Rotten
| Fresh 90%
| Up in the Air (2009) | "
The kind of feel-good film about bad news that has been winning Oscars for decades." — SpoutBlog Posted Nov 18, 2009 |
Rotten 5/10
| Fresh 75%
| Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) | "
One wonders if Capitalism won't look almost avant garde when seen decades removed from the Moore cult of personality." — SpoutBlog Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Fresh 61%
| Peter and Vandy (2009) | "
Activities that were cute and fun at the beginning, we see, ultimately become tedious. The novelty of the film’s gimmick follows suit." — Time Out New York Posted Oct 7, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 86%
| 500 Days of Summer (2009) | "
The Fox Searchlight house style perfected and taken to the brink of self-parody." — SpoutBlog Posted Sep 3, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Fresh 60%
| Paper Heart (2009) | "
Part documentary, part fiction and all cloying affectation, Paper Heart doesn’t seem to care about its subjects, whose insights are incredibly slight." — Time Out New York Posted Aug 5, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 68%
| Funny People (2009) | "
Apatow has taken blisteringly personal material and filtered it through tropes and cliches borrowed from trite, mainstream factory-line cinema of another era. Judd Apatow the writer deserves a better director." — SpoutBlog Posted Jul 28, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 66%
| Public Enemies (2009) | "
...this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti's camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides." — SpoutBlog Posted Jul 13, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 51%
| The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) | "
Like swimming laps in bowl of room-temperature oatmeal." — SpoutBlog Posted Jun 17, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 81%
| Sex Positive (2009) | "
Sex Positive too often looks like something hastily thrown together, which belies the built trust evident between the filmmaker and his subject. Over the course of the film, Berkowitz moves from refusing to discuss certain specifics to spilling in great d" — SpoutBlog Posted Jun 9, 2009 |
Rotten 1/6
| Rotten 20%
| Ghosts of the Heartland (2009) | "
The ambience may be right, but the film lacks what makes actual midcentury middle-American noir so effective: subtext." — Time Out New York Posted May 20, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 76%
| Outrage (2009) | "
Thoughtfully persuades, but never shocks." — SpoutBlog Posted Apr 28, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 28%
| Fast & Furious (2009) | "
I can count on half a hand the things I found appealing about the middle fifty minutes of this movie, but I'll be damned if I don't want to know what happens next..." — SpoutBlog Posted Apr 13, 2009 |
Rotten 2/6
| Rotten 24%
| The Caller (2009) | "
There’s a vaguely appealing elegance to the way the film moves -- that is, when the actors stop spouting laughably portentous dialogue long enough for one to appreciate the film’s pacing." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 11, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 9%
| Memorial Day (2009) | "
Memorial Day sets up the party zone as a moral equivalent to the war zone, hammers that connection home and then stops-content with offering an equation in lieu of an argument" — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 94%
| An Education (2009) | "
An Education works as a fever dream of first love, but the wake-up is unsatisfying." — SpoutBlog Posted Jan 27, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 71%
| The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) | "
Benjamin Button is a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical." — SpoutBlog Posted Dec 22, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 80%
| Gran Torino (2008) | "
Gran Torino is most fun when it's working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic's one-man show." — SpoutBlog Posted Dec 18, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 62%
| The Reader (2008) | "
This is a film which asks us to contemplate the deeply complicated relationship between rational thought and instinctual feeling via a perverse intermingling of global horror and very, very local pain." — SpoutBlog Posted Dec 12, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 94%
| Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) | "
He documents an undeniably affecting personal story, and patches it together like a short attention span scrapbook with his fingerprints intact, but there's something about it which feels false enough to undercut some of its potential power." — SpoutBlog Posted Oct 31, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 60%
| W. (2008) | "
If history remembers W. at all, it'll be as a monument to the erosion of Oliver Stone's balls." — SpoutBlog Posted Oct 16, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 61%
| Changeling (2008) | "
We drink every time Angelina hysterically proclaims, "He's not my son!" We get very drunk, and this may be why we can't figure out why Clint Eastwood made a cheap-looking Lifetime movie that eventually turns into an "And justice for all!" episode of SVU." — SpoutBlog Posted Oct 6, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 62%
| Che (2008) | "
Che may be an extremely accurate portrait of Guevara's life, but truly epic works of cinema have more on the agenda than the literal translation of life. Can this be said of Che? No." — SpoutBlog Posted Sep 30, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 69%
| Religulous (2008) | "
Maher's journey's not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with." — SpoutBlog Posted Sep 16, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 80%
| Nothing But the Truth (2008) | "
Nothing But the Truth is jaw-droppingly over-the-top in ways that are all good for a laugh, but don't amount to much in the way of serious critique." — SpoutBlog Posted Sep 16, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 71%
| American Teen (2008) | "
Burstein either isn't aware of or has made a conscious decision to ignore the very "non-fiction" filmmaking that her subjects and their peers are likely most exposed to." — SpoutBlog Posted Aug 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 84%
| In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2008) | "
A visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city...It's when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem." — SpoutBlog Posted Aug 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 9%
| Sex and Breakfast (2007) | "
The only thing shameful about Sex and Breakfast is its unwillingness to get really shameful." — SpoutBlog Posted May 20, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 29%
| War, Inc. (2008) | "
The John Cusack 'comedy' (generic term used loosely) gives anti-war filmmaking a bad name." — SpoutBlog Posted Apr 28, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 69%
| The Wackness (2008) | "
With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round." — SpoutBlog Posted Apr 25, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 34%
| Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) | "
A sequel, a costume fantasy, a romantic melodrama, a CGI war spectacular, a puzzling celebration of beauty over substance." — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 54%
| Across the Universe (2007) | "
A shorter cut, stripped of some of the forced multiculturalism and contemporary political references, would play like gangbusters in middle schools." — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2008 |
Rotten 6.5/10
| Fresh 90%
| Operation Filmmaker (2008) | "
Davenport seems to be projecting her disappointments concerning the entirety of the Iraq situation onto Muthana, thereby excusing herself from culpability in his individual plight." — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 93%
| The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) | "
An almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery." — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 56%
| A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (2008) | "
Maybe, several years post-YouTube, it's just not enough anymore to train a camera on life; maybe the market demands that life be lived with the camera in mind." — SpoutBlog Posted Feb 4, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 90%
| Little Miss Sunshine (2006) | "
A cheap Sisyphean metaphor literally drives the thing: at first played for laughs, it's recycled to the point of nausea." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| Art School Confidential (2006) | "
A stilted satire of teenage passion and apathy, sex and death and crime...so concerned with aping style that it never bothers to consider its characters as people." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 44%
| The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005) | "
Loaded with easy cynicism and even easier sadism, it's a beautifully orchestrated ideological disaster that shoots for social commentary but settles for lowest-blow shock." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 67%
| Pixies - LoudQUIETLoud: A Film About the Pixies (2006) | "
By night, the Pixies are rock n' roll superheroes...by day, they're just four surly co-workers with very little to say to one another." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten
| N/A | Kill Your Darlings (2007) | "
What we're left with, in the absence of any coherent bank of ideas tying the proceedings together, is an often illiterate onslaught of quirk." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten 6.5/10
| Fresh 86%
| The Road to Guantanamo (2006) | "
If we ever felt like the soldiers and interrogators seen here were in any way human, Winterbottom and Whitecross' indictment of their behavior would hit twice as hard." — Cinematical Posted Feb 1, 2008 |
Rotten 4/10
| Fresh 77%
| I'm Not There (2007) | "
Empty, literal nostalgia...Haynes brings the detached cool, making his exercise in self-indulgent nostalgia safe for hipsters." — SpoutBlog Posted Nov 26, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 52%
| Margot at the Wedding (2007) | "
A monster movie filmed from the unstable point of view of the victims. Stalking the countryside, Margot picks them off one-by-one like Godzilla on a snack rampage." — SpoutBlog Posted Nov 14, 2007 |
Rotten C-
| Rotten 44%
| Redacted (2007) | "
It's like a Max Fisher production of The War Tapes." — SpoutBlog Posted Nov 12, 2007 |
Rotten C
| Rotten 27%
| Lions for Lambs (2007) | "
Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him." — SpoutBlog Posted Nov 12, 2007 |
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