Bill Weber Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Bill Weber

Bill Weber

Agrees with the Tomatometer 70% of the time.

Publications:: House Next Door , Slant Magazine , Stylus Magazine
Critics' Group:: Online Film Critics Society

Total Reviews:: 325

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Showing 1 - 50 of 325

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
2.5/4	93%	Knuckleball! (2012)	" This chronicle of two athletes throwing baseball's funkiest, least respected pitch is given depth by their stranger-than-fiction underdog status and camaraderie with mentors who've had the same struggles." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 18, 2012
2.5/4	100%	Radio Unnameable (2012)	" While crediting free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass with changing the culture of broadcasting, this doc remains clear-eyed about the decline of community radio and the New Left." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 16, 2012
2/4	60%	Francine (2012)	" In a character study of an ex-con who gives her heart and mind to animals rather than people, Melissa Leo's risky performance is ultimately framed with a disappointing, distanced pity." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 10, 2012
1.5/4	58%	The Eye of the Storm (2012)	" This adaptation of a prize-winning Australian novel is a stodgy slog save for some sporadic moments of blunt force supplied by Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 4, 2012
2.5/4	95%	Side by Side (2012)	" A serviceable primer on the digital-celluloid divide in commercial cinema, if a bit unwieldy in scope and in danger of being made obsolete by the next version of the RED camera." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 13, 2012
2/4	65%	The Campaign (2012)	" A lumpy spoof of electoral mudslinging that offers some bracing bipartisan contempt amid the lowbrow, labored slapstick." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 9, 2012
1.5/4	79%	Klown (2012)	" An ostensible Danish Hangover that more closely resembles Two and a Half Men with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 25, 2012
2.5/4	71%	Sacrifice (2012)	" A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 23, 2012
2.5/4	90%	The Well Digger's Daughter (2012)	" Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 16, 2012
3/4	76%	Unforgivable (2012)	" The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 26, 2012
2/4	91%	Gypsy (2012)	" A Slovakian character study of a boy ambivalently caught between worlds that ultimately squanders its promise." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 25, 2012
	100%	The Gold Rush (1925)	" Even with its (likely dictated) propaganda on behalf of the now-superfluous 1942 edition, this set restores a high watermark in cinematic comedy to nearly full glory." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 22, 2012
1/4	43%	To Rome with Love (2012)	" "With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 18, 2012
1.5/4	50%	Americano (2012)	" This odd hybrid of in-search-of-mother quest and lurid border-town pulp shows a humane intimacy mostly in touches borrowed from the filmmaker's estimable parents." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 12, 2012
3/4	100%	Tahrir: Liberation Square (2012)	" A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 9, 2012
3/4	88%	Pink Ribbons, Inc. (2012)	" A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities." — Slant Magazine Posted May 29, 2012
	——	Two Tons Of Turqoise To Taos Tonight (1975)	" Though this two-disc set offers only the films rather than production background, from animal-clothing rights to a bonfire of cash it presents a smart, jaundiced counter-myth of the '60s." — Slant Magazine Posted May 25, 2012
	64%	Putney Swope (1969)	" Though this two-disc set offers only the films rather than production background, from animal-clothing rights to a bonfire of cash it presents a smart, jaundiced counter-myth of the '60s." — Slant Magazine Posted May 25, 2012
	——	Babo 73 (1964)	" Though this two-disc set offers only the films rather than production background, from animal-clothing rights to a bonfire of cash it presents a smart, jaundiced counter-myth of the '60s." — Slant Magazine Posted May 25, 2012
2/4	38%	Dark Shadows (2012)	" A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate." — Slant Magazine Posted May 10, 2012
3/4	——	The Observers (2012)	" A semi-documentary essay of two female climatologists at work in a mountaintop weather station imbues nature and labor with a poetry of the seemingly eternal." — Slant Magazine Posted May 8, 2012
	——	I Compagni (The Organizer) (The Strikers) (1963)	" Worldly wise and etched in hellish, beautiful smoke and soot, this death-punctuated labor comedy of hopeless resistance bellows with populist anger." — Slant Magazine Posted May 8, 2012
	——	Alambrista! (1977)	" A relevant, thoughtfully assembled set of supplements enriches this crucial independent film about the Mexican American experience." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 30, 2012
1.5/4	90%	Bernie (2012)	" A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 25, 2012
	71%	Payback (2012)	" This doc on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism. " — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 24, 2012
	——	It's Only Money (1962)	" Though bereft of supplements, this silly star showcase would be described by videophile Lester March as "like brand. New."" — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 3, 2012
2.5/4	70%	Keyhole (2012)	" A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 29, 2012
2/4	0%	Four Lovers (2012)	" This handsome mate-swapping drama never moves beyond the erotic to become incisive about the barriers built into sexual experimentation for committed couples." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 26, 2012
3/4	79%	The Deep Blue Sea (2012)	" Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 19, 2012
	100%	La Terra trema (1948)	" Though lacking supplements to help place it in the rich pantheon of its era, Visconti's empathetic family opus piquantly dramatizes a hard life on the sea." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 12, 2012
1/4	57%	Detachment (2012)	" Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 11, 2012
1/4	67%	Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)	" An egregiously dopey mushfest where the only sparks between the stars are Nicholas-like." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 9, 2012
2.5/4	84%	Last Days Here (2012)	" This potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 29, 2012
1.5/4	82%	The Salt of Life (2012)	" A dry dream of postmenopausal-male sexual lethargy, this comedy's least musty ideas are among its worst." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 26, 2012
2.5/4	92%	The Fairy (2012)	" Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 19, 2012
	——	The Geisha Boy (1958)	" A supplement-free but reasonably spiffy presentation of a mid-career comedy star's effort to grow up just a little." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 14, 2012
3/4	100%	Pretty Poison (1968)	" Showing its social jaundice between grotty bursts of violence, this acidly comic late-'60s noir lets Tuesday Weld's teen queen with a taste for mayhem out-psycho Anthony Perkins." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 31, 2012
3/4	100%	Come Back, Africa ()	" A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 25, 2012
3/4	55%	How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? (2012)	" Unusually successful in synchronizing the ethos and oeuvre of its protagonist with its own visual strategies and rhythms." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 23, 2012
2/4	89%	Carol Channing: Larger Than Life (2012)	" A bubbly 90-year-old mascot from the golden days of the American musical, this doc's subject is certainly larger than the conventional testimonial treatment she's given." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 19, 2012
2/4	64%	The Front Line (2012)	" Both brutal and sentimental, this Oscar-submitted Korean war drama offers up rusty tropes as telling ironies." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 16, 2012
	——	El Patrullero (Highway Patrolman) (1991)	" Alex Cox judges this to be his most "unified" and best film, and both the feature and the production history recounted in this package attest to the artistry of its unromanticized, downbeat vibrations." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 19, 2011
2.5/4	——	Sleepless Nights Stories (2011)	" A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 13, 2011
2/4	95%	Knuckle (2011)	" A documentary of bareknuckle fights among feuding Irish Traveller clans can't give the participants' self-perpetuating, dead-end rivalry the scope of tragedy." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 6, 2011
3/4	75%	The Adventures of Tintin (2011)	" Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 4, 2011
3/4	96%	The Muppets (2011)	" The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 19, 2011
	100%	Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)	" "Minor" Kaurismäki to the same degree that This Is Spinal Tap is major Rob Reiner, this deadpan musical saga is also a novelty headstone for the Soviet epoch." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 14, 2011
	——	Total Balalaika Show (1994)	" "Minor" Kaurismäki to the same degree that This Is Spinal Tap is major Rob Reiner, this deadpan musical saga is also a novelty headstone for the Soviet epoch." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 14, 2011
	——	Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (Leningrad Cowboys treffen Moses, Die) (1994)	" "Minor" Kaurismäki to the same degree that This Is Spinal Tap is major Rob Reiner, this deadpan musical saga is also a novelty headstone for the Soviet epoch." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 14, 2011

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