Fresh 89/100
| Fresh 83%
| A Single Man (2009) | "
While his influences are obvious - Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai and (maybe more advocationally than stylistically) Julian Schnabel - Ford has managed to craft a moving and beautiful movie while doing no disservice to its undernoticed source material." Posted Feb 8, 2010 |
Rotten 85/100
| Fresh 82%
| Avatar (2009) | "
...a big, dumb movie built to make money but hardly worthy of serious examination. Avatar isn't only critic-proof, it resists serious criticism. You might as well analyze a beach ball." Posted Jan 29, 2010 |
Fresh 89/100
| Fresh 91%
| The Messenger (2009) | "
...a stunningly sad and sobering movie about the inevitable personal costs of national bellicosity." Posted Jan 29, 2010 |
Rotten 83/100
| Rotten 36%
| The Lovely Bones (2009) | "
Jackson and his usual screenwriting collaborators...have simplified and amplified Sebold's text, turning it from a meditation on the interior politics of family into a supernatural revenge story." Posted Jan 16, 2010 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 81%
| Broken Embraces (2009) | "
Almodovar dives into this knotty, plotty mess the only way he can - with utter abandon and what might be best described as a kind of artful recklessness." Posted Jan 16, 2010 |
Rotten 80/100
| Fresh 83%
| Me and Orson Welles (2009) | "
Curiously inert but for the excellent (and accurately stagy) impersonation of Orson Welles by British stage actor Christian McKay ..." Posted Dec 28, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Fresh 89%
| Red Cliff (2009) | "
John Woo's best work has always been mysterious to me. He makes operas - we don't need to understand the words to sense their power." Posted Dec 28, 2009 |
Fresh 90/100
| Fresh 90%
| Up in the Air (2009) | "
Gently devastating, Up in the Air is a movie of great grace and modest aspirations that plays as dry comedy but resounds with tragic gravity." Posted Dec 28, 2009 |
Rotten 83/100
| Rotten 37%
| Nine (2009) | "
Unfortunately, the execution of actual movies never lives up to the bizarro spectacles we mount in our minds. Nine is more a derailment than an actual train wreck, more a bumpy annoyance than a compellingly bloody panoply." Posted Dec 28, 2009 |
Rotten 75/100
| Rotten 13%
| Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009) | "
A friend in Hollywood told me last summer to expect a lot of "recession" movies - movies contrived to provide all those involved with a quick paycheck - in the coming months and I'm guessing this is what he meant." Posted Dec 23, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Fresh 76%
| The Road (2009) | "
The Road... literalizes but doesn't flinch. It is brave in the dumb way brutes sometimes seem to be, as though it knows no alternative." Posted Dec 23, 2009 |
Fresh 85/100
| Rotten 49%
| Antichrist (2009) | "
... it got to me in the way that poetry or music or visual majesty can; it hammered that place beyond language and intellect, the animal id of the screaming self ... A gleaming atrocity. Bad medicine." Posted Dec 16, 2009 |
Rotten 83/100
| Fresh 77%
| Invictus (2009) | "
Like the poem from which it takes its title, it suffers not from any obvious technical flaws but from a failure of tone and perspective. It's a sermon, not a story." Posted Dec 16, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 94%
| The Damned United (2009) | "
...nothing like a conventional sports bio-pic; it's a character study of a difficult personality, a charming, enigmatic victim of self-sabotage." Posted Nov 27, 2009 |
Rotten 83/100
| Rotten 40%
| New York, I Love You (2009) | "
how well it holds your attention may depend on your degree of occupation with the titular city (which in this case, isn't really the whole of New York, but mainly the semi-private island of Manhattan)..." Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Fresh 95%
| An Education (2009) | "
...about the British preoccupation with status, about the aspirant bourgeois and the outliers who exist beyond convention, in a moveable feast of booze, sex and petty criminality." Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 78%
| Bronson (2009) | "
A stylized portrait of a criminal famous in his native Britain as perhaps the most violent man in Her Majesty's prison system, Bronson serves primarily as a showcase for Tom Hardy's undeniably brilliant performance." Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten 80/100
| Fresh 60%
| Pirate Radio (2009) | "
...an amiable mess of a period piece about an interesting time in British pop music history" Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Rotten 83/100
| Rotten 39%
| 2012 (2009) | "
...Roland Emmerich has done it again - he has delivered a movie that can pass for either a sunny atrocity or a brilliant black joke." Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 80%
| It Might Get Loud (2009) | "
...a sweet little ride, a little glimpse into the spooky stuff inside." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Fresh 89/100
| Fresh 86%
| Lorna's Silence (2009) | "
...less a character study than the apparent breaking-in of a camera crew on a sad and sordid life." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Rotten 37%
| Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009) | "
...not the pandering exploitation film you might expect. It's not all pentup sexuality, ripened teen flesh and brooding ashen untouchable boys." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Fresh 90/100
| Fresh 87%
| A Serious Man (2009) | "
...emotionally authentic and genuinely interested in the philosophical questions it raises." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 81%
| Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009) | "
...a footnote to a complex, creative life that cannot be reduced to a cautionary tale. It is a glimpse of joy, a sequin shining amidst the ashes." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Fresh 91/100
| Fresh 81%
| That Evening Sun (2009) | "
a very specific film in that it is about a particular human being in a particular place at a particular moment in time ... It is not about the struggle between good and evil, but about how hard it is to live as a decent person in the world." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Rotten 85/100
| Fresh 67%
| Paris (2009) | "
Overlong and with ambitions of grandeur, Cedric Klapisch's enjoyable Paris is an attempt at Trollopean social archaeology that's best received with a shrug and a smile." Posted Nov 7, 2009 |
Rotten 85/100
| Rotten 9%
| Opa! (2009) | "
...a moderately enjoyable movie that plays like an extended commercial for a vacation on the Greek island of Patmos." Posted Oct 18, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Rotten 32%
| The Burning Plain (2009) | "
It lacks whatever Inarritu brought ... something like a joyful playfulness to leaven the dolefulness of Arriaga's literary vision." Posted Oct 18, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 88%
| Big Fan (2009) | "
...Siegel seems more interested in exhibiting Paul as a not-so-rare species of delusional male thwartedness than granting him an interior life, but it's still a powerful and interesting bit of sociology." Posted Oct 18, 2009 |
Fresh 90/100
| Fresh 94%
| Munyurangabo (2009) | "
Compared to "Munyurangabo," admirable films like Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" or Michael Caton-Jones' "Shooting Dogs" seem like so much heavy-handed melodrama." Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Fresh 90/100
| N/A | Private Century (2009) | "
...a serious, important but above all lovely movie." Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 75%
| Cold Souls (2009) | "
doesn't quite cohere around its squishy metaphysical center, and sometimes swings erratically from meditative essay to screwball surrealism ..." Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 86%
| World's Greatest Dad (2009) | "
...bravely acted (especially by Robin Williams, who's much better in roles like these than when he's called on to be "funny") and invigoratingly dark." Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Fresh 89%
| Zombieland (2009) | "
Like life itself, "Zombieland" is "nasty, brutish and short" and extraordinarily sweet." Posted Oct 5, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Rotten 57%
| 9 (2009) | "
the plot unfortunately calls to mind an unholy recombination of Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines times the third Ice Age installment." Posted Sep 13, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 89%
| O'Horten (2009) | "
...a fable that relies less on fantastical transport than the defrosting of cool faculties; less on the titillation of the senses than the thawing of frozen hearts." Posted Sep 9, 2009 |
Rotten 78/100
| Rotten 48%
| Taking Woodstock (2009) | "
...it's hard to get past the idea of Taking Woodstock as a missed opportunity. It's fine around the edges, but it never convinces you that the central event was the cataclysmic cultural convergence some claim." Posted Sep 9, 2009 |
Fresh 90/100
| Fresh 89%
| Inglourious Basterds (2009) | "
t's so rich in cinematic value, it's difficult for me to understand how a film critic could fail to be impressed by it." Posted Sep 9, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 84%
| Soul Power (2009) | "
...if you are a fan of any of the musicians ... or maybe I should say if you're completely unfamiliar with any of the musicians mentioned - then Soul Power is well worth seeing. Or at least hearing." Posted Sep 9, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 90%
| District 9 (2009) | "
...a speculative fiction with genuine emotional resonance." Posted Aug 18, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Fresh 62%
| Adoration (2009) | "
...a complicated and not altogether successful rumination on identity, technology, terrorism and the nature of truth." Posted Aug 18, 2009 |
Rotten 76/100
| Rotten 14%
| The Ugly Truth (2009) | "
...despite some execrable dialogue, the clocklike predictability of the jokes and a total lack of faith in the audience's powers of discernment, Heigl and Butler almost pull it off." Posted Jul 26, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 85%
| Tyson (2009) | "
...if Tyson never manages to charm us, there are other times when he comes off as touchingly naive. He's uncommonly empathetic to those who might think him a monster. It seems he often sometimes thinks of himself the same way." Posted Jul 24, 2009 |
Fresh 88/100
| Fresh 64%
| The Merry Gentleman (2009) | "
...a formally minimalist film that focuses onsurface description, eschews expository dialogue and expects theaudience to collaborate in its story-making." Posted Jul 19, 2009 |
Fresh 86/100
| Fresh 96%
| Food, Inc. (2009) | "
Like a 21st-century updating of The Jungle ... Food, Inc. is infuriating and disheartening, as it introduces us to the unpleasant verities of eating and the cynical rationalizations of those who purport to feed us." Posted Jul 17, 2009 |
Rotten 77/100
| Fresh 67%
| Bruno (2009) | "
It's a shallow and silly thing that has every right to exist but no profound purpose. It is just a $40 million practical joke, and like all practical jokes, it has at its core a hard kernel of cruelty." Posted Jul 17, 2009 |
Fresh 87/100
| Rotten 54%
| Cheri (2009) | "
Frears revels in the painted silks and hothouse flowers of the era ... Friend often seems carved from alabaster... Pfeiffer is ... [t]rue to Colette's vision ... alternately steely and pliable, willing to bend yet unable to break." Posted Jul 10, 2009 |
Rotten 77/100
| Fresh 61%
| Zabriskie Point (1970) | "
...can't be regarded as any sort of success. It's a self-indulgent movie, filled with half-baked ideas and radical sloganeering." Posted Jul 4, 2009 |
Rotten 80/100
| Rotten 45%
| Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) | "
...you'll likely be underwhelmed by this kinetic film, which feels like the product of screenwriting software that has yet to become self-aware and develop a sense of shame." Posted Jul 4, 2009 |
Fresh 89/100
| Fresh 94%
| Three Kings (1999) | "
Three Kings mightn't be the best thought-out or most reassuring movie of the year, but the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that it is one of the best." Posted Jun 28, 2009 |
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