie Murphy's classic disquisition on The Amityville Horror." — New Republic Posted Mar 27, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 65%
| Duplicity (2009) | "
Like the carnal encounter with which it opens, it's a film that goes through the motions, and while those motions are frequently pleasurable, we, like Owen, are ultimately left disappointed." — New Republic Posted Mar 20, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 64%
| Watchmen (2009) | "
[T]there are problems both with the tale, which was an awful lot more subversive 20 years ago than it is today, and the telling, which in contrast to Moore's radical experimentation is disappointingly staid and straightforward.n" — New Republic Posted Mar 6, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 83%
| Two Lovers (2009) | "
[A] film full of simple scenes brimming with unspoken complications." — New Republic Posted Feb 27, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 58%
| The International (2009) | "
It's betwixt and between, neither smart and understated enough to be le Carre-like nor stylish and energetic enough to be Bond-Bournian." — New Republic Posted Feb 14, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 23%
| Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) | "
[T]his adaptation is really just about buying the 'brand,' and--like the retailers in the film--selling America something it already had." — New Republic Posted Feb 14, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 23%
| Push (2009) | "
Belle... is blank as a page, and the intended romantic chemistry between her and Evans is never in evidence." — New Republic Posted Feb 6, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 13%
| The Pink Panther 2 (2009) | "
[I]f half-hearted remakes of fondly remembered films (and their still more lifeless sequels) are one of the most acute ills currently plaguing Hollywood, [Steve] Martin is arguably the primary vector by which the malady is transmitted." — New Republic Posted Feb 6, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 79%
| Gran Torino (2008) | "
With Gran Torino, Eastwood has taken what might have been the likable last gasp of his iconic persona and turned it into the dullest, most heavy-handed sermon of his career." — New Republic Posted Dec 25, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| The Wrestler (2008) | "
Rourke, in a role that could have invited outsized characterization, instead offers modesty and understatement. This small performance, in a small film, is by far the biggest of his career." — New Republic Posted Dec 25, 2008 |
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