Dana Stevens Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Dana Stevens

Dana Stevens

Agrees with the Tomatometer 75% of the time.

Publications:: New York Times , Slate
Critics' Group:: New York Film Critics Online

Total Reviews:: 572

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 572

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
	71%	Return (2012)	" Finally someone has written a really good role for Linda Cardellini -- a big, prickly, demanding role that puts her onscreen in literally every scene -- and it's a thrill to watch her operating at full throttle." — Slate Posted Feb 10, 2012
	64%	The Woman in Black (2012)	" All I know is, when I had to walk down a dark hallway at home the night I came back from seeing it? Reader, I ran." — Slate Posted Feb 2, 2012
	53%	Albert Nobbs (2012)	" A movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be." — Slate Posted Jan 30, 2012
	77%	The Grey (2012)	" For all its macho standoffs and action set pieces and menacing off-screen howling, The Grey is at heart a simple moral fable about how true heroism consists in helping other human beings to live as long and die as well as they can." — Slate Posted Jan 26, 2012
	93%	Coriolanus (2011)	" The questions Coriolanus poses are so timeless and urgent they could be pullquotes from today's op-ed page." — Slate Posted Jan 20, 2012
	80%	Haywire (2012)	" Though Carano isn't without a certain glowering charisma, her flat line readings and apparent discomfort with dialogue-heavy exchanges make her seem like a refugee from a different, schlockier movie..." — Slate Posted Jan 20, 2012
	48%	Contraband (2012)	" If you enjoy watching Mark Wahlberg do that action-movie thing he does, you could do worse than to spend your next plane ride watching Contraband." — Slate Posted Jan 12, 2012
—	98%	Taxi Driver (1976)	— Slate Posted Jan 11, 2012
	54%	The Iron Lady (2012)	" If it weren't for Streep, The Iron Lady would be unwatchable." — Slate Posted Dec 31, 2011
	99%	A Separation (2011)	" Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be." — Slate Posted Dec 31, 2011
	76%	War Horse (2011)	" Tthe images have what I can only describe as a wonderful texture. They also have intense color: deep gemlike greens and reds, with black shadows out of an old master painting." — Slate Posted Dec 31, 2011
	75%	The Adventures of Tintin (2011)	" Even if this hyperactive movie isn't your cup of tea, there's much to admire on-screen, including Spielberg's astonishing attention to visual detail and John Williams' jaunty score." — Slate Posted Dec 21, 2011
	87%	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)	" Even Fincher's elegantly gruesome style can't turn this Swedish noir into the meditation on evil and corruption that it fancies itself to be." — Slate Posted Dec 20, 2011
	71%	Carnage (2011)	" Even as you admire the film's construction, it's hard to shake the thought that a lot of talent got thrown away on the wrong project." — Slate Posted Dec 16, 2011
	80%	We Need to Talk About Kevin (2012)	" Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away." — Slate Posted Dec 9, 2011
	84%	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)	" Even Alberto Iglesias' old-school symphonic score and Hoyte Van Hoytema's chiaroscuro cinematography aren't quite enough to provide cover for Tinker Tailor's rushed incoherence." — Slate Posted Dec 8, 2011
	80%	Shame (2011)	" This sleek-looking but curiously unfocused character study never quite gets down to the business of showing us who Brandon is, but boy, does Fassbender make him into a captivating enigma." — Slate Posted Dec 1, 2011
	97%	The Artist (2011)	" This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet: A holiday release with enough formal sophistication to appeal to cinephiles and enough old-fashioned showbiz bravado to win over a general audience." — Slate Posted Dec 1, 2011
	78%	A Dangerous Method (2011)	" It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be." — Slate Posted Nov 25, 2011
	96%	The Muppets (2011)	" Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world." — Slate Posted Nov 23, 2011
	25%	Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)	" By any normal standard, this is a terrible movie, with stilted dialogue and leaden pacing -- every 15 minutes or so, the action stops for a musical montage involving slow-motion handsomeness. But the Twilight saga stopped being normal a long time ago." — Slate Posted Nov 18, 2011
	90%	The Descendants (2011)	" It's such a disappointment that The Descendants -- Alexander Payne's first film after a seven-year hiatus following Sideways -- isn't a better movie than it is." — Slate Posted Nov 17, 2011
	78%	Melancholia (2011)	" There's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget." — Slate Posted Nov 11, 2011
	44%	J. Edgar (2011)	" Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center." — Slate Posted Nov 9, 2011
	69%	A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011)	" This third movie, a proudly unambitious buddy comedy, brings the franchise back to home turf, both geographically and thematically." — Slate Posted Nov 4, 2011
	68%	Tower Heist (2011)	" The most that can be said for Tower Heist, the new action comedy from Brett Ratner, is that it's a middlingly well-done evocation of the big-budget caper you remember with vague fondness from long-ago matinees at the mall." — Slate Posted Nov 3, 2011
	37%	In Time (2011)	" A movie so consistently flat-footed, with pauses between lines of dialogue so vast, that you begin to wonder if the whole thing might be a psychological experiment of some kind." — Slate Posted Oct 28, 2011
	47%	Anonymous (2011)	" What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough. Rather than plunging merrily ahead with its fanciful counternarrative, the movie keeps stopping to actually, seriously make its case -- to posit and explain and persuade." — Slate Posted Oct 28, 2011
	88%	Margin Call (2011)	" This may be the first post-2008 feature film to dramatize the crisis itself, rather than using it as a backdrop for an outraged harangue against the banks." — Slate Posted Oct 21, 2011
—	——	Am Ende kommen Touristen (2007)	— Slate Posted Oct 21, 2011
	90%	Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)	" It's one thing for a work of art to ambiguously reveal depths of emotion and meaning; it's something else again to dangle the promise of meaning that never arrives." — Slate Posted Oct 20, 2011
	79%	The Skin I Live In (2011)	" Though the story boils over with extreme acts of passion and vengeance, Almod�var's examination of these two damaged people's troubled coexistence remains a cold (if impressively executed) formalist exercise." — Slate Posted Oct 14, 2011
	94%	Weekend (2011)	" If you've ever met someone who changed your life in the space of days, you'll relate to something in this movie." — Slate Posted Oct 7, 2011
	85%	The Ides of March (2011)	" Beware The Ides of March. This slick political thriller, the fourth directorial effort of the velvet-voiced heartthrob and aspiring auteur George Clooney, adds up to less than it appears to be at first glance, or even the first several glances. " — Slate Posted Oct 6, 2011
	24%	What's Your Number? (2011)	" For comedy connoisseurs it isn't news that Anna Faris is a largely untapped treasure. The melancholy question that lingers on the way out of the vulgar yet retrograde What's Your Number? is: Whither Anna?" — Slate Posted Sep 30, 2011
	93%	50/50 (2011)	" Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon-Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres." — Slate Posted Sep 30, 2011
	67%	Pearl Jam Twenty (2011)	" Crowe has assembled some top-drawer ephemera -- old show posters, home movies, and candid backstage footage -- but he overestimates his audience's patience for present-day talking-head interviews." — Slate Posted Sep 23, 2011
	94%	Moneyball (2011)	" It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless -- in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life." — Slate Posted Sep 22, 2011
	17%	I Don't Know How She Does It (2011)	" I Don't Know How She Does It purports to be about the difficult choices of modern motherhood, but it's too prim and cautious a movie to dip a pedicured toe into the murky waters of real choice." — Slate Posted Sep 16, 2011
	93%	Drive (2011)	" Enters the viewer like a sharp unseen blade." — Slate Posted Sep 15, 2011
	53%	Brighton Rock (2011)	" All in all, this new Brighton Rock strikes me as a minor but effective exercise in neo-noir style." — Slate Posted Aug 26, 2011
	68%	Our Idiot Brother (2011)	" I can't quite account for why the whole of Our Idiot Brother seemed to me greater than the sum of its admittedly modest parts. Maybe it's just nice to see a comedy that's about something other than "Will these guys get laid?" or "Which one will she marry?"" — Slate Posted Aug 25, 2011
	99%	The Interrupters (2011)	" The Interrupters, a documentary about an initiative to stop urban violence in Chicago, may be the most necessary film you'll see this year." — Slate Posted Aug 19, 2011
	92%	Senna (2011)	" Senna feels a touch too short to be fully realized -- but then again, so was Ayrton Senna's life." — Slate Posted Aug 18, 2011
	44%	30 Minutes or Less (2011)	" One of the great disappointments of my cinematic year so far." — Slate Posted Aug 12, 2011
	76%	The Help (2011)	" The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America." — Slate Posted Aug 11, 2011
	25%	The Change-Up (2011)	" With slight variants, this is another chapter in the epic saga of body shame, gender panic, and free-floating contempt for the human race that Hollywood comedies seem to be issuing piece by piece in serial format." — Slate Posted Aug 5, 2011
	83%	Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)	" This movie is a worthy claimant to the simian throne and the rare summer blockbuster that gets more, not less, fun as it goes along." — Slate Posted Aug 4, 2011
	91%	Tabloid (2011)	" Though the events Tabloid recounts took place in the pre-digital age, the film also functions as a kind of prehistory of modern celebrity culture and tabloid journalism." — Slate Posted Jul 28, 2011

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