Rotten
| Fresh 65%
| Adam (2009) | "
I'm sorry to report that beyond that educational element and the delicate performances of Dancy and Byrne, I found Adam dramatically limp, predictable and in a curious way even retrograde." — Salon.com Posted Jul 30, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 31%
| Deadgirl (2008) | "
Much of the allegorical force Harel and Sarmiento's film has built up is undone by its utterly conventional, lameass-switcheroo ending, which may be an indication that more than enough virtual ink has been spilled on this subject." — Salon.com Posted Jul 22, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 52%
| The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) | "
Helgeland's story is so formulaic and the characters so stock that we're just sitting there waiting for these guys to perform like circus animals." — Salon.com Posted Jun 12, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 25%
| Friday the 13th (2009) | "
This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over." — Salon.com Posted Feb 12, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 14%
| The Informers (2009) | "
People sometimes had ordinary, reasonably polite conversations, even in the '80s. Not absolutely all the talking was affectless mumbling, angry recriminations, drug deals or TV news about Ronald Reagan." — Salon.com Posted Jan 23, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 21%
| The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) | "
If this is the best the human race can do, forget it." — Salon.com Posted Dec 11, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 45%
| Antarctica (2008) | "
Ambition and a roomful of good-looking guys isn't quite enough." — Salon.com Posted Dec 3, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 87%
| Lola Montes (1955) | "
In some odd way, the huge production scale and marvelous widescreen color scheme make Lola Montès seem more distant and artificial than Ophüls’ smaller-scale black-and-white films." — Salon.com Posted Oct 10, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 70%
| Religulous (2008) | "
[Maher's] scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one." — Salon.com Posted Oct 3, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 47%
| Towelhead (2008) | "
This third-act redemption raises Towelhead several notches, but it still ends up feeling like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball's television work." — Salon.com Posted Sep 12, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 82%
| Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) | "
It's literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors." — Salon.com Posted Aug 15, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 74%
| Elegy (2008) | "
It's beautiful, but nobody involved was ever sure what the movie was actually about, or why they were making it." — Salon.com Posted Aug 8, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 43%
| What We Do Is Secret (2008) | "
With all his devotion to getting the story right -- and that's a worthy goal, don't get me wrong -- Grossman never captures the insanity and terror, or for that matter the seductive allure, of nihilist L.A. punk in its early years." — Salon.com Posted Aug 5, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 50%
| Stealing America: Vote By Vote (2008) | "
A clumsy if well-intentioned work of recycled propaganda, a mixture of hard evidence, random anecdote and far-flung inference that may convince some viewers that a clear verdict can be rendered on that impossibly murky event." — Salon.com Posted Aug 1, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 77%
| Chevolution (2008) | "
The Cannes Che, probably a film no one will see again, is a big, sprawling, ambitious mess. It's less a grand-opera mess than a beautifully constructed machine whose parts don't all quite work together." — Salon.com Posted May 22, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 41%
| Blindness (2008) | "
Earnest and dreary." — Salon.com Posted May 15, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 48%
| Before the Rains (2008) | "
So pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen." — Salon.com Posted May 9, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 37%
| Dark Matter (2008) | "
It's an inelegant experiment that captures many intriguing moments as they pass, but ends up utterly baffled by the question of how its delightful central character becomes a tabloid-ready monster." — Salon.com Posted Apr 10, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 71%
| The Hammer (2008) | "
If you liked Rocky Balboa you should be in good shape, since it's exactly the same movie, just aimed at a teeny-tiny-bit younger demographic and with an affectless leading man who avoids hambone acting by not acting at all." — Salon.com Posted Mar 19, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 80%
| The Business Of Being Born (2008) | "
No one, male or female, pregnant or childless, who sees The Business of Being Born will ever see the hospital maternity ward as a normal environment again." — Salon.com Posted Jan 10, 2008 |
Rotten
| Rotten 39%
| The Grand (2008) | "
As my idol Joe Bob Briggs used to say, that's an awful lot of plot getting in the way of the story." — Salon.com Posted Jan 7, 2008 |
Rotten
| Fresh 66%
| The Kite Runner (2007) | "
Maudlin, implausible and dull." — Salon.com Posted Dec 13, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 65%
| The Weeping Meadow (2004) | "
The Weeping Meadow doesn't offer quite enough sugar for its harsh medicine to go down easily." — Salon.com Posted Nov 15, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 58%
| Lynch (One) (2007) | "
Lynch offers a fascinating view of Lynch's irascible personality." — Salon.com Posted Oct 25, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 23%
| Slipstream (2007) | "
I'm glad that Hopkins has apparently been using the bland, middlebrow stage of his acting career to experiment with massive doses of psychotropic chemicals and open the doors of perception and all that. Next time, maybe he'll just write a manifesto." — Salon.com Posted Oct 25, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 88%
| Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) | "
What you see in it says more about you than it says about Lumet and his straightforward, throwback-style entertainment, which is richly played and dazzlingly blinged up with sex and drugs, but virtually devoid of human insight or narrative ambition." — Salon.com Posted Oct 25, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 82%
| Black White + Gray: A Portrait Of Sam Wagstaff And Robert Mapplethorpe (2007) | "
Black White & Gray raises provocative questions but can't answer them, or even frame them with total clarity." — Salon.com Posted Oct 18, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 36%
| Sleuth (2007) | "
It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to. That goes some distance toward concealing that Sleuth is a horrible mismatch of writer and material." — Salon.com Posted Oct 11, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 56%
| The Bubble (2007) | "
Fox does better in his serious dramatic mode than he does with light comedy, at least to my taste." — Salon.com Posted Sep 6, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 10%
| The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) | "
So far, so good, right? Not really." — Salon.com Posted Sep 6, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 67%
| The Nines (2007) | "
The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb." — Salon.com Posted Aug 29, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 29%
| Goya's Ghosts (2007) | "
Goya's Ghosts...has no clear purpose, no clear message and no clear central character. Like most costume dramas these days, it dwells on the gore, filth and violence of the past -- but toward what end is never apparent." — Salon.com Posted Jul 19, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 57%
| Interview (2007) | "
This veneer of pseudo-adult psychological realism doesn't stop the film from being trashy, awkward and implausible, something like a stage play that might have seemed challenging in 1976." — Salon.com Posted Jul 11, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 27%
| Evening (2007) | "
In its pursuit of superior craftsmanship and high-minded lyricism, Evening constantly risks sliding down the slippery slope into inept sentimentality and self-caricature." — Salon.com Posted Jun 27, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 65%
| Broken English (2007) | "
Despite its schizophrenic nature and often disagreeable characteristics, Broken English has flashes of something. You might say it has an integrity of purpose, if not of execution." — Salon.com Posted Jun 21, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 69%
| Ocean's Thirteen (2007) | "
It's watchable, colorful and intermittently funny, but given the level of talent on display, it's reasonable to want more than that." — Salon.com Posted Jun 2, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 76%
| Paranoid Park (2008) | "
Van Sant wants his brief, deadpan, underpopulated scenes to feel more like real teen existence than the clichés of mainstream cinema. It's a worthy goal, but I'm afraid the actual effect is the opposite." — Salon.com Posted May 24, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 55%
| Vacancy (2007) | "
A near-toxic mismatch of script, cast and director." — Salon.com Posted Apr 19, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 83%
| Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2007) | "
An intriguing, and profoundly frustrating, view of the New York underground hero." — Salon.com Posted Apr 11, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 67%
| Whole New Thing (2007) | "
After a precisely crafted first hour with nary a detail out of place, Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack." — Salon.com Posted Apr 4, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 64%
| The TV Set (2007) | "
Kasdan should have the expertise to write a backstage exposé of the TV industry. This one simply isn't funny." — Salon.com Posted Apr 4, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 51%
| Color Me Kubrick (2007) | "
A mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film." — Salon.com Posted Mar 22, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 52%
| Manufacturing Dissent (2007) | "
Something of a missed opportunity. Somebody really needs to delve deep into the symbolic value, and very real limitations, of the left's class clown and über-celebrity." — Salon.com Posted Mar 13, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 83%
| Beyond the Gates (2007) | "
I think Beyond the Gates is an important film, and it's too bad that it's not a very good one." — Salon.com Posted Mar 7, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 73%
| The Decomposition of the Soul (2007) | "
Too slow and morbid for American viewers without an existing interest in the subject." — Salon.com Posted Feb 8, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 50%
| Puccini for Beginners (2007) | "
Rarely have I seen a film simultaneously so good and so bad." — Salon.com Posted Feb 1, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 60%
| Grace is Gone (2007) | "
All three [principal characters] sometimes just disappear into the affectless, low-energy drift of Grace Is Gone. They stare at carpets, curl up on motel room beds, sit on sidewalks, gaze at the featureless American landscape." — Salon.com Posted Jan 25, 2007 |
Rotten
| Rotten 16%
| Hounddog (2008) | "
Seriously, I'm astonished that anybody would try to pass this movie off as artistically or socially meaningful in 2007." — Salon.com Posted Jan 25, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 82%
| Teeth (2008) | "
After Dawn comes to understand her remarkable genital gift, it's pretty much one can-you-top-this gross-out scene after another." — Salon.com Posted Jan 24, 2007 |
Rotten
| Fresh 69%
| The Secret Life of Words (2006) | "
A tantalizing and beautiful picture made with tremendous integrity, and anchored by two marvelous performances, Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words still, somehow, doesn't quite work." — Salon.com Posted Dec 14, 2006 |
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