Fresh
| Rotten 46%
| The Box (2009) | "
Kelly, as he did in Donnie Darko, avoids obvious scare techniques. Instead, he makes the bizarre, the surreal, and the frightening emerge from normal reality." — New Yorker Posted Nov 9, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 90%
| The Messenger (2009) | "
This is a fully felt, morally alert, marvellously acted piece of work. Despite the grim subject, it’s a sweet-tempered movie, with moments of explosive humor -- an entertainment." — New Yorker Posted Nov 9, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 100%
| La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) | "
It’s a joyous experience to see an institution in full flower-- to see not dereliction and disorder but the many forms of striving and virtue." — New Yorker Posted Oct 26, 2009 |
Fresh
| N/A | You Cannot Start Without Me: Valery Gergiev - Maestro (2009) | "
The movie, though conventional in form, brings us close to an elemental ferocity just barely held in check." — New Yorker Posted Oct 26, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 20%
| Amelia (2009) | "
Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded -- not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject." — New Yorker Posted Oct 26, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 94%
| An Education (2009) | "
I have a feeling that Sarsgaard could have stretched the role a lot further if the script had allowed him to, but, still, what he does is surprising." — New Yorker Posted Oct 12, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 70%
| Where the Wild Things Are (2009) | "
I have a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy?" — New Yorker Posted Oct 12, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 75%
| Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) | "
Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story is something else -- not a good movie or a coherent exposition of the meltdown but an emotional attack on capitalism as a system, an attempt, literally, to de-moralize capitalism." — New Yorker Posted Sep 28, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 86%
| A Serious Man (2009) | "
As a piece of moviemaking craft, A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable." — New Yorker Posted Sep 28, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 83%
| Bright Star (2009) | "
There’s a full complement of geese and mud and some women in bonnets, but Campion avoids finery and ceremony. She doesn’t show off the period; she triumphantly makes it a time in which people live as best they can." — New Yorker Posted Sep 14, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 76%
| The Informant! (2009) | "
The Informant! is a return to form for Soderbergh, who couldn’t seem to put anything resembling an emotional charge into his recent films...This time, Soderbergh is in full control, and his star is on fire." — New Yorker Posted Sep 14, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 100%
| Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) | "
The movie is an act of hero worship, but it inadvertently suggests that, without a necessary touch of grandiosity, Ellsberg might never have acted as bravely as he did." — New Yorker Posted Aug 31, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 69%
| American Casino (2009) | "
The Cockburns have finally made a movie about a nuclear disaster that actually happened -- their subject is the social ecology of financial meltdown." — New Yorker Posted Aug 31, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 75%
| Julie & Julia (2009) | "
Julie & Julia is one of the gentlest, most charming American movies of the past decade." — New Yorker Posted Aug 17, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 88%
| Inglourious Basterds (2009) | "
Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive—a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously." — New Yorker Posted Aug 17, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 68%
| Funny People (2009) | "
Funny People is leisurely, with many extended sequences, but the performers’ natural command of rhythm holds it in tension." — New Yorker Posted Jul 27, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 19%
| Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | "
The movie rages on for a hundred and fifty minutes and then just stops, pausing for the next sequel." — New Yorker Posted Jun 29, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 67%
| Public Enemies (2009) | "
The movie is emotionally neutered." — New Yorker Posted Jun 29, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| Food, Inc. (2009) | "
An angry blast of disgust aimed at the American food industry." — New Yorker Posted Jun 22, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| The Hurt Locker (2009) | "
The Hurt Locker is a small classic of tension, bravery, and fear, which will be studied twenty years from now when people want to understand something of what happened to American soldiers in Iraq." — New Yorker Posted Jun 22, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 66%
| Away We Go (2009) | "
Some of the episodes are ripely satirical, others almost heartbreaking." — New Yorker Posted Jun 1, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 44%
| Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) | "
The result is pretty much a free-form traffic jam in which everyone fights everyone else." — New Yorker Posted Jun 1, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 98%
| Up (2009) | "
The movie is packed with lovely jokes, some of them funny in inexplicable ways." — New Yorker Posted Jun 1, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 94%
| Summer Hours (2009) | "
In the end, Assayas, shooting the film with relaxed, flowing camera movements, gives his love not to beautiful objects but to the disorderly life out of which art is made." — New Yorker Posted May 18, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| Angels & Demons (2009) | "
If these movies made any damned sense, the public response might be no more than a yawn." — New Yorker Posted May 18, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 86%
| Tyson (2009) | "
Those who were furious at Tyson will be made even angrier by Toback’s film, for here is a fresh provocation—an attempt to restore to Tyson the human dimensions that have been taken from him (by himself, of course, as well as by others)." — New Yorker Posted May 4, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 41%
| Fighting (2009) | "
The fights may not be very convincing, but the story’s underdog structure is satisfying in a happy-cliché sort of way. Fighting is Rocky without the bombast, Fight Club without the daft metaphysical pretensions." — New Yorker Posted May 4, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) | "
Alas, there’s nothing quite memorable here: much of the combat is just a whirl of movement photographed up close. As the X-Men series has progressed, the startling poetic extravagances of the first film have given way to flesh-pounding clumsiness." — New Yorker Posted May 4, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 84%
| State of Play (2009) | "
The three screenwriters may have been trying to work too many plot strands into two hours; in any case, State of Play is both overstuffed and inconclusive." — New Yorker Posted Apr 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 55%
| The Soloist (2009) | "
I don’t know if Beethoven and a sympathetic newspaper reporter can redeem a messy American city, but this movie makes a plausible case for so fervent a dream." — New Yorker Posted Apr 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 94%
| Goodbye Solo (2009) | "
Creating his fiction shrewdly, Ramin Bahrani ultimately suggests that finality, too, has its beauty, and must be valued as much as endless possibility." — New Yorker Posted Apr 6, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Adventureland (2009) | "
The story is semi-autobiographical, but has a gentler touch than his prior work on Superbad, and certainly relies less on slapstick episodes." — New Yorker Posted Apr 6, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 90%
| Hunger (2008) | "
In the end, even though I recognized the need to be reminded of Guantánamo and of crimes carried out there, I was awed but not moved by Hunger." — New Yorker Posted Mar 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 65%
| Duplicity (2009) | "
Duplicity is an enormously enjoyable hybrid, a romantic comedy set at the center of a caper movie." — New Yorker Posted Mar 23, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 58%
| The International (2009) | "
Killer banks may be new to the movies, but there's nothing else original in this if-it's-Tuesday-this-must-be-Istanbul thriller, with its portentous globe-hopping and racing through colorful street bazaars." — New Yorker Posted Feb 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Coraline (2009) | "
A gift to imagination." — New Yorker Posted Feb 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 91%
| Katyn (2007) | "
A stunning, epic film." — New Yorker Posted Feb 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 84%
| Cherry Blossoms (2009) | "
The movie’s conceits are just barely endurable, but the sharpness of Dörrie’s eye -- for Tokyo’s electric night, for Fuji’s iconographic landscapes, for cherry blossoms -- sustains emotion even when story logic fails." — New Yorker Posted Jan 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 84%
| Wendy and Lucy (2008) | "
The movie, for all its morose impassivity, is beautiful and haunting." — New Yorker Posted Jan 20, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 50%
| Notorious (2009) | "
The movie leaves us with the sense that, twelve years after Biggie Smalls’s death, a lot of people are trying to extract whatever profit or pride they can from the chaotic life of a young man who was, as he well knew, a work in progress." — New Yorker Posted Jan 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 90%
| The Secret of the Grain (2008) | "
[Director] Kechiche digs a good story out of the flux, and, in the movie’s final forty minutes, the suspense is terrific." — New Yorker Posted Jan 5, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 56%
| Defiance (2008) | "
The picture offers the most moving account we’ve ever had of how an ordinary, rather disagreeable man, challenged and then electrified by catastrophe, grows into a great leader." — New Yorker Posted Jan 5, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 97%
| The Class (2008) | "
The Class is a prime document of French post-colonial blues, though its relevance to American urban education could not be any greater if it had been made in the Bronx or Trenton or South Los Angeles." — New Yorker Posted Dec 15, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 79%
| Gran Torino (2008) | "
The movie, which Eastwood directed with his usual vigor, has plenty of violent scenes, but it’s mostly a rueful comedy of enlightenment." — New Yorker Posted Dec 15, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 68%
| Revolutionary Road (2008) | "
It is honorably and brutally unnerving." — New Yorker Posted Dec 15, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 54%
| Australia (2008) | "
Luhrmann is drawn to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey." — New Yorker Posted Dec 1, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 91%
| Frost/Nixon (2008) | "
One of the virtues of Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s hit play, is that it brings the intelligence back to the forefront without dispelling the elements of menace and fraudulence that were also part of Nixon’s temperament." — New Yorker Posted Dec 1, 2008 |
Fresh
| Rotten 49%
| Twilight (2008) | "
Twilight, the first movie adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s series of best-selling teen novels, is going to be a big hit with young girls, and deservedly so -- the picture delivers." — New Yorker Posted Nov 24, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 93%
| Milk (2008) | "
Giving himself utterly to the role, Penn takes an actor’s craft and dedication to soulful heights, making a demand for dignity that becomes universal." — New Yorker Posted Nov 24, 2008 |
Fresh
| Fresh 90%
| I've Loved You So Long (2008) | "
You may need to see I’ve Loved You So Long twice in order to see it once." — New Yorker Posted Nov 3, 2008 |
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