ROTTEN TOMATOES: Ed Gonzalez

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ED GONZALEZ

""Scooby Doo can do do but Sartre is smartra."--Homer Simpson"

Agrees with the Tomatometer 71% of the time.

Biography: Ed Gonzalez is a freelance writer working out of New York City, or thereabouts. A graduate of NYU, he worked for Cosmopolitan, House Beautiful, and O Magazine before turning to film criticism. His writing has appeared in City Pages, Gay City News, and The Village Voice. He currently serves time as Film Editor and Senior Film Writer at Slant Magazine and Contributing Film Editor at PLANETº. Ed is also a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the New York Film Critics Online.

Publications: Apollo Guide, City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul, House Next Door, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Slant Magazine, Village Voice

Critics' Group: Online Film Critics Society, New York Film Critics Online

Total Reviews: 2553

Location: Weehawken, NJ

MOVIE REVIEWS ONLY

Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date (default)

Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 71%	Sherlock Holmes (2009)	" *Pop culture's most enduring sleuth gets a welcome, modernized makeover in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes." — Slant Magazine* Posted Dec 24, 2009
Rotten 0/4	Rotten 22%	Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)	" The story is so paper-thin one surmises it was scrawled on soggy toilet paper somewhere" — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 23, 2009
Rotten 1/4	Rotten 49%	It's Complicated (2009)	" The character names are irrelevant as the plot's a hoary, hokey pretense to gather under the stars." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 22, 2009
Rotten 2.5/4	Rotten 40%	The Lovely Bones (2009)	" There's a blinkered quality to the film that might have been more intriguing had the story been given a stirring political context." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 6, 2009
Rotten 2.5/4	Fresh 72%	The Road (2009)	" Hillcoat has a way of undermining the earthy performances of his cast with overly refined images and obtrusive music." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 20, 2009
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 73%	Where the Wild Things Are (2009)	" Max's dilemma and emotions are distilled to their essence, so the way his real-life suffering informs his dreamscapes becomes unmistakable." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 11, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Fresh 92%	Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009)	" *One for the Stuff White People Like canon, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire* is an impeccably acted piece of trash.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Oct 1, 2009
Rotten 2/4	N/A	To Die Like a Man (2009)	" Joao Pedro Rodrigues's perspective on cinema and life, in a nutshell: All the world's a stage, and everyone in it is a drama queen." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 23, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 50%	Antichrist (2009)	" *What's the purpose of Antichrist* beyond an artist's callow flaunting of his recalcitrance?*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Sep 21, 2009
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 84%	Bright Star (2009)	" Through a lush filmic vernacular, Campion shows how these two figures were not only fiercely devoted to their work but also kindred spirits." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 14, 2009
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 88%	Inglourious Basterds (2009)	" Tarantino seems to be scrutinizing his obsession with the cinema by cleverly placing it into an apt historical context." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 17, 2009
Fresh	Fresh 80%	Taxidermia (2007)	" All this helps to shape Pálfi's crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder, and annihilation." — Village Voice Posted Aug 11, 2009
Rotten	Fresh 68%	Grace (2009)	" Creepy, yes, but what's the point of all of this bratty, poignance-free bloodletting?" — Village Voice Posted Aug 11, 2009
Rotten	Rotten 43%	Fragments (2009)	" The hell that Paul Haggis hath wrought grows exponentially by the day." — Village Voice Posted Jul 30, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 82%	Thirst (2009)	" From the sweltering, acrobatic sex to the bone-crunching suckings and slayings, Tae-ju's angrily orchestrated mayhem rhymes perfectly with Chan-wook's voracious style." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 26, 2009
Rotten	Rotten 50%	Kassim the Dream (2009)	" Kassim the Dream's aestheticization of human despair is nearly obscene." — Village Voice Posted Jun 3, 2009
Fresh 3.5/4	Fresh 98%	Up (2009)	" Per usual, the nuances of human relationships are conveyed via Pixar's predictably acute attention to detail, coded in a mysterious evocation of mood." — Slant Magazine Posted May 21, 2009
Rotten 2/4	Rotten 18%	Dance Flick (2009)	" Aside from a half dozen salient bits that call bull**** on the white-black symbiosis portrayed in films such as Step Up, more times than not Dance Flick falls flatter than Eddie Murphy's butt in Norbit." — Slant Magazine Posted May 21, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 71%	Den du Frygter (2008)	" The latest from the Dogma cine-factory is notable for director Kristian Levring's visual suggestion of madness." — Slant Magazine Posted May 3, 2009
Rotten	Rotten 8%	The Skeptic (2009)	" A mechanical compendium of anti-skepticism clichés, right down to the obligatory post-realization upchuck." — Village Voice Posted Apr 28, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 39%	The Limits of Control (2009)	" *Folly of the most pretentious order, The Limits of Control* is a meaningless stylistic immersion from the typically on-point and perceptive Jim Jarmusch.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Apr 27, 2009
Rotten 2.5/4	Fresh 78%	Nursery University (2009)	" Largely coasts on shots of kids being adorable and parents behaving badly, but the film occasionally, if somewhat accidentally, proves illuminating." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 20, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 11%	The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (2009)	" At best a sincere show of flattening, at worst a colossal bore of a coming-of-age story." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 7, 2009
Rotten 2/4	Rotten 20%	Give Me Your Hand (2009)	" Represents the most attractively shot twin porn off all time." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 30, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Fresh 71%	Bart Got a Room (2009)	" *Consists largely of nasty knocks against the fat, old, and Asian, all of whom are framed in cramped compositions that suggest the influence of Simpsons* animation cells and Ulrich Seidl.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Mar 29, 2009
Rotten 0/4	N/A	Stay the Same Never Change (2009)	" Shines a light on an artist's prurient, shamelessly exploitative, and attention-grabbing instincts." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 27, 2009
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 96%	The Cove (2009)	" Staggeringly exposes the high-to-low complicity of many hands in the international captivity trade, though mostly it stands as a testament to one man's activist spirit and a reminder of how all social progress comes from the passion of the individual." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 23, 2009
Rotten 2/4	Fresh 87%	Amreeka (2009)	" The end result isn't a relaxed and incantatory celebration of cross-cultural friction that finds emotional and spiritual resonance in the mundane, a la The Secret of the Grain, but a sitcomish harangue." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 23, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 88%	Sin Nombre (2009)	" From beginning to end, the director understands that life for most immigrants is an expansive turf war." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 15, 2009
Fresh	Fresh 94%	2009 Academy-Award Nominated Short Films (2009)	" Manon on the Asphalt is a whimsical evocation of a woman's life flashing before her eyes, but On the Line is the real standout here." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 6, 2009
Rotten	Rotten 9%	Memorial Day (2009)	" Back in Iraq, the film's trite, unexamined spectacle of men and women behaving badly proceeds." — Village Voice Posted Feb 3, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Rotten 57%	Taken (2009)	" Would that Morel had infused the project with the same variety of style he brought to District B13, but the subtle insights of the script and Neeson's splendiferous range more than pick up the slack." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 28, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 67%	Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2009)	" Remarkable for bringing a little-known story of one woman's great courage and conviction to our attention but is most notable for director Roberta Grossman's dully strenuous cinematic sense." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 25, 2009
Fresh 2.5/4	Rotten 45%	Hotel for Dogs (2009)	" There isn't a malicious bone in the film's body." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 15, 2009
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 34%	Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009)	" The shot of Blart quietly crawling into a hostage situation inside the mall's bank and walking through a roped line is a moment of absurd grace, only it's shot with the vulgarity of a Crash Test Dummies commercial." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 13, 2009
Rotten 2/4	Rotten 12%	The Tiger's Tail (2006)	" The Tiger's Tail, like Cassandra's Dream, prominently features a boat that is both symbol of financial attainment and emotional ruin; it also finds a master filmmaker defying the "show, don't tell" principle with almost crippling cynicism." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 24, 2008
Rotten 1.5/4	Fresh 70%	Last Chance Harvey (2008)	" *One reacts to Joel Hopkins's Last Chance Harvey* with about the same level of revulsion directed at its titular character by the people around him.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Dec 20, 2008
Rotten	Rotten 33%	Ciao (2008)	" The film's calculatingly minimalist style is in many ways as affected as all the gay Amerindie films at which writer-director Yen Tan snottily thumbs his nose." — Village Voice Posted Dec 3, 2008
Fresh 2.5/4	Fresh 75%	Dust (2008)	" Never feels philosophically uncommitted, nor does it scan as neo-colonialist exploitation." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 2, 2008
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 94%	Milk (2008)	" Clearly Van Sant struggled to deliver something as conventional as he has, but if his visual digressions aren't exactly subversive, they affect a feeling of angst that's very much in sync with the time period depicted in the film." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 24, 2008
Rotten 2/4	Rotten 12%	Lake City (2008)	" Quaintly shot and paced, not unlike Shotgun Stories, but insanely over-written, Lake City dumps on audiences a plot that consists of 500-some-odd puzzle pieces that all come together exactly as you expect." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 16, 2008
Fresh 3/4	Fresh 68%	Were the World Mine (2008)	" The material has been playfully updated, made into a parable of gay desire and wish fulfillment, but its significance remains the same, right down to Timothy's understanding that free will must ultimately be restored." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 16, 2008
Rotten 2.5/4	Rotten 50%	The Beautiful Truth (2008)	" The end result not only constitutes an uncomfortable--dare I say, inorganic--collusion of fact and fiction but also suggests we're being indoctrinated into a cult." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 10, 2008
Rotten	Rotten 50%	Gardens of the Night (2008)	" The film never quite recovers from writer-director Damian Harris's dithering way of shooting things." — Village Voice Posted Nov 5, 2008
Rotten 2/4	Rotten 50%	Stages (2008)	" Director Mijke de Jong employs a fractured style to match the personalities of its characters, but this synchronicity isn't so much heartfelt as it is solipsistic." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 4, 2008
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 34%	Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)	" Give me torture porn any day." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 2, 2008
Rotten 1.5/4	Rotten 33%	The Guitar (2008)	" *Without its weirdo visual flourishes, The Guitar* would be completely reprehensible.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Nov 2, 2008
Rotten 2/4	Fresh 80%	The Matador (2008)	" Issues of class don't matter to the filmmakers, who pride above all else Fandila's justifications for what he does, romanticizing the possibility of his dying while giving the bulls he dances with the shaft." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 26, 2008
Rotten 1.5/4	Fresh 67%	Ben X (2008)	" Balthazar's aesthetic is ugly, aloof, maddeningly literal and unimaginative." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 19, 2008
Rotten 2/4	Fresh 80%	Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie (2008)	" *In the end, it probably doesn't matter if you think Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie* is in fact a documentary, because the film's psychoanalysis is dull and reductive.*" — Slant Magazine* Posted Oct 15, 2008

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4/4	I Am CubaOffsite
4/4	SiberiadeOffsite
4/4	Inland EmpireOffsite
4/4	The Fall of the House of UsherOffsite
4/4	Pandora's BoxOffsite
4/4	Sir Arne's TreasureOffsite
4/4	RepulsionOffsite
4/4	The Best of YouthOffsite
4/4	The New WorldOffsite
4/4	PickpocketOffsite

ED GONZALEZ

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