J. R. Jones Movie Reviews & Previews

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J. R. Jones

Agrees with the Tomatometer 72% of the time.

Publications:: Chicago Reader

Total Reviews:: 1176

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Showing 1 - 50 of 1176

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
	53%	The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013)	" This sure-handed adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's international best seller shows Nair at her best." — Chicago Reader Posted May 3, 2013
	98%	Mud (2013)	" Nichols takes his time with the story, dwelling on how the boy is shaped by the killer's tragic sense of romance, yet the suspense holds." — Chicago Reader Posted May 3, 2013
	88%	The Angels' Share (2013)	" [Ken Loach] and his longtime screenwriter, Paul Laverty, find a good balance between drama and wacky character moments." — Chicago Reader Posted May 3, 2013
	78%	Iron Man 3 (2013)	" This installment actually flirts with satire, sending its hero-in-a-can on a vengeful mission against a mad, bearded jihadist before yanking the rug out from under the neocon story line. There are some good laughs as well." — Chicago Reader Posted May 2, 2013
	80%	Breaking the Sound Barrier (The Sound Barrier) (1952)	" Public excitement over jet travel helped make David Lean's 1952 British feature a big hit, though its science doesn't wash and its majestic aerial sequences are uneasily wedded to a starchy familial drama." — Chicago Reader Posted May 1, 2013
	81%	Renoir (2013)	" If you love the paintings of Auguste Renoir or the films of his son Jean, there's a good chance you'll sit through this slow-moving prestige item." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 25, 2013
	56%	Oblivion (2013)	" The story eventually devolves into a grab bag of sci-fi tropes but, as with so many other Cruise productions, the sheer scale of everything is so mind-numbing that you may not notice." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 19, 2013
	42%	To The Wonder (2013)	" There's a little too much wonder and not quite enough story in this middling effort from Terrence Malick." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 18, 2013
	54%	The Company You Keep (2013)	" The high celebrity quotient tends to work against the drama, reminding us what a privileged generation this was and how its endless examination of itself in popular culture was part of that privilege." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 18, 2013
	81%	The Place Beyond The Pines (2013)	" This naturalistic drama is ambitious to the point of being unwieldy... But once the story has advanced from one generation to the next and its thematic sweep has become apparent, these flaws seem much more tolerable." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 12, 2013
	87%	Upstream Color (2013)	" No one else today approaches the genre in quite this way; the only precedent I can think of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 11, 2013
	77%	42 (2013)	" Ironically, the most valuable player here is Harrison Ford, giving one of the best performances of his career as Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 11, 2013
	62%	Evil Dead (2013)	" There isn't much to do here except turn the gore up to 11; if you've ever wondered what it would be like to jam a chainsaw into someone's mouth (and who hasn't?), this will give you a good working idea." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 5, 2013
	94%	Room 237 (2013)	" This is sure to amuse you if you get a bang out of the claims that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and Dark Side of the Moon was intended as a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz." — Chicago Reader Posted Apr 4, 2013
	79%	Reality (2013)	" Matteo Garrone follows his crime epic Gomorrah with a comedy about reality TV, and though it hardly rivals the earlier movie in its social complexity, it still offers the spectacle of a vibrant and vividly realized Neapolitan neighborhood." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 28, 2013
	——	Warrendale (1967)	" [A] striking cinema verite documentary." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 28, 2013
	93%	The Sapphires (2013)	" [A] genial, entertaining, cliché-ridden showbiz story from Australia." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 28, 2013
	66%	Spring Breakers (2013)	" Korine gestures toward social criticism, but essentially this is just an hour and a half of bongs [and] beers... thinly dressed as Natural Born Killers." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 22, 2013
	43%	Admission (2013)	" This is certainly an interesting idea, though the movie is badly handicapped by Fey, who must venture beyond her usual snippiness into scenes of genuine poignancy and proves unequal to the task." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 22, 2013
	82%	Like Someone in Love (2013)	" Kiarostami is masterful in his layering of space, using glass walls, mirrors, and, in one instance, the aligned side windows of parked cars to suggest a world of divisions, both between people and within them." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 15, 2013
	64%	My Worst Nightmare (2012)	" Isabelle Huppert may be approaching self-parody as an icon of Gallic frigidity, yet the talented writer-director Anne Fontaine puts that to excellent use in this broad, obvious, but consistently funny bedroom farce." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 14, 2013
	89%	Koch (2013)	" An emphasis on Koch the character obscures his administration." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 14, 2013
	87%	The Silence (2013)	" Nicely paced but rotely characterized." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 14, 2013
	29%	Upside Down (2013)	" Timothy Spall enlivens this as a crafty engineer in the corporation where Dunst and Sturgess work, but they're all just props in a dream whose logic hasn't been quite worked out." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 14, 2013
	92%	Lore (2013)	" Saskia Rosendahl gives an impressively poised performance as the beautiful teenager, whose determination to protect her remaining family coincides with her growing revulsion toward her parents." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 8, 2013
	63%	The Monk (2013)	" Not bad for a robe-ripper along the lines of The Thorn Birds, but Diary of a Country Priest it ain't." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 7, 2013
	93%	Barbara (2012)	" The occasional ravings of the patients, ringing off the walls in Petzold's measured quiet, provide an appropriate backdrop to the heroine's need for freedom, yet the movie's politics never trump its humanity." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 7, 2013
	31%	Emperor (2013)	" This fascinating historical tale is badly crowded by a bland love story, told mainly in flashbacks." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 7, 2013
	92%	No (2013)	" If you can shake off the inherent grossness of mining the Pinochet years for yet another Mad Man-style deification of zeitgeist-grasping salesmen, this is moderately interesting stuff." — Chicago Reader Posted Mar 7, 2013
	89%	A Place at the Table (2013)	" Their stories are wrenching and provide a functional framework for the directors to make some important points about hunger in America." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 28, 2013
	67%	Stoker (2013)	" This erotic psychodrama rivals his Oldboy and Lady Vengeance in its bold color and delirious compositions but avoids the ritualized sadism that made those films such dubious pleasures." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 28, 2013
	16%	A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)	" This giant turkey was produced, written, and directed by Roman Coppola, who must have thought the dumb fantasy sequences, steeped in movieland imagery, would remind people of 8-1/2 (or, at the very least, Head)." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 15, 2013
	45%	Beautiful Creatures (2013)	" This fantasy about witches and warlocks walking among us was clearly produced for the Twilight crowd, but a witty script and the enjoyably hammy performances from Emma Thompson and Jeremy Irons broaden its appeal." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 14, 2013
	20%	Identity Thief (2013)	" [Identity Thief] exhausts most of the comic potential from identity theft in the first 20 minutes and then turns into a solid but unexceptional road picture." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 8, 2013
	85%	Side Effects (2013)	" This neatly executed mystery is just the sort of thing Hollywood craves from Steven Soderbergh: genre entertainment as cool, clean, and impersonal as a Formica countertop." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 7, 2013
3/4	100%	Stolen Seas (2013)	" Digs deep into the subject of piracy, arguing that it's less an anachronism than a sign of the times." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 6, 2013
	47%	Bullet to the Head (2013)	" Hill's eye for back alley scuzz is as strong as ever, but the story, adapted from a French graphic novel by Alexis Nolent, is so die-cut it gives neither him nor Stallone anything to work with." — Chicago Reader Posted Feb 4, 2013
4/5	94%	Neighbouring Sounds (2012)	" A Brazilian drama with a powerful and enveloping sense of place ..." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 30, 2013
	95%	Sister (2012)	" [An] absorbing French drama." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 10, 2013
	93%	Amour (2012)	" [Haneke] has put his finger on a very particular kind of heartbreak: seeing a lover give up not on you but on the life you've shared." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 10, 2013
	32%	Gangster Squad (2013)	" Apart from the gore -- and there's plenty -- this is basically L.A. Confidential without the script." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 10, 2013
	86%	The Master (2012)	" [A] challenging, psychologically fraught drama." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 8, 2013
	100%	The Invisible War (2012)	" This travesty has been encouraged by a military culture that blames the victim and a policy directing soldiers to refer complaints to their commanding officer, which typically results in no action or even reprisals against those speaking out." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 7, 2013
	99%	This Is Not a Film (2012)	" This may not be a film, but it's a moving statement of defiance and despair." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 7, 2013
	69%	Not Fade Away (2012)	" The period details are spot-on and the soundtrack is great." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 4, 2013
	93%	Zero Dark Thirty (2013)	" At the very least Bigelow has widened her reach past the white-knuckle thrills of The Hurt Locker and into the darkest currents of American military might -- at the risk of being swept away." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 3, 2013
	82%	Rust and Bone (2012)	" The masterful writer-director Jacques Audiard draws vivid performances from Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts for this gripping French romance about the body and the soul. " — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 3, 2013
	51%	Promised Land (2013)	" A love triangle involving the two men and a local schoolteacher (Rosemarie DeWitt) seems more like a commercial necessity than an integral part of the story, and the small-town types are indifferently realized by director Gus Van Sant." — Chicago Reader Posted Jan 3, 2013
	38%	The Guilt Trip (2012)	" Rogen and Streisand are reasonably funny together, though Rogen, always best when he's angry, is crowded into the role of a well-mannered straight man." — Chicago Reader Posted Dec 21, 2012

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