Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez

""Scooby Doo can do do but Sartre is smartra."--Homer Simpson"

Agrees with the Tomatometer 71% of the time.

Biography:
Ed Gonzalez is a freelance writer working out of New York City, or thereabouts. A graduate of NYU, he worked for Cosmopolitan, House Beautiful, and O Magazine before turning to film criticism. His writing has appeared in City Pages, Gay City News, and The Village Voice. He currently serves time as Film Editor and Senior Film Writer at Slant Magazine and Contributing Film Editor at PLANETº. Ed is also a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the New York Film Critics Online.
Publications:
Apollo Guide , City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul , House Next Door , L.A. Weekly , Los Angeles Times , Slant Magazine , Village Voice
Critics' Group:
New York Film Critics Online, Online Film Critics Society
Total Reviews:
1944
Location:
Weehawken, NJ

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 51 - 100 of 1944
Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
2.5/4 94% The Rabbi's Cat (2012) " Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 17, 2012
3.5/4 77% Las Acacias (2012) " This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 17, 2012
1/4 41% Silent House (2012) " Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 4, 2012
86% Chico & Rita (2012) " Regurgitates the starry-eyed rags-to-riches story of Cuban musicians making it in the States immortalized in everything from I Love Lucy to Mambo Kings." — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 5, 2012
2/4 65% The Woman in Black (2012) " James Watkins can frame a fierce image along a diagonal line, but he has few tricks up his sleeve, often recycling similar shots from scene to scene, as well as spring-loaded scares that would get Roger Ebert's blood boiling. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 1, 2012
14% Ride the Divide (2010) Slant Magazine
Posted Jan 10, 2012
1.5/4 26% The Divide (2012) " Man is depicted as his own worst enemy, but for audiences there's perhaps no greater threat than Gens's overripe artistry." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jan 8, 2012
2.5/4 86% The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) " The most handsome funeral procession ever mounted--which is, in the end, better than feeling like you're the corpse lying inside the coffin." — Slant Magazine
Posted Dec 12, 2011
1.5/4 76% We Need to Talk About Kevin (2012) " What we really need to talk about is the fraudulence of Lynne Ramsay's overripe collage of bright colors, smug pop music, and flimsy characterizations." — Slant Magazine
Posted Dec 4, 2011
3.5/4 82% Autoreiji: Biyondo (Outrage Beyond) (2011) " Once sacred values like honor and brotherhood have no place here, and old practices, like ritual finger amputation as a form of apology, are turned into a running joke." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 28, 2011
2.5/4 80% The Love We Make (2011) " There are a few moments that point toward Albert Maysles's gifts, as they acknowledge a tougher side to Pual McCartney's life and profession." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 7, 2011
1.5/4 80% Shame (2011) " Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction--in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 6, 2011
2/4 30% Courageous (2011) " Praise be to Courageous for being upfront." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 30, 2011
3/4 72% Carnage (2011) " Roman Polanski ensures that Carnage's images, like its words, cut through us like a knife." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 28, 2011
2.5/4 30% Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011) " For all of the documentary's wholesale condescension, you never doubt that Sarah Palin, conspicuous by her absence, has gotten exactly what she deserves." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 28, 2011
2.5/4 81% The Skin I Live In (2011) " Sometimes in Pedro Almodóvar's cinema, as in The Skin I Live In, looking isn't always the same as seeing. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 24, 2011
2/4 77% Melancholia (2011) " Melancholia is a film of few epiphanies and even fewer insights, and as artful as the film's doom and gloom may be, its symbolism flounders." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 24, 2011
2/4 29% Machine Gun Preacher (2011) " Empathy's a bitch in Machine Gun Preacher, but its moral toll is not something the by-the-numbers story cares to elaborate on." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 21, 2011
2/4 85% Happy, Happy (2011) " Happy, Happy is another gust of smugly cold air from the land of Bent Hamer." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 11, 2011
1.5/4 85% Contagion (2011) " Steven Soderbergh's feature-length Purell advertisement is short on human interest and long on explanations of a pandemic through analogies and generalities." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 7, 2011
1.5/4 14% Seven Days In Utopia (2011) " What dooms Seven Days in Utopia is its contrived storytelling and dim-witted artistry." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 31, 2011
3/4 68% Our Idiot Brother (2011) " If Our Idiot Brother clearly courts Gump-ian territory, its pattern finally bears a stronger resemblance to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 21, 2011
1.5/4 58% Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011) " Pity that the mythology of the homunculi's existence is as arbitrary as the story's lazy, asinine plotting. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 21, 2011
2.5/4 72% Fright Night (2011) " Despite some unexpected cultural observations and insights into its male protagonist's sexual insecurities, Fright Night is very much a product of our time." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 17, 2011
3/4 61% Final Destination 5 (2011) " It almost kills me to say that Steven Quale's Final Destination 5 brings sanity to a single-minded, broken record of a franchise that has, until now at least, seemed predisposed against thoughtfulness. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 11, 2011
2/4 82% Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) " Faced with the horror of half-assed material from which he can't escape, James Franco allows himself to be steamrolled by his pet monkey. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 4, 2011
1.5/4 23% The Smurfs (2011) " Here comes The Smurfs movie to nail the coffin shut, to remind us that there's no bigger bitch in this life than nostalgia." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jul 28, 2011
2.5/4 32% The Ward (2011) " Points for humaneness, I guess, but is The Ward scary? Not really." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jul 3, 2011
3.5/4 85% Polytechnique (2009) " Denis Villeneuve's unnerving abstraction of the subject matter daringly relays his view of the human cost of gender warfare." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 26, 2011
3/4 100% Leap Year (2011) " Something wicked this way comes in Michael Rowe's Leap Year, a character study of outstanding subtlety and fierce aesthetic exactitude." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 18, 2011
2.5/4 84% A Better Life (2011) " A stale but scrupulously structured anecdote, A Better Life seems intended as an eye-opener for the send-'em-back American racist." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 18, 2011
2/4 26% Green Lantern (2011) " Martin Campbell's Green Lantern is a mediocrity, neither folly nor kitsch." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 16, 2011
1/4 19% Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer (2011) " Wait a sec, does anyone, other than M.I.A. perhaps, rely so heavily and stridently as Judy does on an acronym-heavy parlance?" — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 7, 2011
3.5/4 84% The Tree of Life (2011) " The Tree of Life's fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Terrence Malick's impassioned philosophical outlook." — Slant Magazine
Posted May 18, 2011
3/4 93% Midnight in Paris (2011) " Midnight in Paris is Allen's strongest movie in at least 10 years, a fantasy about delusion rather than a deluded fantasy itself, but it's no masterwork." — Slant Magazine
Posted May 12, 2011
2.5/4 34% Prom (2011) " The film, a wish-fulfillment fantasy through and through, sounds as if it was scripted by a tween, but it acknowledges the sincerity of its characters' desires without denying that the ritual of prom is by and large a frivolous one. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Apr 27, 2011
.5/4 11% Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs Evil (2011) " Despite ample proof to the contrary, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil was not written by the punaholic Carrie Bradshaw. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Apr 24, 2011
2/4 77% Beautiful Darling (2011) " Perhaps it's time we acknowledged that, despite their outré appetites, Warhol's superstars may have been legitimately boring people. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Apr 17, 2011
2/4 71% African Cats (2011) " The ghetto narration would have us believe that the lives of African cats is not unlike the lives of...people living in the ghetto?" — Slant Magazine
Posted Apr 17, 2011
2/4 71% Hanna (2011) " This gorgeous folly doesn't lack for visual enticement, but unlike Neil Jordan's In Dreams, it's a cold-blooded sort of enticement. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Apr 3, 2011
2.5/4 66% Insidious (2011) " Less film than funhouse ride, but it's a frequently scary funhouse ride that presents itself as such." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 27, 2011
1.5/4 77% In A Better World (2011) " Without its patronizing third-world sequences, In a Better World would have only been a somber, self-serious film about the ethics of violence; with them, it becomes a politically arrogant one." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 27, 2011
2.5/4 95% Pariah (2011) " It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 24, 2011
71% Octubre (2011) " Octubre is a film about currency, but how money binds people to each other and how it enslaves them aren't ideas the Vargas brothers seriously work out." — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 24, 2011
2.5/4 76% 3 Backyards (2011) " Eric Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's Judy Berlin suggests Little Children as helmed by a nature documentarian. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Mar 6, 2011
1.5/4 56% Unknown (2011) " Unknown doesn't aspire to the artistic and moral sophistication of John Frankenheimer's '60s political thrillers." — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 13, 2011
1/4 25% Now & Later (2011) " Shrilly over-written and artlessly directed by Philippe Diaz, and with the same presumptuousness he brought to the documentary The End of Povery?" — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 13, 2011
3/4 38% The Eagle (2011) " A proudly old-fashioned adventure about brotherhood that happens to speak to our current moment of moral uncertainty without ever drawing specious analogies between the political reality of its characters' lives and ours." — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 8, 2011
2/4 30% Sanctum (2011) " Given the wafer-thin characterizations and half-hearted performances, Sanctum barely musters even a blip of existential dread. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Feb 2, 2011
3/4 94% A Useful Life (2011) " A Useful Life blooms as a study of cinephilia as a means to a sheltered end. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Jan 14, 2011
73% Piranha 3-D (2010) " A spectacular checklist of over-the-top, 3D-enhanced death sequences tailor-made for those who always wanted to take an ax to the MTV Beach House." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jan 13, 2011
96% The Social Network (2010) " This elegantly and scrupulously produced Blu-ray essentially serves as an all-in-one For Your Consideration campaign for David Fincher's soon-to-be Best Picture-winner." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jan 10, 2011
2/4 64% Biutiful (2010) " In the end, you may be forgiven for thinking the film is another collaboration between González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga." — Slant Magazine
Posted Dec 27, 2010
46% Step Up 3-D (2010) " If you're TV set and Blu-ray player can handle it, this 3D Blu-ray set of Step Up 3D corroborates the film's innovatie use of 3D. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Dec 26, 2010
54% Disney's A Christmas Carol (2009) " A handsome Blu-ray presentation of a film that largely plays like one of those video game cutscenes you can't skip." — Slant Magazine
Posted Dec 1, 2010
2/4 87% Black Swan (2010) " Aronofsky makes trashy what David Lynch made poignant in Mulholland Drive, though to be fair, Aronofsky isn't going for poignancy here: All he wants is draaaama." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 23, 2010
2/4 36% Burlesque (2010) " Yeah, girlfriend can out-sing just about anyone in the biz, even Mariah Carey these days, but that's about all that Burlesque is interested in showcasing." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 22, 2010
83% Avatar (2009) " Avatar looks more like a cartoon on the small screen than it did in theaters, but anyone who owns a Pixar film on video knows that isn't meant as a slam." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 17, 2010
93% The Kids Are All Right (2010) " The Kids Are All Right plays like a pilot episode for a new Showtime series, but it's a heartfelt and well-acted sitcom nonetheless." — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 16, 2010
99% Toy Story 3 (2010) " The audio is almost obscenely immersive, boasting some of the finest separations these ears have ever heard. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Nov 1, 2010
2/4 93% 127 Hours (2010) " Boyle's poppy conceptual razzmatazz simply suggests the man as a contestant on America's Next Top Mountain Climber, all style for the sake of style. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 29, 2010
1.5/4 32% For Colored Girls (2010) " For Colored Girls's undiluted hysteria would be completely obscene if it weren't so unintentionally hilarious." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 29, 2010
15% Sex and the City 2 (2010) " Michael Patrick King would say the extras on this Sex and the City 2 Blu-ray/DVD combo are meant to stir one's juices, but I say they have been designed to diminish brain cells." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 25, 2010
2/4 77% Amer (2010) " This kaleidoscopic freak show, indebted as much to Argento and Bava as it is to Cronenberg, Deren, and Brakhage, is a study in sexual cause and effect." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 24, 2010
2/4 42% The Taqwacores (2010) " Eyad Zahra's The Taqwacores pays lip service to its characters with the same self-importance of a '90s-era episode of The Real World." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 16, 2010
2/4 40% Gerrymandering (2010) " In trying to make the subject of gerrymandering interesting to the unwashed, Reichert has made it an ear- and eyesore for everyone else." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 11, 2010
15% A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) " Like Rob Zombie's Halloween, this new take on A Nightmare on Elm Street gives a movie boogeyman a psychological makeover, though Samuel Bayer directs the thing with all the nuance of a "Stranger Danger" video." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 5, 2010
74% Splice (2010) " The ne plus ultra of chicks-with-***** body horror, Splice makes the leap to Blu-ray with an aptly pristine image/sound presentation." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 5, 2010
2/4 34% I Spit On Your Grave (2010) " Thirty-two years later, what most shocks about Steven R. Monroe's remake of Zarchi's cheapo classic is its utter predictability." — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 3, 2010
2/4 29% The Tempest (2010) " Julie Taymor's new film version of The Tempest isn't as disastrous as it could have been, though it does fundamentally fail Shakespeare's play. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Oct 2, 2010
1/4 36% Hatchet II (2010) " Rob Zombie could sue Green for filching his lightning filters." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 30, 2010
2.5/4 93% Another Year (2010) " Leigh, a lover of misfits and strange ducks with funny faces and even funnier voices, wants us to understand that a house of forgiveness is one without condescension." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 30, 2010
3/4 89% Let Me In (2010) " In color, composition, and tone, both Let Me In and Let the Right One In are strikingly alike, but their differences are almost as remarkable." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 24, 2010
4/4 88% Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) (2011) " Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy doesn't defy you to understand it, and yet it feels almost inappropriate, tasteless even, to do so-as if you were eavesdropping on a private conversation." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 22, 2010
3/4 90% Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2011) " Throughout Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul sees weirdness and wonder in the mundane, from the taste of tea to a daylight stroll across a field alive with the buzz of honeybees. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 21, 2010
3/4 100% Poetry (2011) " Poetry is another sobering philosophical work by Lee Chang-dong." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 20, 2010
2/4 72% Enter the Void (Soudain le vide) (2010) " Even though Enter the Void is stylistically wearying, and stupefyingly transparent as a disquisition, you can't doubt that Noé is a dazzling synthesizer of image and sound." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 19, 2010
2/4 96% Cameraman: The Life And Work Of Jack Cardiff (2011) " After Jack Cardiff's relationship with the Archers ends, the film offers precious little in the way of biographical piquancy." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 19, 2010
2/4 71% Never Let Me Go (2010) " If you don't completely scoff at Romanek's vision, it's because its ambivalence isn't exactly far from Ishiguro's own stiff upper lip." — Slant Magazine
Posted Sep 12, 2010
2.5/4 90% My Dog Tulip (2010) " The film's animation, an emulation of The New Yorker cartoon style, may be undistinguished, but the filmmakers' use of color--or lack thereof--and movement is rife with surprise." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 30, 2010
1/4 50% Daniel & Ana (2010) " The director effusively fixates on the siblings' post-traumatic stress, conveyed throughout fancily composed and classically scored scenes that suggest parodies of Michelangelo Antoninoi's ennui-clogged style." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 23, 2010
2.5/4 50% Non Ma Fille, Tu N'iras Pas Danser (Making Plans for Lena) (2010) " With Téchiné-like expertise, Honoré delicately weaves together the dramas of his characters' lives." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 15, 2010
2/4 54% Salt of This Sea (Milh Hadha al-Bahr) (2010) " Just as the film finds its graceful footing, it succumbs again to heavy-handedness." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 8, 2010
97% A Prophet (Un prophete) (2010) " A cult classic in the making, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet receives a much better shake on DVD than its main character does in prison." — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 2, 2010
2/4 47% Spring Fever (Chun feng chen zui de ye wan) (2010) " The film becomes a confused pantomime of fear and disaffection, succumbing to a torpidness from which it never recovers. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 1, 2010
2/4 79% Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura) (2010) " Here's why Manoel de Oliveira is still with us: As an artist, the Portuguese auteur rarely breaks a sweat. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Aug 1, 2010
1.5/4 62% Salt (2010) " Rather than move and cut to Angelina Jolie's asphyxiating rhythm (like Tom Tykwer once did to Franka Potente), Phillip Noyce simply keeps out of her way." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jul 20, 2010
92% Prodigal Sons (2010) " The image on this DVD edition of Prodigal Son is almost as sad as Marc McKerrow's life, but this remains of the great documentaries of the last decade. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Jul 16, 2010
85% A Single Man (2009) " Before, A Single Man was only notable for Colin Firth's great performance. Now, on DVD, it's also worthwhile for Tom Ford's baby's-first-movie commentary track." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jul 7, 2010
91% Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick (Everlasting Moments) (Maria Larsson's Everlasting Moment) (2009) " Emotionally and politically complex, Everlasting Moments hauntingly conflates a woman's spiritual awakening with the birth of cinema. " — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 22, 2010
71% The Crazies (2010) " George A. Romero has disowned this film, but has he even seen it? In style and gravitas, Breck Eisner's stylishly heart-pounding vision walks circles around Survival of the Dead." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 21, 2010
85% The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) (2009) " This high-falutin' Nazi origin story is practically a masterpiece of subtlety in the finger-wagging blowhard Michael Haneke's canon." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 21, 2010
3/4 99% Toy Story 3 (2010) " Tears tell no lies in the end: Toy Story 3 is sketchy, but it's also profoundly moving." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 17, 2010
28% Remember Me (2010) " For young girls who don't care for politics but love Twilight, Remember Me is a 9/11 story they can truly wrap their arms around." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 17, 2010
78% Bluebeard (2010) " A barebones DVD release of a predictably, spectacularly toothsome Catherine Breillat film." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 16, 2010
87% Close-up (1999) " Kiarostami's rapturous chimera of a film finally gets its deserved due on DVD and Blu-ray." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 16, 2010
16% When in Rome (2010) " Dreck of the shrillest order." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 14, 2010
37% From Paris with Love (2010) " A solid audio/video presentation on this From Paris with Love DVD almost makes Pierre Morel's latest worth a rental." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 7, 2010
3/4 94% Winter's Bone (2010) " The film's succinct, well-paced plot avoids narrative convention and cheap sentimentality. It's the anti-Frozen River." — Slant Magazine
Posted Jun 7, 2010
Showing 51 - 100 of 1944
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