Andrew Schenker Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Andrew Schenker

Andrew Schenker

Agrees with the Tomatometer 63% of the time.

Publications:: House Next Door , Slant Magazine , Time Out New York , Village Voice
Critics' Group:: Online Film Critics Society

Total Reviews:: 595

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Showing 51 - 100 of 595

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
1.5/4	65%	Barrymore (2012)	" Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 11, 2012
2.5/4	64%	Anna Karenina (2012)	" The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 8, 2012
	100%	Burn (2012)	" Burn captures the danger (and, yes, excitement) of putting out blazes, as well as the futility of dousing flames in a city rife with arson-and the struggles to maintain adequate funding in a wrecked economy that hits the public sector hardest." — Village Voice Posted Nov 7, 2012
2/4	89%	A Royal Affair (2012)	" The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 3, 2012
	——	The Understudy (2012)	" Seems at times to aspire to being an edgy look at the transgressions a would-be Broadway star will commit to land the big role. Other times, it seems unsure of what it wants to be at all." — Village Voice Posted Nov 1, 2012
2/5	31%	A Man's Story (2012)	" Bonicos's documentary on fashion icon Ozwald Boateng nonetheless evinces a minimal amount of interest in digging into what makes its subject tick." — Time Out New York Posted Oct 31, 2012
3.5/4	50%	Vamps (2012)	" A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 28, 2012
1/4	45%	The Details (2012)	" The Details is as smug and self-satisfied as its privileged lead character. " — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 28, 2012
	67%	Long Shot The Kevin Laue Story (2012)	" [Pounds] home its points via a seemingly endless series of sound bites that forms the chief content of the first half." — Village Voice Posted Oct 23, 2012
2.5/4	25%	Dinotasia (2012)	" This decision to avoid treating the dinosaurs as surrogate people for easy identification is both the film's boldest move and the source of much of its problems. " — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 21, 2012
2/5	84%	The Flat (2012)	" There's only so deep Goldfinger can dig. After a while, he's left unearthing nothing but fitfully fascinating speculation." — Time Out New York Posted Oct 16, 2012
2/4	65%	All Together (2012)	" The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 14, 2012
2/4	96%	Argo (2012)	" Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 11, 2012
	13%	Hotel Noir (2012)	" Gutierrez bathes in moodiness while remaining unconcerned with anything so pedestrian as dramatic cohesion." — Village Voice Posted Oct 9, 2012
3/4	79%	Ginger & Rosa (2013)	" Sally Potter packs so much detail and thematic heft into 90-minute films that, given her elliptical and often unemphatic presentation, feel tantalizing but never overstuffed." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 9, 2012
2.5/4	94%	Our Children ()	" With Our Children, Joachim Lafosse seems hellbent on avoiding any hint of sensationalism." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 6, 2012
3/4	——	Fill the Void (2013)	" The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 3, 2012
3/4	93%	The House I Live In (2012)	" A powerful indictment of a program that has decimated communities, cost taxpayers roughly a trillion dollars, and hasn't reduced the amount of drugs being consumed one iota." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 29, 2012
3/4	81%	Pitch Perfect (2012)	" Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 25, 2012
2.5/4	79%	You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (2013)	" The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 23, 2012
2/4	60%	Camille Redouble ()	" It's all a pleasant enough idyll, or maybe even a dream, but as an exercise in philosophically-grounded whimsy, Camille's time travels fall short. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 18, 2012
2/4	67%	Hellbound? (2012)	" Fitfully engaging, but the doc turns into a touchy-feely isn't-it-wonderful-we're-all-saved love fest as soon as the universalists begin to dominate the interview segments." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 16, 2012
3/4	88%	Tears of Gaza (2012)	" There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 16, 2012
2/5	43%	To Rome with Love (2012)	" The film's litany of bad ideas overshadows any of its thematic concerns." — Little White Lies Posted Sep 13, 2012
2/5	68%	Step Up To The Plate (2012)	" Step Up to the Plate doesn't skimp on the food-porn goods, but the dynamic between its two stoical subjects is too undercooked to truly resonate." — Time Out New York Posted Sep 11, 2012
3/5	88%	The Other Dream Team (2012)	" Draws on archival footage and firsthand accounts from both players and outside observers to reveal the complex interaction of politics and athletics that colored the Euro-on-Euro competition." — Time Out New York Posted Sep 11, 2012
2/5	33%	Snowman's Land (2012)	" The tone here is unhurried and the bursts of violence and narrative played at an aesthetic remove, but the cycles of languor and activity ultimately feel too calculated-the strained overlay of sensationalism onto a desiccated canvas." — Time Out New York Posted Sep 11, 2012
	69%	Liberal Arts (2012)	" Despite the possible creepiness of the scenario, Radnor plays the scenes between himself and Olsen with restrained intelligence, understanding the ways both characters project their uncertainties and desires onto each other." — Village Voice Posted Sep 11, 2012
3/4	73%	Hello I Must Be Going (2012)	" Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 5, 2012
	38%	[REC] 3 Genesis (2012)	" Giddy shots of the undead slogging through a decimated party-scape materialize the decadence and instability of upper-crust family life, even as groom and (pregnant) bride prepare to give birth to another generation of the Spanish elite." — Village Voice Posted Sep 4, 2012
	73%	Hello I Must Be Going (2012)	" Todd Louiso's Hello I Must Be Going affirms Lynskey as a lead mostly by letting us marvel at the depth she brings ..." — Village Voice Posted Sep 4, 2012
	22%	Serving Up Richard (2012)	" Glory's inconsistent characterization defeats rather than builds tension, and the tepid soon gives way to the ridiculous ..." — Village Voice Posted Sep 4, 2012
3/4	70%	The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2012)	" Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 28, 2012
1.5/4	56%	For a Good Time, Call... (2012)	" While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 26, 2012
1/5	51%	The Three Stooges (2012)	" The quicker it's forgotten, the better." — Little White Lies Posted Aug 23, 2012
3/4	76%	Premium Rush (2012)	" Rarely has a movie been so well served by its superficiality; Premium Rush proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 23, 2012
	33%	Death by China (2012)	" The bulk of the film contains as much hysterical rhetoric as sober analysis." — Village Voice Posted Aug 14, 2012
1.5/4	25%	Why Stop Now (2012)	" Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 13, 2012
.5/4	89%	Compliance (2012)	" It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it. " — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 12, 2012
1/5	18%	$upercapitalist (2012)	" Lensed with a tiresome gloss meant to mimic the seduction of the Asian metropolitan high life and filled with clumsily didactic talking points and inadequate performances ..." — Time Out New York Posted Aug 7, 2012
	62%	It Is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl (2012)	" The film doesn't exactly sizzle, but it does manage to provide a straightforward (if perspective-challenged) biographical sketch of a major historical figure." — Village Voice Posted Aug 7, 2012
3/4	——	Drought (2012)	" Everado González isn't above capturing some striking landscape shots, seemingly for the shear desolate prettiness of it, but they always double as a reminder of the very real plight facing the subjects. " — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 6, 2012
2/4	50%	Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (2012)	" A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 2, 2012
2.5/4	67%	Dreams of a Life (2012)	" Dreams of a Life succeeds in making its point about the unkowability of the people in our lives, but there isn't quite enough substance here to fully sustain the film." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 29, 2012
1/4	8%	The Babymakers (2012)	" A safe, laugh-free exercise that gets to have its fun, such as it is, because it's all in the service of the most conservative notions of domestic normality." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 29, 2012
1.5/4	16%	The Watch (2012)	" What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 26, 2012
5/5	100%	Red Desert (1964)	" Red Desert is Antonioni's clearest, most striking statement of purpose - and one of cinema's great films." — Little White Lies Posted Jul 26, 2012
2/5	75%	Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (2012)	" An occasionally fascinating, if ultimately reductive, showdown between First Amendment rights and corporate power." — Time Out New York Posted Jul 24, 2012
3/4	97%	Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012)	" The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 22, 2012
2.5/4	94%	Wagner's Dream (2012)	" The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 16, 2012
	——	Ponies (2012)	" Ponies can claim the not negligible achievement of bringing one of the more irritatingly objectionable characters in recent cinema to the screen." — Village Voice Posted Jul 11, 2012
2/5	52%	Grassroots (2012)	" This is one film as misguided as the business-as-usual subject it aims to critique." — Time Out New York Posted Jul 10, 2012
2/4	63%	Union Square (2012)	" Nancy Savoca's film begins in caricature and ends in sentimentality, only briefly hitting the sweet spot in between." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 8, 2012
	55%	Starry Starry Night (2012)	" [Lin] can't make up for the fact that the film wants to say more about the fragility of childhood than it's capable of communicating through its characters and their delicate, perpetually uncertain situations." — Village Voice Posted Jul 5, 2012
1/4	76%	The Do-Deca-Pentathlon (2012)	" In Jay and Mark Duplass's film, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued. " — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 1, 2012
.5/4	28%	Crazy Eyes (2012)	" While the male characters are certainly not presented as models of enlightened behavior, their antics and crises are indulged in a manner not extended to their female counterparts." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 1, 2012
.5/4	56%	People Like Us (2012)	" This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 24, 2012
—	——	Ordinary Miracles (1998)	— Village Voice Posted Jun 20, 2012
	83%	Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York (2012)	" Ordinary Miracles offers a breezy and informative overview of the legendary photographic collective known as the Photo League." — Village Voice Posted Jun 19, 2012
1.5/4	55%	Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)	" A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 18, 2012
1.5/4	53%	Patang (2012)	" Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 9, 2012
2/4	29%	Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding (2012)	" What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 4, 2012
2.5/4	97%	Paul Williams Still Alive (2012)	" The film too often undercuts its goals by indulging its director's need for self-affirmation at the expense of the movie's far more compelling central subject." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 3, 2012
1/4	34%	Lola Versus (2012)	" A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 3, 2012
4/5	92%	Himizu (2013)	" A near-masterpiece from one of the most significant directors working today, Himizu combines all the director's strengths while introducing a tentative humanism that proves remarkably affecting." — Little White Lies Posted May 31, 2012
	43%	One Day On Earth (2012)	" Ultimately, a collage film is only as good as its constituent parts, and, with a few exceptions, the brief snippets from this particular day on earth are far too prosaic to be illuminating." — Village Voice Posted May 30, 2012
	91%	Chely Wright: Wish Me Away (2012)	" What it lacks in artfulness, Wish Me Away makes up for in emotive force." — Village Voice Posted May 29, 2012
	27%	High School (2012)	" There's a certain relentlessness to the film's stoned vibe that gets under your skin, but it's far from enough to make up for the project's dreary mirthlessness." — Village Voice Posted May 29, 2012
2/5	38%	Crooked Arrows (2012)	" A by-the-numbers triumph-of-the-underdog flick." — Time Out New York Posted May 29, 2012
2/5	58%	U.N. Me (2012)	" This is a disturbingly blinkered film." — Time Out New York Posted May 29, 2012
4/5	88%	Pink Ribbons, Inc. (2012)	" It's a powerful and subversive reminder that, pink or not, depoliticizing a worthy cause is never pretty." — Time Out New York Posted May 29, 2012
1/4	18%	For Greater Glory (2012)	" The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots." — Slant Magazine Posted May 27, 2012
2/4	22%	6 Month Rule (2012)	" The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another. " — Slant Magazine Posted May 27, 2012
3/5	89%	OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie (2012)	" Rendered with cinematic brio and forceful clarity." — Time Out New York Posted May 22, 2012
1.5/4	20%	Mighty Fine (2012)	" Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe." — Slant Magazine Posted May 21, 2012
3.5	94%	Moonrise Kingdom (2012)	" For the first 15 minutes or so, Moonrise Kingdom feels like the movie Wes Anderson's detractors have always accused him of churning out. Then it finds its footing and becomes a film that only Anderson could have made." — Slant Magazine Posted May 17, 2012
1/4	22%	What to Expect When You're Expecting (2012)	" It's the inevitability and uniformity of the film's attitude--as well as the desperately strained and unfunny way in which it puts it across--that's bothersome." — Slant Magazine Posted May 15, 2012
1.5/4	50%	Small, Beautifully Moving Parts (2012)	" Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening." — Slant Magazine Posted May 8, 2012
2/4	56%	A Bag of Hammers (2012)	" Suffers from both an odd, ineffective structure and a low-key tone that jars uncomfortably with the subject matter and makes the film's stakes seem unnecessary low." — Slant Magazine Posted May 6, 2012
1/4	4%	A Little Bit Of Heaven (2012)	" Unsurprisingly for a film detailing terminal disease, this is a largely solemn affair, often verging on morbidity in its elongated death watch." — Slant Magazine Posted May 3, 2012
2/4	86%	Last Call at the Oasis (2012)	" Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 30, 2012
3/4	64%	The Five-Year Engagement (2012)	" The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 25, 2012
4/5	100%	Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story (2012)	" It's a powerful testament to how far we both have and haven't come." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 24, 2012
2/5	47%	96 Minutes (2012)	" The film cuts with such precision that there's scarcely any room to breathe; it's the rare thriller that is perhaps too tightly structured." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 24, 2012
3/5	71%	Payback (2012)	" Despite trying to fit both the ancient Albanian Kanun legal code and the fate of the environment on the same procrustean bed, Baichwal's free-flowing essay film stands as a thoughtful and compelling meditation on global interconnectivity..." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 24, 2012
	100%	Dolphin Boy (2012)	" Dolphin Boy stands as an example of how the pitfalls of potentially mushy material can be overcome by smart and sensitive direction." — Village Voice Posted Apr 24, 2012
	82%	Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment (2012)	" Despite a few minor objections raised by some kibbutzniks, the film takes for granted the near unimpeachability of the original communities, giving only token mention of issues like gender inequality." — Village Voice Posted Apr 24, 2012
2/5	55%	Downtown Express (2012)	" The film's wide-eyed view of New York as a wonderland of harmonic diversity soon grows as tiresome as the film's trite romantic shuffling." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 17, 2012
2/4	67%	Trishna (2012)	" Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 17, 2012
2.5/4	74%	Chimpanzee (2012)	" The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 16, 2012
2.5/4	13%	The Moth Diaries (2012)	" This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 13, 2012
2/5	64%	Unraveled (2012)	" In allowing Dreier to shape his own narrative, too many lame excuses are allowed to pass, as the financial schemer spins his own story dangerously close to self-pity." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 10, 2012
2/4	77%	Here (2012)	" While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 8, 2012
2/5	28%	We the Party (2012)	" It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2012
2/5	75%	Surviving Progress (2012)	" Like the myriad dangers threatening the earth, the film is simply too unwieldy, a sprawling mass of ideas that are dutifully checked off and then given only superficial explanations in lieu of insightful explorations." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2012
	71%	MIS Human Secret Weapon (2012)	" Although the veterans go light on tales from the front line, it's their stories of fractured identity that form the heart of the project." — Village Voice Posted Apr 3, 2012
2.5/4	62%	We Have a Pope (2012)	" Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 28, 2012
	17%	God Save My Shoes (2012)	" There's no escaping the fact that Benasra's doc does little more than perpetuate the myth of women-all women-as vapid materialists worshipping at the altar of Manolo Blahnik." — Village Voice Posted Mar 27, 2012
2.5/4	93%	Turn Me On, Dammit! (2012)	" Showing a 15 year old masturbating may be edgy, but if that's your film's most audacious conceit, then you probably need to try a little harder. " — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 25, 2012

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