Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 82%
| Me and Orson Welles (2009) | "
As so often with films reverently dealing with theatre folk, the directing itself becomes exasperatingly theatrical and inert." — Guardian [UK] Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Fresh 62%
| The Girlfriend Experience (2009) | "
I don't think Soderbergh has ever missed quite as badly as this: a shallow, negligent piece of work, badly acted and casually put together." — Guardian [UK] Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 83%
| Disgrace (2009) | "
A worthwhile film which is concerned to do the right thing by a modern classic." — Guardian [UK] Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 50%
| The Descent: Part 2 (2009) | "
It's efficient, and workmanlike enough, but the spark of inspiration that won fans for the first film seems to me pretty much gone." — Guardian [UK] Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 45%
| The Box (2009) | "
This film just goes interminably on and on, like some pop video to a prog rock track from hell, padding things out to feature length with all sorts of incredible gibberish and extraneous nonsense." — Guardian [UK] Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 15%
| Mr. Right (2009) | "
A perkily performed Soho soap that somehow also manages to be mesmerically depressing." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 27, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Rotten 24%
| Law Abiding Citizen (2009) | "
It's silly and nasty at the same time: not a good combination." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 27, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 56%
| Bunny & The Bull (2009) | "
The awful truth is that the script fundamentally isn't all that great: and compared with any episode of The Mighty Boosh, say, or Peep Show, it really is pretty feeble." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 27, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 82%
| Paranormal Activity (2009) | "
This ingenious and often genuinely frightening film is a digital mocu-real nightmare." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 27, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 100%
| Ulysses (1967) | "
It's a disappointment, though watched again now for this rerelease, it doesn't seem as much of a disappointment as all that." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 76%
| The Informant! (2009) | "
Soderbergh has commissioned a relentlessly jazzy, wacky musical score from Hollywood veteran Marvin Hamlisch just so that we realise it's all supposed to be funny." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 76%
| The First Day of the Rest of Your Life () | "
Reasonable enough, but underpowered." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 81%
| Examined Life (2009) | "
Each of the half-dozen or so thinkers gets around 20 minutes to maunder on - simultaneously not long enough and far too long. Frustratingly, no subject is investigated in depth, and the glibness is dull." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Fresh 5/5
| Fresh 87%
| A Serious Man (2009) | "
Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once... The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 29%
| The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) | "
After a terrifically enjoyable start, the Twilight series is settling into a somewhat predictable groove, with its tragi-romantic motif of not having sex becoming a bit gimmicky and worn." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 19, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 97%
| Tulpan (2008) | "
An eminently lovable film." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| N/A | The Magic Hour () | "
There are interesting images and themes here, but I have to say that many ideas did not really come off and some films needed work." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 75%
| Cold Souls (2009) | "
The pedantic borrowings from Kaufman are obvious. Is there any other "–esque" to be detected? There's Allen-esque, but that comes with the Kaufman-esque territory. Maybe Huxley-esque? The anxiety of influence hangs heavily here." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 77%
| Harry Brown (2009) | "
Daniel Barber's film occupies an interesting position on a certain type of Britfilm continuum with Ken Loach at one end and Nick Love at the other." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Fresh 60%
| Paper Heart (2009) | "
A world-beatingly annoying and pointless "docu-romcom"." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 53%
| The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) | "
If we can't be sure how much is just being made up, then we have to rely on the entertainment factor, and that is marginal." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 100%
| Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno () | "
Bromberg examines this lost footage and his assemblage is perhaps more fascinating than the completed work would have been. A must-see." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Rotten 50%
| 1 Day () | "
By turns gloomy, frenzied, downbeat and violently melodramatic, Penny Woolcock's gang grime musical throbs intermittently with energy." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Rotten 44%
| Jennifer's Body (2009) | "
A genre high-school horror flick with a satirical edge." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 55%
| Disney's A Christmas Carol (2009) | "
There is a weird lack of passion here, almost condescension, a sense that Scrooge's agonised moral journey into his past is potentially pretty dull, and so Zemeckis is always livening things up by whooshing the old miser excitingly through the night sky." — Guardian [UK] Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 100%
| Tales from the Golden Age (2009) | "
The dark laughter involved is Romania's way of staying sane, not merely at the time but, also, in a way, right now. Comedy is a way of looking back at the horror without the rage and despair becoming unendurable." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 73%
| Starsuckers (2009) | "
Knocking celeb culture might be like shooting fish in a barrel, but documentary activist Chris Atkins gets a pretty loud bang." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 91%
| Love Exposure () | "
Deeply strange and politically incorrect, baffling, and often funny." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 10%
| Dead Man Running (2009) | "
It'll shift serious DVD units, and is not as bad as it could have been." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 5/5
| Fresh 100%
| Citizen Kane (1941) | "
There can hardly be anything left to say about Citizen Kane, now revived on the big screen, other than to comment on sublime moments." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 94%
| An Education (2009) | "
A sad, painful comedy, and the lovely performance from Mulligan makes it a very enjoyable film." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 88%
| An American Werewolf in London (1981) | "
Scary-funny is an acquired taste. For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Rotten 58%
| 9 (2009) | "
It allegedly lasts 79 minutes. I think it lasted 79 hours, or 79 years, or perhaps 79 times the space of time between the extinction of allosaurus and the rise of Cro-Magnon." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 60%
| Made in Jamaica (2006) | "
Unselfconsciously celebratory about a culture teeming with energy and semi-absorbed influences." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh 5/5
| Fresh 87%
| Johnny Mad Dog (2008) | "
War is brutalising, infantilising, dehumanising, requiring the unquestioning submission to authority. All soldiers are child soldiers: that is the bitterly cynical nightmare that Sauvaire's film insists upon to the very end." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Rotten 26%
| The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009) | "
This film is so crass and so lowbrow its hairline is level with the carpet underlay. And yet, and yet, I must hang my head and confess I did laugh a fair bit." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 92%
| Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) | "
Anderson's mannerisms have been irritating in the past, but pitching a film at children has restored his sweet-natured charm. This is hip – but with heart." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Rotten 42%
| Colin (2009) | "
The overall cost was clearly higher than £45, but I've seen duller and cheaper-looking films that have cost Britain's lottery players an awful lot more." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Fresh 69%
| Coffin Rock (2009) | "
Generic and workmanlike." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 37%
| Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009) | "
Tod Browning's Freaks were the real thing. These are strictly CGI and the teen-vamp pose is beginning to pall." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 81%
| Triangle (2009) | "
A rather smart, interestingly constructed scary movie from British director Christopher Smith." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 82%
| Thirst (2009) | "
Not one of Park's best films, but it has bite." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Fresh 84%
| Pontypool (2009) | "
An utterly baffling and stunningly boring zombie horror thriller." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Rotten 2/5
| Rotten 47%
| Ong Bak 2 (2009) | "
Overcooked, overproduced, and all the action is swamped with distracting camerawork and gimmicky design." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Rotten 12%
| Couples Retreat (2009) | "
A loo book written by Pol Pot would have more laughs than this chillingly unfunny, cynically prefabricated non-comedy." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 94%
| Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (2009) | "
The film is slight, but there's enough there for Meadows to create a plausible narrative arc with solid laughs along the way." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 94%
| Katalin Varga (2009) | "
A slow-moving, insistently gripping, faintly Dostoyevskian tale of violence and retribution set in the swooningly photographed Hungarian countryside." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Fresh 4/5
| Fresh 94%
| Goodbye Solo (2009) | "
An instantly gripping, funny, quietly persuasive drama that held me from the first frames." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Fresh 3/5
| Fresh 62%
| Vanishing of The Bees () | "
Langworthy and Henein sketch out the way this crisis has entered Hollywood's consciousness, in the form of M Night Shyamalan's sci-fi clunker The Happening." — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Rotten 1/5
| Rotten 18%
| Love Happens (2009) | "
How can we, as a species, tolerate Jennifer Aniston with her blurry expression of emotional bravery?" — Guardian [UK] Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
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