Fresh
| Rotten 50%
| It's Complicated (2009) | "
Beneath this movie's gleaming high-end surfaces beats the heart of a classic screwball comedy." — Slate Posted Dec 23, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 37%
| Nine (2009) | "
We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either?" — Slate Posted Dec 22, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 89%
| Crazy Heart (2009) | "
On first viewing, Crazy Heart seemed like a pretty good movie with one great performance. After a second time through, it's sneaking up on the title of my favorite film of the year." — Slate Posted Dec 17, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 83%
| Avatar (2009) | "
You, dear reader, want to know: Is it or is it not stupendously friggin' rad? And the answer is yes. For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin' rad." — Slate Posted Dec 17, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 76%
| Invictus (2009) | "
Freeman-as-Mandela is an actor all dressed up with no place to go -- at least, nowhere we didn't already know he was headed." — Slate Posted Dec 11, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 40%
| The Lovely Bones (2009) | "
Scene by scene, the movie alternates between prurient violence and sentimental uplift." — Slate Posted Dec 10, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 57%
| Brothers (2009) | "
After watching this movie, I had what you might call Portman Traumautic Stress Disorder, a condition that leaves you twitchy, irritable, and in need of a well-acted light comedy." — Slate Posted Dec 4, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 89%
| Up in the Air (2009) | "
Jason Reitman's third film has the lifespan of a state-fair churro: tasty at the point of consumption, it congeals soon afterward into its component ingredients of sugar and lard." — Slate Posted Dec 3, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 72%
| The Road (2009) | "
Unless you're far better at walling yourself off from identification than I am, you walk out in a state of untreated shock. Rather than thinking about the movie afterward, you wait for it to wear off." — Slate Posted Nov 25, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 85%
| Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) | "
Like the water snake that slithers by during the opening credits or the baby crocodile from whose point of view we observe one roadside scene, this movie is a freaky little swamp thing." — Slate Posted Nov 20, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 28%
| The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) | "
Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord." — Slate Posted Nov 19, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 93%
| Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) | "
You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play." — Slate Posted Nov 13, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 55%
| Disney's A Christmas Carol (2009) | "
How they made it into this Disney adaptation unprettified is a Christmas miracle in itself." — Slate Posted Nov 6, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 91%
| Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009) | "
In offering up their heroine's misery for the audience's delectation, they've created something uncomfortably close to poverty porn." — Slate Posted Nov 5, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 82%
| Paranormal Activity (2009) | "
Though it never poses a question more abstract than "Where's that scratching sound coming from?" Paranormal Activity is all about spiritual and ethical debts coming due." — Slate Posted Oct 30, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 80%
| Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009) | "
This Is It is one of the best documents of live performance that I've ever seen, a rehearsal diary that's more intimate and immediate than a traditional concert film." — Slate Posted Oct 28, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 21%
| Amelia (2009) | "
Directed by Mira Nair and executive-produced by its star Hilary Swank, the movie seems oddly preoccupied with the audience's approval for its subject." — Slate Posted Oct 23, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 50%
| Antichrist (2009) | "
After the infantile bludgeoning that is Antichrist), I feel no need to keep accompanying von Trier's career at all." — Slate Posted Oct 22, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 95%
| The Maid (2009) | "
If Luis Buñuel had joined forces with the Dogme 95 movement and moved to modern-day Santiago, Chile, he might have made a movie like The Maid." — Slate Posted Oct 16, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 73%
| Where the Wild Things Are (2009) | "
Jonze and Eggers' approach to the book is both original and well-intentioned; it's clear that they take both Sendak and childhood seriously (though not as seriously as they take themselves). It's just too bad the end result isn't a better movie." — Slate Posted Oct 15, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 94%
| Good Hair (2010) | "
The result is a pop documentary in the Morgan Spurlock mode, cheeky and smart without being too serious." — Slate Posted Oct 9, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 94%
| An Education (2009) | "
As with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile." — Slate Posted Oct 8, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 57%
| The Invention of Lying (2009) | "
Despite the ambitious scope of its premise, this confounding, disappointing and, in the end, depressing movie is content to devote 80 percent of its screen time to wondering who gets to kiss the girl." — Slate Posted Oct 2, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 87%
| A Serious Man (2009) | "
An exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute." — Slate Posted Oct 1, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 84%
| Bright Star (2009) | "
The rare film about the life of an artist that is itself a work of art." — Slate Posted Sep 25, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 75%
| Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) | "
Moore's choice to make "capitalism" his straw man (rather than, say, greed or Reagan-era deregulation) puts him in closer company than he might like with some pretty nasty world-historical bedfellows." — Slate Posted Sep 24, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 77%
| The Informant! (2009) | "
Mark's collection of bizarre behaviors doesn't add up to a character." — Slate Posted Sep 19, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 44%
| Jennifer's Body (2009) | "
Kusama and Cody's collaboration is a wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far." — Slate Posted Sep 17, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 89%
| No Impact Man (2009) | "
You may find Colin Beavan unbearably smug, but at the heart of his mission lies an inconvenient truth: Our consumable, disposable, unsustainable culture is destroying the planet, and there's no way to change that without making sacrifices." — Slate Posted Sep 17, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 57%
| 9 (2009) | "
It's easy to see why Acker's gifts caught the attention of these directors; he's a visual craftsman of no little promise. Now if he can just stitch together a story with the same loving care that went into creating those digital burlap dolls..." — Slate Posted Sep 10, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 70%
| American Casino (2009) | "
As the Cockburns interview exterminators and local police about the rats' nests and meth labs that tend to proliferate in foreclosed homes, the corruption metaphor is like something out of a Nathanael West novel." — Slate Posted Sep 10, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 63%
| Extract (2009) | "
Like Judge's first two live-action films, Extract seems destined to do minor business at the box office but achieve a kind of immortality as a cult DVD." — Slate Posted Sep 3, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 87%
| Big Fan (2009) | "
With its unremittingly bleak humor and eagerness to plumb the depths of fanboy abjection, Big Fan seems destined for a future in the cult canon." — Slate Posted Aug 28, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 49%
| Taking Woodstock (2009) | "
Even as a mind-clearing break from Lee's darker, more ambitious work, Taking Woodstock is an underachieving movie, so slight and gentle-spirited that it seems to be looking at the summer of 1969 through a scrim of rosy gauze." — Slate Posted Aug 27, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 87%
| The Baader Meinhof Complex (2009) | "
This starkly unromantic epic ultimately benefits from its 150-minute running time, immersing the audience in the RAF's journey from shared passion to collective madness as their movement runs its full, sad, bloody course." — Slate Posted Aug 21, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 88%
| Inglourious Basterds (2009) | "
Tarantino's signature nastiness and his juvenile delight in shocking the audience undercut the movie's larger purpose." — Slate Posted Aug 21, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 38%
| The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) | "
Long spans of time pass between lines of dialogue, many of which seem to have been inexpertly translated from a foreign language so that they almost make sense but not quite." — Slate Posted Aug 14, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 91%
| Ponyo (2009) | "
Ponyo has elements of both a classic fairy tale and an environmental message movie, but it shifts as nimbly between those genres as Ponyo herself does from person to goldfish and back again." — Slate Posted Aug 12, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 75%
| Julie & Julia (2009) | "
Makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph. The stakes may not be as high as the kill-or-be-killed suspense of a summer action movie, but the sauces are way tastier." — Slate Posted Aug 6, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 86%
| Lorna's Silence (2009) | "
That's as much as you should know before going into Lorna's Silence, which combines Bressonian aesthetic rigor with Hitchcockian suspense." — Slate Posted Jul 31, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 68%
| Funny People (2009) | "
Judd Apatow may be the first filmmaker to jeopardize his career through excessive niceness." — Slate Posted Jul 30, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 95%
| In the Loop (2009) | "
The first successful satire inspired by the Iraq war comes not from the country that started it, but from the sceptered isle that was our most important ally." — Slate Posted Jul 23, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 79%
| Humpday (2009) | "
Humpday may not be the single best movie I've seen so far this year -- though it's certainly a contender for the title -- but it's without doubt the most surprising." — Slate Posted Jul 17, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 86%
| 500 Days of Summer (2009) | "
If only some sharp-eyed script editor had run 500 Days through the de-sappifying machine, it could have been the first great romantic comedy of 2009." — Slate Posted Jul 16, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 83%
| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) | "
Despite the preponderance of (PG-rated) snogging, there are pleasures to be found along this movie's meandering path." — Slate Posted Jul 15, 2009 |
Rotten
| Fresh 66%
| Public Enemies (2009) | "
It's like spending an afternoon -- a long one -- at a beautifully lit wax-museum display inspired by earlier gangster movies." — Slate Posted Jul 1, 2009 |
Fresh
| Fresh 97%
| The Hurt Locker (2009) | "
By keeping its scale miniature instead of epic (there are no combat scenes in the traditional sense), The Hurt Locker keeps its audience in a constant state of tension without risking battle fatigue." — Slate Posted Jun 26, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 20%
| Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | "
The simplest thing Bay could have done to clarify the stakes of the robot wars would be to visually distinguish the robots from one another in some way. Armbands? Shirts and skins? "Hello, My Name Is" stickers?" — Slate Posted Jun 24, 2009 |
Rotten
| Rotten 47%
| Whatever Works (2009) | "
The idea of wedding Woody Allen's comic persona (the introverted nebbish) to Larry David's (the entitled jerk) sounds promising on paper, but as Boris portentously observes just before his unsuccessful suicide attempt, life doesn't take place on paper." — Slate Posted Jun 19, 2009 |
Fresh
| Rotten 15%
| Year One (2009) | "
Year One is a slapdash concoction with an overreliance on scatological gags and a long lag time between laughs. I freely admit that. Yet I have a certain affection for this movie, if only because of its conceptual simplicity." — Slate Posted Jun 19, 2009 |
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