David Fear Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » David Fear

David Fear

Agrees with the Tomatometer 72% of the time.

Biography:: Film Critic, San Francisco Bay Guardian and CultureVulture.net
Publications:: culturevulture.net , Time Out , Time Out New York , Time Out Sydney
Critics' Group:: San Francisco Film Critics Circle

Total Reviews:: 930
Total QuickRatings:: 1

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 930

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
3/5	80%	Venus And Serena (2013)	" Once Venus and Serena flips through the duo's collection of greatest hits and hissy fits, it settles into a groove of lip service from famous people ..." — Time Out New York Posted May 7, 2013
3/5	——	Fragments of Kubelka (2013)	" A whirling tour of one man's wide-ranging thoughts that requires stamina but leaves you rewarded." — Time Out New York Posted May 2, 2013
2/5	65%	Greetings From Tim Buckley (2013)	" Little of the chops and charisma Buckley fils had in spades is channeled; this is still the usual Let Us Now Praise Famous Men karaoke session, wrapped up in some extra-discordantly warbled notes." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 30, 2013
3/5	73%	Dead Man's Burden (2013)	" You never get over the feeling that you're watching modern actors play frontier-drama dress-up. It's a deathblow." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 30, 2013
4/5	62%	Paradise: Love (2013)	" It's a tribute to Tiesel's ray of humanity that this chapter underlines its subtitle while still getting its unflinching message across." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 23, 2013
2/5	93%	Sun Don't Shine (2013)	" Seimetz hasn't quite figured out how to sustain long-form tension; by the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 23, 2013
3/5	79%	An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty (2013)	" Overambitiousness can turn a valentine into hot air and white noise, but it can also serve as a calling card for an artist finding his pitch-and Nance is indeed an artist, pure and simple." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 23, 2013
2/5	——	Out-Takes From The Life Of A Happy Man (2013)	" The result is alternately elegiac and akin to watching a photograph fade in real time." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 23, 2013
4/5	100%	Portrait of Jason (1967)	" Serves as a sideways time capsule, creating a blurry snapshot of an Afro-camp subculture during the era of Christopher Street bar raids and burn-baby-burn rioting." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 16, 2013
4/5	90%	Ain't In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2013)	" An unsentimental, salt-of-the-earth tribute that keeps the beat in a way that would make this extraordinary journeyman beam." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 16, 2013
2/5	68%	Disconnect (2013)	" All the hand-wringing tech paranoia is merely an excuse for a microversion of Babel-like melodrama, one in which the loosely interwoven stories, regrettably, never add up to the sum of their parts." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 9, 2013
3/5	100%	This Ain't California (2013)	" Combines vintage Super-8 footage, re-creations, cheeky asides (a lesson on how to do an ollie!) and middle-aged guys reminiscing ..." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 9, 2013
3/5	54%	The Company You Keep (2013)	" [It] might have been more effective if not filtered through so much graybeard griping." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2013
2/5	56%	Eddie The Sleepwalking Cannibal (2013)	" Allegedly a horror-comedy, it's neither comic nor, despite several scenes of a bloodied Smith in his tighty-whities, particularly horrifying ..." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2013
2/5	76%	No Place On Earth (2013)	" This story is both uplifting and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be told better." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2013
1/5	50%	Bert Stern: Original Madman (2013)	" The film does offer some revealing anecdotes about his infamous Monroe sessions, but mostly, it simply slouches from one sensationalistic, salacious bit to the next, sans any historical context." — Time Out New York Posted Apr 3, 2013
2/5	64%	Dog Pound ()	" Neither the film's bark nor its bite leaves much of a mark." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 26, 2013
3/5	80%	Eden (2013)	" Once bodies start piling up to a generic indie-twang score and plot turns head south of ludicrous, Eden's goodwill dissipates." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 19, 2013
3/5	90%	My Brother The Devil (2013)	" It's to newcomer Sally El Hosaini's credit that she embeds a tangible, lived-in sense of the region's diaspora community and urban criminal underbelly that's leagues away from anthropological fetishizing." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 19, 2013
4/5	91%	Gimme The Loot (2013)	" It's a triumph of the underdog in more ways than one. And that final shot would make Ozu beam." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 19, 2013
3/5	69%	New World (2013)	" Gangster-movie fanatics should take note: New World dishes out enough of the genre's oldest pleasures to make it worthwhile." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 19, 2013
2/5	30%	Reincarnated (2013)	" The whole thing ends up feeling like a superficial cross between a starstruck version of Vice's gonzo travelogues and a highly (ahem) stage-managed portrait of an artist in transition." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 12, 2013
1/5	38%	The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)	" Wonderstone's climax revolves around an improbable comeback trick that involves making an entire audience disappear. The movie itself should have no problem accomplishing that feat long before the end credits." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 12, 2013
3/5	63%	Vanishing Waves (2013)	" Yes, it's derivative to a fault-but a deserved midnight-movie cult following is all but assured." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 12, 2013
2/5	93%	Knuckleball! (2012)	" Nonfans, however, are about to find out exactly what the phrase inside baseball means." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 11, 2013
2/5	66%	The We and the I (2013)	" Given the choice between handcrafted whimsy and heavy-handedness, we'll take the former, thanks." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 5, 2013
4/5	87%	The Silence (2013)	" The Silence speaks volumes." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 5, 2013
2/5	53%	The Girl (2013)	" In all aspects, The Girl can't help it-this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic." — Time Out New York Posted Mar 5, 2013
3/5	——	The Unspeakable Act (2013)	" The film would simply not work without [Medel], no matter how sensitively Sallitt handles such provocative, ick-producing bait." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 26, 2013
2/5	47%	The Sweeney (2013)	" Regardless of whether you're a longtime devotee or not, you'll be left saying, "This is The Sweeney? I've been rooked."" — Time Out New York Posted Feb 26, 2013
3/5	92%	11 Flowers (2013)	" Mildly resonant, if not revelatory." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 20, 2013
2/5	30%	The Berlin File (2013)	" Everything here, except the action scenes, [feels] sluggish and rote." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 12, 2013
4/5	92%	Night Across the Street (2013)	" The way Ruiz uses such giddy flourishes in the name of looking back on one's life is both thrillingly irreverent and surprisingly moving." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 5, 2013
2/5	20%	Identity Thief (2013)	" It fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a Midnight Run-style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 5, 2013
3/5	92%	Lore (2013)	" What starts as a flipped survival tale turns into historical tragisploitation that wallows in its slog of endless suffering." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 5, 2013
3/5	67%	Porfirio (2013)	" Part po-faced dramatization, part documentary and all affectless true-crime curio." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 5, 2013
2/5	——	Once Every Day (2013)	" Experimental-cinema fans weaned on formal deconstruction and celluloid chaos will likely find their minds less than blown." — Time Out New York Posted Feb 5, 2013
3/5	89%	Koch (2013)	" Neither blind idolatry nor a definitive portrait; just a major missed opportunity content to loiter in the middle of the road." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 29, 2013
3/5	——	San Diego Surf ()	" This plotless assemblage of sandy-crotch improvisations simply feels cracked." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 23, 2013
1/5	28%	Knife Fight (2013)	" Everyone from Eric McCormack's caricature of a Southern candidate to Julie Bowen's celebrity newscaster are simply straw men for writer-director Bill Guttentag's argument that elections are a dirty business ..." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 23, 2013
—	88%	Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing (2006)	— Time Out New York Posted Jan 22, 2013
3/5	50%	Clandestine Childhood (2013)	" Ávila is an artist worth keeping an eye on." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 9, 2013
1/5	24%	Struck by Lightning (2013)	" All but the hard-core Colferphiles slink out embarrassed, feeling as confused and discombobulated as if they too just took an electric bolt to the brain." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 9, 2013
4/5	98%	56 Up (2013)	" An intimate portrait of settling down and finally making peace with one's well-publicized past." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 1, 2013
3/5	67%	A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (2013)	" The film's notion that a little understanding and a lot of e-mailing would basically solve the Middle East crisis ... is as reductive as it is utopian." — Time Out New York Posted Jan 1, 2013
1/5	18%	Allegiance (2012)	" What, exactly, is the payoff for suffering through such painfully bad filmmaking for 93 minutes?" — Time Out New York Posted Dec 27, 2012
2/5	38%	The Guilt Trip (2012)	" Rogen and Streisand have a genuinely complementary chemistry, feeding off each other in a way that suggests that, given a halfway decent script, the two would make a better-than-decent screen duo." — Time Out New York Posted Dec 18, 2012
2/5	42%	Let Fury Have The Hour (2012)	" The film unintentionally makes the perfect valentine for the OWS version of radicalism: It's righteous, full of rage and cripplingly unfocused." — Time Out New York Posted Dec 11, 2012
3/5	89%	Consuming Spirits (2012)	" The interweaving stories of commercialized religion, rancid Americana and alcoholic wretches start wearing thin around the movie's midpoint; by the end, the whole morose endeavor risks becoming downright threadbare." — Time Out New York Posted Dec 11, 2012

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