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Leo Goldsmith

Agrees with the Tomatometer 82% of the time.

Publications:: indieWIRE , Not Coming to a Theater Near You , Reverse Shot , Village Voice
Critics' Group:: Online Film Critics Society

Total Reviews:: 285
Total QuickRatings:: 23

Worst Reviewed Films

Showing 1 - 50 of 228

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
0/5	0%	Dream a Little Dream (1989)	" Total crap." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 14, 2004
0/5	24%	The Punisher (1989)	— Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 14, 2004
1/5	44%	Batman Forever (1995)	— Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 14, 2004
	48%	The Ruins (2008)	" So bereft of creativity that it fails even to deliver to its base--teenage boys--the ghouls and boobs they so desperately want to see." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	91%	Hairspray (2007)	" Shankman's crassly theatrical attenuation of Hairspray only draws gay culture away from a moment of American history with which it ought to have a great deal in common" — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	51%	The Kingdom (2007)	" A good deal more Transformers than Syriana, a movie that drapes a crisp, lightly browsed copy of The Economist over an enormous pubescent boner for grinding metal, busted glass, and crackling gunfire." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	0%	Tiro en la cabeza (Bullet in the Head) (2008)	" A painfully old-fashioned trick, a game played many times before, by far more thoughtful filmmakers with greater commands of and ideas about their medium." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	17%	Sleepwalking (2008)	" Each bend in the road positively screeches with the urgency of impending catharsis, but the film never earns its resolution." — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	39%	Dark Matter (2008)	" Begins with a shot of Meryl Streep practicing tai chi, and therein lies a precise encapsulation of the film's attitude toward the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	24%	The Life Before Her Eyes (2007)	" A hopelessly overblown melodrama, which oversteps its mark with pretensions of narrative complexity and social currency" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	57%	Quid Pro Quo (2008)	" In fact, "Quid Pro Quo" is not at all funny, merely occasionally sarcastic, its plot a succession of half-baked pop-psych speculations and its dialogue a glib sampling of sub-Diablo Cody incredibility" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	63%	Sixty Six (2006)	" Cleaves too closely to the pattern set out by more original films with similar subject matter. Its obvious distinctions of time and place come through in clever details, but these don't seem to serve Weiland's autobiography so much as situate it into a fa" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	56%	Sukiyaki Western Django (2008)	" Ultimately not quite as clever as it thinks it is. Even the action sequences are more about Foley than choreography, and so the film largely rests on the oddity of its mix of styles and its parade of genre in-jokes" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	54%	Battle in Seattle (2008)	" Approaching its subject with a neat idealism and packaging its political fervor in the most facile of forms, the film boasts a cast loaded with Hollywoods both new and old and wraps its message up with eye-rolling naivete." — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	34%	Good (2008)	" Bears a superficial resemblance to "The Conformist" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," with their sense of dreary complacency, oppressively museum-like spaces, and curiously drab natural settings, but ultimately "Good" is less evocative" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	52%	Yonkers Joe (2009)	" Mostly strong, that is, with the major exception of Tom Guiry's portrayal of Joe Jr. Painfully broad, Guiry practically sinks the film with garishly slack-jawed and over-the-top manchildishness." — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	18%	Reunion (2009)	" It's a wonder a group of experienced film professionals could not make "Reunion" look and sound the least bit proficient or even entertaining" — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	65%	Is Anybody There? (2009)	" The talent and craftsmanship of "Is Anybody There?" is ample, but it remains uncertain whether there's anybody here still interested in this all-too-familiar story." — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	72%	The Great Buck Howard (2009)	" Malkovich's titular mentalist is the primary focus of attention%u2014and sadly the source of many of the film's unique problems. In a career of strange performances, Malkovich turns in a true curiosity here%u2014and maybe it's because he is not, for once," — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009
	74%	Cold Souls (2009)	" Giamatti's usual character%u2014at least, the one that Cold Souls wishes to exploit%u2014is paper-thin, working better on the periphery than in the center of the narrative." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	67%	Belle Toujours (2007)	" Ultimately offers little expansion on the original story, little insight into the nature of sadism and masochism in film or in life, and almost no complement to Bunuel's film" — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Oct 30, 2006
	——	Rubber Johnny (2005)	" Ultimately, the film serves the function of a music video for Aphex Twin, and not one that breaks any new ground." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Aug 7, 2006
	29%	Fun With Dick and Jane (2005)	" The film proposes Carrey as an Everyman for the 21st century. But if you don't sympathize with the film's variations on the American Dream, that's a frightening thought." — Reverse Shot Posted Apr 25, 2006
	86%	The Fallen (2004)	" While the scope is ambitious and the tone refreshingly light on moralism, few of the innumerable characters and subplots elicit much sympathy." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Mar 7, 2006
	75%	Gabrielle (2005)	" In spite of some effective work by the lead actors and some blind stabs at stylistic ingenuity, Gabrielle proves itself to be a rather old-fashioned infidelity story." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Oct 18, 2005
	91%	Professione: reporter (The Passenger) (1975)	" This is an art film - and an Antonioni film at that - so what sounds like a thriller pregnant with romance and political intrigue is rather what we Americans call "ambiguous."" — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Oct 18, 2005
	83%	Keane (2005)	" The horribly overused device of the handheld camera makes Keane not simply grating and heavy-handed, but also nauseating." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Jun 21, 2005
	86%	Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior) (The Double) (1980)	" Here, as in all of Kurosawa's late films, this sense of hopeless fixity renders unconvincing any hope for human agency." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 29, 2005
	39%	A View to a Kill (1985)	" Moore's tryst with Grace Jones is, on the one hand, a well-intentioned attempt to tear down the Bond-girl color barrier, and, on the other, a rather disturbing image." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Mar 22, 2005
3/5	46%	Dragnet (1998)	" Strident pop-culture revisionism." — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Jun 22, 2004
3/5	59%	Happy Gilmore (1996)	— Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 14, 2004
3/5	15%	Summer Rental (1985)	— Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Apr 14, 2004
	100%	Rancho Notorious (1952)	" There is a distinct hokeyness about Lang's vision of the West--pancake-flat sets in a generic studio-backlot Western town; giant, abstract crab-colored boulders made out of papier-mache, brazenly unnaturalistic stage-lighting--but it's the ardent phoneyne" — Not Coming to a Theater Near You Posted Aug 8, 2009
	79%	Chasing a Dream (Miles from Nowhere) (2009)	" A grand gesture, an exercise in epic biography that explodes the intimate details of Isaiah's life and its effects on his family onto the screen." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	80%	Akasen chitai (Street of Shame) (1956)	" The film's cinematography utilizes an unusual technique for a Mizoguchi film, the close-up, whereby the camera gets steadily closer to each protagonist as the various causes of their downfall to prostitution are revealed." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	73%	Tokyo! (2008)	" Sandwiched between Gondry and Bong's variously euphoric entries, Carax's contribution seems either a work of deep cynicism from an inveterate party-pooper or a welcome satirical sour note from one of the great talents of 80s and 90s French cinema." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	70%	Stuff and Dough (Marfa si banii) (2008)	" Ultimately, like Lazarescu, Ovidiu becomes a mere cog in a social and economic system that would chew him up without a moment's consideration, and it's Puiu's goal to elevate this and other such stories above their banality and into the realm of myth." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	93%	Bigger Than Life (1956) (1956)	" Always a shrewd melodramatist, with a particular eye for the domestic space, Ray builds this sense of conflict into the Avery home itself, with its frequently competing horizontal and vertical patterns." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	——	Dongdong de jiaqi (A Summer at Grandpa's) (1984)	" Hou's film places demands on our powers of observation, insisting that we, like Tung-tung, attend to the minutiae, ironies, and deeper meanings it offers us." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	97%	Hairspray (1988)	" The shock Waters's cinema offers, then, is not transcendent, but almost reflexive, implicating the viewer in the awkward complexities of his own humanity and forcing him to either celebrate it or run screaming away." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	78%	Lou Reed's Berlin (2008)	" Schnabel's set design, onstage projections, and postproduction add a good deal of visual noise to Reed & company's aural variety, which reproduces the album with a mixture of professional exactitude and unpredictable cacophony." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	93%	This Is England (2007)	" It is the war within him--and by extension, within the minds of many embittered, working class young men left behind in Thatcher's England--that Meadows's film most strikingly portrays." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	96%	Somers Town (2009)	" As in all of Meadows's films, Somers Town emphasizes the importance of character and particularly of camaraderie amongst male characters--here, teenagers who nick clothes from the local laundry, get drunk in the park, and furtively investigate masculinity" — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	——	Shuga (Chouga) (2007)	" Ramps down Tolstoy's soap-opera grandiosity, while still managing to elevate the banalities of a high-society dalliance to the level of a cosmic psychodrama" — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	20%	Obsessed (2009)	" "I knew it would come to this," hisses Sharon when finding Lisa lurking around her beautiful Brentwood home--at which point I exclaimed, "Me too!"--and then the fun (and, for many, the entire purpose of the film) starts." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	96%	Tulpan (2009)	" With this harsh and beautiful backdrop so attentively rendered, at once otherworldly and palpable, the desires of Tulpan's characters become almost metaphysical imperatives." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	75%	The Killing of Sister George (1968)	" Melodrama, slapstick, romance, exploitation, and psychological horror all vie for dominance throughout the film, giving it an air of fickle, feminine hysteria, which the graphic sex scene at the end of the film makes still more difficult to pin down." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	83%	Mang Shan (Blind Mountain) (2007)	" With its complex (and, at times, deeply problematic) intersection of an educated outsider with the stubborn realities of rural life, Blind Mountain explicitly harkens back to those classic works from the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, like Yellow" — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	80%	Gran Torino (2009)	" Though Eastwood is not above self-deprecation and, here, downright silliness, Gran Torino is no orangutan movie." — Reverse Shot Posted Aug 8, 2009
	91%	Shotgun Stories (2007)	" There is much to "Shotgun Stories" that elevates it above the fray of Green derivatives and unflattering categorizations, bolstered by a roster of naturalistic, fully assimilated performances, led by "Bug"'s now ubiquitous Michael Shannon." — indieWIRE Posted Aug 8, 2009

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