Critics » James Kendrick
James Kendrick

James Kendrick

""Great movies are rarely perfect movies."—Pauline Kael"

Agrees with the Tomatometer 82% of the time.

Biography:
James Kendrick is the film and DVD critic at QNetwork.com, where he has worked since 1998. From 1996 to 1998, he wrote reviews at his own, now defunt web site, "Charle Don't Surf!" He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baylor University.
Favorites:
Current All-Time Top 10 (Chronological Order)—Always Subject to Change Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) Best Films of 2004: 1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry) 2. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood) 3. Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi) 4. The Aviator (Martin Scorsese) 5. Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston) 6. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) 7. Sideways (Alexander Payne) 8. The Incredibles (Brad Bird) 9. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino) 10. Primer (Shane Carruth) Honorable Mention: Garden State (Zack Braff) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón) Mean Creek (Jacob Aaron Estes) The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass) The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran) Mean Girls (David S. Waters) Spartan (David Mamet) Wish I could include: Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1929) M (Fritz Lang, 1931) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945/1946) Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1947) Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954) The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) Seven (David Fincher, 1995) Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) In the Mood for Love (Wong-Kar Wai, 2000)
Publications:
Q Network Film Desk
Critics' Group:
Online Film Critics Society
Total Reviews:
2134
Total QuickRatings:
7
Location:
Waco, Texas

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 2134
Previous | Next
Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
2/4 33% The Family (2013) " a surprisingly flat satire" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 24, 2013
4/4 97% To Be or Not to Be (1942) " one of Lubitsch's greatest works and one of the most inventive anti-Nazi films to emerge from Hollywood" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 20, 2013
3/4 60% Riddick (2013) " Twohy gets back to basics, returning the character to his B-movie roots in a stripped-down tale of competition and survival. " — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 18, 2013
2.5/4 36% The Hot Flashes (2013) " unlikely to put Susan Seidelman back in the front ranks of Hollywood, even though it is an enjoyable, albeit highly derivative, comedy that dares to put "women of a certain age" front and center." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 17, 2013
2/4 34% Touchy Feely (2013) " There are some wonderful moments scattered throughout and a fantastically awkward performance by Josh Pais, but otherwise Touchy Feely is something of a mess. " — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 16, 2013
2.5/4 89% The World's End (2013) " the first part of the movie is so good--so knowing and funny and raucous and even bittersweet in its depiction of male arrested development--that all the sci-fi silliness that runs rampant in the second part feels derivative and unnecessary" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 11, 2013
4/4 94% Charulata (1964) " One of the greatest joys of watching Ray's best films is the way he uses the "simplicity" of his cinematic style to convey the deepest of human emotions and leave us with a sense that the world might someday become a better place. " — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 11, 2013
3.5/4 89% Mahanagar (The Big City) (The Great City) (1967) " a complex, but ultimately generous depiction of humanity trying to navigate the uncertainties of a changing world" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 11, 2013
3/4 75% You're Next (2013) " a smart, gory, and often darkly comical variant on the home invasion horror-thriller" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 3, 2013
3/4 34% Passion (2013) " generates suspense and tension the old-fashioned way while simultaneously heightening everything to the point of near absurdity" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Sep 3, 2013
4/4 93% Amour (2012) " a profoundly humane and deeply challenging depiction of the emotional and physical ravages of old age" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 22, 2013
4/4 91% The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo del diablo) (2001) " an elegant, emotionally fraught ghost story" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 21, 2013
2/4 68% Elysium (2013) " the film's allegorical terms are decidedly unstable and arguably compromised by the presence of Damon, a traditional white leading man, as the film's savior figure" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 17, 2013
2.5/4 89% The Muppet Movie (1979) " while The Muppet Movie is certainly entertaining, the shift to a coherent, linear, feature-length narrative deprives the film the show's brilliantly structured inanity" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 15, 2013
3.5/4 96% Babettes Gæstebud (Babette's Feast) (1987) " a simple film of great feeling and generosity" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 11, 2013
3.5/4 100% Lord of the Flies (1963) " The brute simplicity of Golding's dark adventure story is almost perfectly captured in Peter Brook's film adaption." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 8, 2013
3/4 72% Pacific Rim (2013) " the attention to social detail, as well as the film's visual punch, makes Pacific Rim more than a monsters-on-the-rampage movie--although it is certainly that, as well. " — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Aug 2, 2013
3/4 65% Turbo (2013) " dutifully and cheerfully follows a well-worn path and rarely if ever deviates from the rising-underdog formula, and while it doesn't break any new ground, what it does it does quite well" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 22, 2013
1.5/4 31% The Lone Ranger (2013) " Stuck with a character they can't really transform or darken, they instead turn him into a galloping joke in a white hat and black mask, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to care about his exploits, no matter how inventively staged they might be." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 17, 2013
4/4 100% Shoah (1985) " a magnificently disquieting experience--a harrowing descent into the depths of humanity's potential for unmitigated brutality, cruelty, and evil." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 11, 2013
2.5/4 75% Despicable Me 2 (2013) " Everything that is good about it-including those wonderfully nattering minions who have even more screen time and play a bigger role in the narrative-is what was good in the first film, so there isn't any sense of growth or expansion" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 10, 2013
3/4 65% The Heat (2013) " McCarthy delivers her profanity-laced lines with an aggressive force that feels amazingly natural, and her put-downs and insults derive a particularly strong comic vibe by bouncing off Bullock's pinched straight-woman routine." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 9, 2013
3/4 69% Stoker (2013) " a hothouse psychodrama rendered in a deliberately cool style that gives it the feel of a dollhouse chamber play conceived in a mental institution" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 5, 2013
2.5/4 78% Monsters University (2013) " The inventive world-making and comic inversion of expectations regarding the relationship between humans and monsters is dulled because it is forced into a college comedy formula, which eliminates virtually all potential for surprise" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 5, 2013
3/4 67% World War Z (2013) " the film's best thrills almost always rely on the terror of space rapidly collapsing, leaving you no place else to run-the very essence of panic, which is the film's primary emotional register" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jul 1, 2013
2/4 56% Man of Steel (2013) " While expertly rendered by the film's army of special effects artists, the violence feels simultaneously bloated and empty, yet another exercise in wide-scale cinematic decimation without any sense of humanity or the weight of its loss." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 19, 2013
2/4 92% Things to Come (1936) " a disappointing lesson learned about the limitations of amazing imagery bereft of interesting characters and narrative" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 13, 2013
4/4 96% Safety Last! (1923) " The climb has both comic and dramatic weight because it is both a thrilling exercise in physical humor and a thematically rich evocation of the pressures men feel to succeed, lest they be viewed as less than a man" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 12, 2013
2.5/4 38% The Purge (2013) " doesn't spend enough time with the characters to give us much insight beyond the bare necessities, so their eventual devolution into primordial self-protection feels more like genre machinations than psychological intrigue" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 11, 2013
3/4 69% Fast & Furious 6 (2013) " stretches into new genre territory while still maintaining the basic expectations of big muscles, fast cars, and loud guns" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 7, 2013
3.5/4 87% Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) " so enjoyable that it becomes easy to forget that virtually everything in the film is a riff or spin on something we (including only casual Star Trek fans) have already seen" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 4, 2013
3/4 81% Shadow Dancer (2013) " a potent, ultimately disheartening slow-burn drama" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Jun 2, 2013
2.5/4 49% The Great Gatsby (2013) " too much for its own good, drowning its best intentions in stylistic overkill" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 17, 2013
3.5/4 100% Jubal (1956) " an intense drama whose Shakespearean tensions are embodied in the enormity of the Grand Tetons beneath which it unfolds" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 15, 2013
3/4 100% Jigokumon (Gate of Hell) (1954) " a powerful drama that has rightfully taken its place once again among the films that opened Western audiences' eyes to the wonders of Japanese cinema" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 13, 2013
3/4 79% Iron Man 3 (2013) " what it does it does quite well, providing a satisfying sense of escapism while reminding us that such pleasures don't have to be saturated with overkill and completely devoid of relevance" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 11, 2013
3.5/4 98% Mud (2013) " a film that demands a certain patience, which it rewards with various emotional payoffs that aren't ever quite what you expect" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 9, 2013
2.5/4 54% Oblivion (2013) " really no more derivative a science fiction thriller than most these days, it just has the unfortunate tendency of seeming to be more obvious about it" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted May 2, 2013
3/4 44% To The Wonder (2013) " an experiment in fragmented, impressionistic storytelling that keeps its characters just a bit too far out of reach, their symbolic qualities trumping their flesh-and-blood passions" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Apr 17, 2013
3/4 97% Monsieur Verdoux (1947) " a pitch-black, arguably bitter comedy that wasn't so much a departure for Chaplin (he had, after all, lampooned Hitler in his previous film) as it was an opportunity to fully engage with his darker comedic impulses" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Apr 10, 2013
3.5/4 93% Jurassic Park (1993) " confirms both Spielberg's mastery of cinematic thrills and the comparatively empty bombast of today's summer tentpole movies, even the better ones." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Apr 9, 2013
2/4 62% Evil Dead (2013) " You're better off giving Raimi's original another spin. " — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Apr 5, 2013
3.5/4 93% Room 237 (2013) " a journey down a rabbit hole worth taking, as the film immerses us in alternately fascinating, compelling, absurd, and frightening theories about what, exactly, The Shining is (or might be) about" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Apr 3, 2013
2/4 66% Spring Breakers (2013) " The subject of the film is the perversion of youth, and its greatest achievement (if one can call it that) is how it somehow manages to pander to a youth audience while also cinematically chiding them." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 27, 2013
2.5/4 47% Olympus Has Fallen (2013) " plays so much like the original Die Hard, with so many plot points lifted and transcribed into the new setting, that one could play a potentially lethal drinking game putting away shots every time you spot one" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 24, 2013
2.5/4 59% Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) " That the female roles are the most memorable is intriguing since Oz the Great and Powerful is arguably at heart a broadside against male chauvinism" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 22, 2013
3/4 100% Ministry of Fear (1944) " The film as a whole doesn't really stick with you, but isolated moments and images do" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 18, 2013
2.5/4 52% Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) " The tonal shifts from unironic romance, to self-conscious grotesquerie, to roaring action don't always flow smoothly, which suggests a film stewed by a few too many hands who weren't always on the same page." — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 8, 2013
3.5/4 100% Narayama bushiko (Ballad of Narayama) (1958) " a striking experimental mixture of Japanese folklore, theatrical traditions, and stunning camerawork" — Q Network Film Desk
Posted Mar 6, 2013
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