ROTTEN TOMATOES: Nick Davis

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NICK DAVIS

Agrees with the Tomatometer 65% of the time.

Biography: Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University

Favorites: The Piano, Morvern Callar, Safe, When Harry Met Sally..., Persona, Pinocchio ('40), Singin' in the Rain, The Scarlet Empress, Laura, Meshes of the Afternoon, Aliens, Crash, Harlan County U.S.A., The Thin Red Line, Citizen Kane, Velvet Goldmine, Dancer in the Dark

Publications: Nick's Flick Picks

Critics' Group: Cinemarati

Total Reviews: 449
Total QuickRatings: 184

Location: Chicago, IL

LISTING OF ALL REVIEWS & ARTICLES

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

Fresh B+	Fresh 70%	La Captive (2001)	" For the high-minded, literary, and formally invested viewers who are receptive to how she works and what she worries about, the film offers a starkly insinuating exercise in the contemplation of love." Posted Jul 7, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 83%	Wonder Boys (2000)	" If Douglas and Hanson have aimed to make Grady as simultaneously weary and jazzed...as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning theme song is, they have come enticingly close, with marvelous highs along the way (not just the narcotic kind), but they haven't fully got th" Posted Jul 1, 2009
Fresh B-	Fresh 75%	Adoration (2009)	" No one else would have made a film about these people, exploring these ideas and taking these kinds of mysterious risks... but it all amounts ambiguously to being either the best of Egoyan's weaker films or the shakiest of his good ones." Posted Jun 30, 2009
Fresh B+	N/A	The Battle of Midway (1942)	" As provocative as a new (and an old) way to contemplate Ford as it is seminal as a time-capsule for martial history and for wartime image-mongering and tribute-paying in the days before television." Posted Mar 19, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 100%	Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)	" Mr. Jordan has the right kind of love for itself: it isn't self-glorifying or self-fetishizing so much as it is contagiously warm toward its characters and besotted with its tenderly ambitious script" Posted Mar 13, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 85%	The Wolf Man (1941)	" The Wolf Man's tantamount pleasures are its economy and speed, its silvery manipulations of light and shadow, and the panache with which the lighting, the story, and the rich cast navigate [its] tone." Posted Mar 10, 2009
Rotten C-	Fresh 61%	Changeling (2008)	" Writer J. Michael Straczynski and director Clint Eastwood keep abducting their own movie and flagrantly replacing it with a different one." Posted Nov 12, 2008
Rotten D+	Fresh 90%	I've Loved You So Long (2008)	" If this movie is as patient, delicate, and introspective as it pretends, what to make of all the bludgeoning, obvious tactics that keep serving to remind us of its impeccable tact?" Posted Nov 11, 2008
Fresh A	Fresh 67%	Synecdoche, New York (2008)	" *Brazen and witty and starkly serious...Synecdoche stands in relation to Kaufman's best previous screenplays in the same way that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE* stood in relation to Mulholland Drive.**" Posted Nov 11, 2008
Fresh B	Fresh 65%	Quantum of Solace (2008)	" Lively with color but dotted with chic black-on-white motifs, splashed with escapist enticements without losing its grip on James's curdled spirit, suggestive of interesting fragilities in the time-honored MI6 chain of command." Posted Oct 28, 2008
Rotten C+	Rotten 59%	Delta (2008)	" Delta, quite easy to laugh at, and deserving, at least, of impatience if not contempt, has a keen eye and a flexibility of expression as well as subtle intimations of depth that are worth sounding out." Posted Oct 26, 2008
Rotten C+	N/A	Let It Rain (2008)	" It's one of those right-down-the-middle affairs that puts its script front and center, selling punchlines and double-takes under a thin gloss of continental sophistication." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 84%	Two Lovers (2009)	" An early suicide attempt, complete with potent sound design, confers a life-and-death gravity on the picture that its story about a faltering manchild with a frustrated crush doesn't fully earn." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Fresh B+	Fresh 88%	Ballast (2008)	" A doleful movie that often has a lump in its throat, but it's also a poetic and illuminating movie that earns its attitudes and effects, including the lumps." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 74%	Genova (2008)	" [Winterbottom] can't quite decide which well-trodden path to walk, either of domestic drama or of supernatural riddle, which should have been a sign that he hasn't really committed to this project." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Fresh A-	Fresh 69%	Julia (2009)	" The film has the focused derangement of a suicide bomber...but I for one am elated to see such brazenness, such mystery, and such crazy, highwire ambition back in the movie theater." Posted Oct 19, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 60%	The Duchess (2008)	" Dibb conceived of the right, poignant atmosphere for a glimpse at rarefied 18th-century life but barely read the Cliff's Notes for whose life he was staging, or why he was doing it." Posted Oct 14, 2008
Rotten D+	Rotten 53%	Mamma Mia! (2008)	" A chintzy valentine to the world-shaking ebullience of one's own flimsily "empowered" friendships and one's most offhanded and tarted-up whims." Posted Sep 15, 2008
Rotten D	Fresh 82%	Tropic Thunder (2008)	" Tropic Thunder, full of punchlines about Milli Vanilli and Being There, stitches the tired cultural references of one generation to the utterly debased expectations of their heirs." Posted Sep 15, 2008
Fresh A	Fresh 100%	The Third Man (1949)	" *If The Third Man* is a tragedy, it isn't just the tragedy of a hobbled city, scribbled with ruins and parsed into zones of occupation that can't communicate and don't cooperate.**" Posted Sep 13, 2008
Fresh B+	Fresh 85%	Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)	" Beware of a Holy Whore is the film you would make if you spent the previous ten years on a steady diet of Godard and Warhol, with occasional afternoons cleared for Antonioni and every night reserved for hard drinking." Posted Aug 23, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 82%	Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)	" Long ago, Allen became interested in "the artist" only as a theme and rhetorical figure. The actual making of art, whether as his subject or as embodied by his own films, no longer grips him. It may actually bore him." Posted Aug 22, 2008
Fresh C+	Rotten 49%	Smart People (2008)	" Smart People aims [at] enlisting Quaid's intelligence and self-awareness without denying him the wit and the grins that keep him so likable on screen. He handles the role well, but you couldn't say he owns it or thrives with it." Posted Apr 27, 2008
Fresh B-	Fresh 67%	Turn the River (2008)	" Turn the River, sometimes like Kailey herself and sometimes not, has a laudable habit of pulling back at the right moments and proving its mettle in unexpected ways." Posted Apr 26, 2008
Fresh B	Rotten 44%	Fay Grim (2007)	" *The nicest surprise of the movie is how long and how well Fay Grim* works as a contemporary screwball comedy, a genre from which Hartley's diffuse yet severe sense of irony would seem to disbar him.**" Posted Jan 3, 2008
Fresh B	Fresh 77%	Crazy Love (2007)	" Crazy Love...sidles up to us, thrills and surprises us, seduces us with the pop flavor of its mid-century paperback aesthetic and its titillating tabloid tale. Crazy Love is chummy." Posted Nov 15, 2007
Rotten C-	Rotten 31%	Making Love (1982)	" *On its own baby-step terms, and despite its moneyed vanilla-himbo vision of gay masculinity and desire, Making Love* plays now as a bemusing anachronism but not an insulting or self-inflating one.**" Posted Nov 13, 2007
Fresh B-	N/A	The Joy of Life (2005)	" The Joy of Life offers a truncated and incomplete but a nonetheless promising start to that looming and hopefully brilliant career." Posted Nov 12, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 96%	Groundhog Day (1993)	" The movie deserves its fans, earns our respect, delivers richly on its initial promises if not always on its greater ones, and rewards multiple viewings, even as it carries a built-in joke about the typical shelf-life of repeated experience." Posted Nov 12, 2007
Fresh B+	Fresh 100%	The Search (1948)	" Both a well-modulated immersion in the experience of stunned and stranded children and a time-capsule of the scarred land and crumbled cityscapes of Germany after the war." Posted Oct 18, 2007
Rotten D+	Rotten 34%	Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)	" Elizabeth: Full Throttle. Elizabeth: The Heretic. Elizabeth: Book of Shadows. Despite all the peacock kerfluffery Kapur can conjure, this remains an inscrutable film, in intent as well as execution." Posted Oct 16, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 90%	Michael Clayton (2007)	" The multiplex needs more movies where life, work, morality, and debt comprise the constellation of adult experience, unimpinged upon by concessions to youth audiences and unameliorated by any whiff of romance." Posted Oct 16, 2007
Rotten C	Fresh 73%	Stuck (2007)	" Assumes the stance of a transfixed but inarticulate bystander to its own premise, rather than using that premise as an aperture into revelation of character, accumulation of suspense, or persuasive ethical reflection." Posted Oct 13, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 72%	Mister Foe (2008)	" Hallam Foe cannot be accused of concealing its investment in the dramatic heightening of sensation, the privileging of psychic logic and hormonal pulls over safer and more quotidian forms of "realistic" storytelling." Posted Oct 10, 2007
Fresh B-	Fresh 87%	Control (2007)	" Parades so many smart, savvy strategies for avoiding the typical music-bio pablum that it's particularly dispiriting when the middle and end of the film so dully and incorrigibly embrace those very clichés." Posted Oct 8, 2007
Rotten C-	Fresh 67%	The Darjeeling Limited (2007)	" The evidence of talent persists in Anderson's work, but the prognosis of terminal solipsism and emotional dilettantism draws ever fuller support." Posted Oct 8, 2007
Fresh B+	Fresh 71%	Lust, Caution (2007)	" Lust, Caution spins a satisfying and surprising yarn, and the formal and visual motifs are more ambitious and ambiguous here [...]than anything in Brokeback." Posted Oct 8, 2007
Rotten C+	N/A	The Good Fairy (1935)	" This strange, uncertain film doesn't augur or embody Wyler's subsequent trademarks so much as it calls them into relief through their very absence." Posted Sep 25, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 89%	Zodiac (2007)	" I'm impressed with Fincher's delicate formal and tonal control in Zodiac's best passages...but sometimes this restraint feels like a gag in the movie's throat, or a damper on its affective potential." Posted Sep 15, 2007
Fresh A-	Fresh 83%	Donnie Darko (2001)	" The film...asks the question: what if the universe as we live it, not just as we theorize it, really isn't as we imagine it? In making the mundane as bottomless as the cosmic, Donnie Darko has the guts to remain a riddle itself." Posted Aug 4, 2007
Fresh B-	Fresh 75%	The Devil Wears Prada (2006)	" An ideal movie for DVD: you can pick and choose moments and lines to revisit while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the thematic compromises, hectoring impulses, and structural handicaps that start to engulf the film." Posted Aug 4, 2007
Rotten C-	Fresh 69%	Freedom Writers (2007)	" Ironically, the film features almost zero teaching. Despite much pedagogical posturing, it doesn't teach us much, either." Posted Aug 4, 2007
Rotten D	Rotten 55%	Vacancy (2007)	" *Trite and opportunistic in its feints at intellectual weight... Best, in fact, to mine from the crumbly ore of Vacancy* a drinking game plated in gold.**" Posted May 2, 2007
Rotten C	Fresh 69%	Year of the Dog (2007)	" The film is simply too inconsistent in its writing and inadequate in its playing to click with an audience, or even to click with itself." Posted Apr 30, 2007
Fresh A-	Fresh 100%	Chang - A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)	" Beautiful and engaging, if factually dubious... Built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience." Posted Mar 23, 2007
Rotten F	Rotten 56%	Alpha Dog (2007)	" *As it happens, not all dogs to to heaven. Some go straight to hell, and Alpha Dog* gets there faster and stays there longer than most.**" Posted Mar 4, 2007
Rotten C	Fresh 93%	The Lives of Others (2006)	" The formal mechanisms are so obvious and impersonal that they flatten our modes of thinking and feeling almost as much as the propaganda films that a regime like East Germany's would have approved." Posted Mar 4, 2007
Fresh B-	Fresh 84%	Breach (2007)	" Breach builds toward a few crucial moments where we get inside the mind of a turncoat long enough to sense his arrogance as well as his acrid despair." Posted Mar 3, 2007
Fresh B+	Fresh 65%	Black Snake Moan (2007)	" Black Snake Moan finally, is a comedy of faith and faithlessness, in their religious and also their sexual dimensions...A consummate act of jerking our collective chain, and making us love it." Posted Mar 3, 2007
Rotten F	Fresh 64%	Apocalypto (2006)	" A web of death-drives, false devotions, lofty pretenses, auto-plagiarisms, sound but inarticulate craftsmanship, and lowest-common-denominator provisions of trauma as entertainment." Posted Dec 5, 2006

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NICK DAVIS

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