Jason Anderson Movie Reviews & Previews

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Official Websites:
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Jason Anderson

Agrees with the Tomatometer 83% of the time.

Publications:: CBC.ca Arts , eye WEEKLY , Globe and Mail , The Grid , Toronto Star
Critics' Group:: Toronto Film Critics Association

Total Reviews:: 890
Total QuickRatings:: 2

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
8/10	90%	Portrait of Wally (2012)	" The film's troubling take on the moral flexibilities of the art world may also have viewers wondering about the provenance of what they see on museum walls." — The Grid Posted May 6, 2013
	100%	Burn (2012)	" An action-packed look at the men who do their best to keep Detroit from going up in flames." — Toronto Star Posted May 2, 2013
6/10	54%	The Company You Keep (2013)	" What with a cast that includes Robert Redford, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte, and Susan Sarandon, this might've been the most star-studded production of the year had it been made in 1975." — The Grid Posted Apr 26, 2013
7/10	33%	Tai Chi Hero (2013)	" Like its predecessor, Tai Chi Hero is continually hampered by its thin characters and badly convoluted narrative but at least this time there are more opportunities to savour the many oddball pleasures." — The Grid Posted Apr 26, 2013
8/10	70%	Wrong (2013)	" Quentin Dupieux's brand of absurdism lands somewhere between the plays of Eugène Ionesco, the looniest sketches of Monty Python, and the most adventurous efforts of the Adult Swim brigade." — The Grid Posted Apr 26, 2013
4/10	42%	To The Wonder (2013)	" Fragmentary to the point of being formless and devoid of any motivation or momentum, it's the first of Malick's works to feel more like a sketchbook than a film." — The Grid Posted Apr 26, 2013
8/10	71%	My Awkward Sexual Adventure (2013)	" The rare sex farce that is ultimately more adult than it is adolescent." — The Grid Posted Apr 26, 2013
6/10	53%	Love, Marilyn (2012)	" Garbus' use of Monroe's own words are plenty wrenching at times but they don't add much to our collective understanding of either the enduring myth or the truth about the damaged woman who existed behind that sexpot façade. " — The Grid Posted Apr 4, 2013
7/10	62%	Evil Dead (2013)	" For all of his movie's predictability, director Fede Alvarez finds several ways to increase the creep factor, largely by playing the scares straight and sticking to an unabashedly old-school approach. " — The Grid Posted Apr 4, 2013
6/10	67%	Stoker (2013)	" As fun as it can be to play this game of spot-the-reference, the movie's too besotted with its own cleverness and stylistic flourishes to generate a genuine sense of risk or menace." — The Grid Posted Apr 2, 2013
3/10	9%	The Host (2013)	" Director Andrew Niccol is completely unable to add any depth or elegance to Meyer's pedestrian storytelling and thin characters. We can only presume that those aliens have already gotten hold of his body already." — The Grid Posted Mar 29, 2013
9/10	100%	Wake in Fright (2012)	" This tale of sun-baked savagery has lost little of its audacity or ferocity while it languished unseen." — The Grid Posted Mar 28, 2013
7/10	90%	Beyond The Hills (2013)	" Such is the rigorous and high-minded nature of Romanian cinema that even a real-life exorcism story can inspire something loftier than a horror movie." — The Grid Posted Mar 28, 2013
5/10	28%	G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)	" The glib humour gives the endeavour an air of self-parody, but not always the fun kind. " — The Grid Posted Mar 28, 2013
8/10	81%	From Up On Poppy Hill (2013)	" With its modest story and lack of cute magical furballs, From Up on Poppy Hill is a tad too uneventful and prosaic to match the best of Studio Ghibli but it's lovely all the same." — The Grid Posted Mar 21, 2013
8/10	69%	New World (2013)	" However familiar its moves may sometimes be, New World continually punches above its weight and that's true even when the screen isn't filled with black-suited extras assaulting each other with knives and baseball bats." — The Grid Posted Mar 21, 2013
6/10	48%	Olympus Has Fallen (2013)	" Olympus Has Fallen comes off like an entirely unironic attempt to revive the '80s cycle of let's-restart-the-Vietnam-War movies and home-turf variants like Invasion U.S.A. " — The Grid Posted Mar 21, 2013
9/10	92%	No (2013)	" No continually impresses for its slyness and savvy -- rarely has such an eyesore been so worth watching." — The Grid Posted Mar 15, 2013
8/10	——	Blood Pressure ()	" Director Sean Garrity fashions something tense, steely, and affecting out of a premise that might've yielded an erotic fantasy if the events here weren't so rooted in its suburbanite heroine's mid-life malaise." — The Grid Posted Mar 15, 2013
5/10	38%	The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)	" Though the best stretches flirt with the mix of cruel-edged comedy and abject despair that was once the forte of the Farrelly brothers, it soon settles for being a rote redemption tale." — The Grid Posted Mar 15, 2013
5/10	36%	Dead Man Down (2013)	" Dead Man Down's script falls prey to its own downward trajectory, its unwieldy array of cheap contrivances and half-witted switcheroos amounting to little more than a cut-rate riff on The Departed." — The Grid Posted Mar 8, 2013
6/10	58%	Snitch (2013)	" Snitch's storyline has distinct echoes of Breaking Bad but it's hard to say where to place it on the proverbial TV dial due to its sometimes clumsy shifts between Lifetime-style earnestness and a tougher sensibility better suited to FX." — The Grid Posted Mar 6, 2013
8/10	80%	Tower ()	" A confident statement of purpose by one of Toronto's most gifted young filmmakers" — The Grid Posted Mar 6, 2013
9/10	94%	Neighbouring Sounds (2012)	" Neighbouring Sounds might be considered something of a horror movie for Brazil's urban bourgeoisie. One of Filho's most audacious tactics is to package what might've otherwise been an Altmanesque ensemble drama as a sort of existential thriller." — The Grid Posted Mar 6, 2013
5/10	20%	Identity Thief (2013)	" Hollywood's most skilled and fearless physical comedian since Jim Carrey in his '90s heyday, Melissa McCarthy is so dogged in her efforts to eke out a laugh that it's depressing to see a movie treat her as shabbily as this one does. " — The Grid Posted Mar 6, 2013
8/10	75%	Berberian Sound Studio (2013)	" That keen awareness of aural matters also allows director Peter Strickland to convey the engineer's deteriorating hold on reality with genuine subtlety." — The Grid Posted Jan 22, 2013
3/5	63%	Daydream Nation (2011)	" An alternately heady and queasy portrait of a small town slipping into madness." — eye WEEKLY Posted May 11, 2011
3/5	77%	Thor (2011)	" Thor's level of visual opulence is one sure indication that director Kenneth Branagh is unafraid of embracing the potential for camp inherent in any superhero blockbuster but generally avoided amid the current vogue for Dark Knight-style solemnity." — eye WEEKLY Posted May 6, 2011
3/5	73%	POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011)	" The director finds time in between making cold calls, creating spoof ads and having some fun at the expense of Mane 'n Tail horse shampoo to provide a few valuable insights about the rampant commercialization of nearly every corner of our culture." — eye WEEKLY Posted May 5, 2011
2/5	61%	The Beaver (2011)	" Jodie Foster's drama The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson as a depressed man who communicates via a hand puppet, is many things: admirably sincere, occasionally poignant, often trite and perversely wrong-headed." — eye WEEKLY Posted May 5, 2011
5/5	96%	Chungking Express (1996)	" Quentin Tarantino and Xavier Dolan are just two of the directors who've worshipped at the altar of Wong Kar-wai. Chungking Express remains the best reason why." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 20, 2011
2/5	59%	La Rafle (2012)	" In her efforts to compel French viewers to confront a very ugly moment in their history, Bosch doesn't leave time to develop her characters or their individual stories beyond the most cursory strokes." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 20, 2011
4/5	——	Mulroney: The Opera ()	" If you're going to write an opera about Brian Mulroney, there can be no rhyming lyric more inevitable than this one: "I have the chin / I'm going to win!"" — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 15, 2011
4/5	73%	Beeswax (2009)	" Andrew Bujalski ought to be more than a critical darling by this point." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 6, 2011
3/5	58%	Kaboom (2011)	" Any aging hipster harbouring feelings of nostalgia for the scrappy movies Gregg Araki made before the relative maturity of his 2004 molestation drama Mysterious Skin will be thrilled by the American director's latest salacious story of youth gone wild. " — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 6, 2011
4/5	68%	Rubber (2011)	" Dupieux's third feature (and first in English) is a surrealist comedy with a singular sensibility." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 6, 2011
3/5	80%	Littlerock (2011)	" Ott's knack for telling observations and beguiling ambiguities make him a director to watch." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 6, 2011
3/5	74%	Winter in Wartime (2011)	" An adaptation of a well-loved Dutch young-adult novel by Jan Terlouw, Winter in Wartime embodies both a traditional style for WWII dramas and a more troubling contemporary strain." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 1, 2011
2/5	46%	Monogamy (2011)	" Jones has little to do besides look fed up, and justifiably so." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 1, 2011
2/5	91%	Source Code (2011)	" One of the problems is Gyllenhaal's inability to make his character seem coherent, sympathetic or particularly interesting." — eye WEEKLY Posted Apr 1, 2011
3/5	67%	Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)	" Eisener displays considerable finesse as an action director. His movie's occasional moments of wit also take some of the edge off the otherwise assaultive nature of this exercise in scumbag cinema." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 25, 2011
2/5	44%	White Irish Drinkers (2011)	" White Irish Drinkers contains a cast of characters who are as loud, brash and pugnacious as that title would suggest. They also represent just about every Irish-American stereotype." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 25, 2011
2/5	40%	The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom ()	" Unfortunately, Johns' movie is less satisfying when it comes to matters not directly pertaining to Dolly Parton." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 18, 2011
3/5	72%	Paul (2011)	" In its efforts to please those nerds, Hollywood may actually be selling them short with films that have little of the ingenuity that used to be the lifeblood of genre moviemaking." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 17, 2011
4/5	89%	A Screaming Man (2011)	" A moving new film by one of Africa's best directors, A Screaming Man won the jury prize at Cannes last year and deserves a wider audience than the continent's great movies often achieve." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 17, 2011
3/5	70%	Limitless (2011)	" [An] erratic but often wickedly sly thriller." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 17, 2011
3/5	83%	The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)	" Blessed with a character who loves to showboat, McConaughey is a pleasure to behold -- not since the actor was battling dragons in Reign of Fire has he been so much fun to watch." — eye WEEKLY Posted Mar 17, 2011
3/5	79%	Small Town Murder Songs (2011)	" The force in Stormare's performance is enough to suggest we've witnessed only a fraction of the character's anguish." — eye WEEKLY Posted Feb 18, 2011
4/5	97%	Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune (2011)	" Despite all the sadness and disappointment in his story, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune is an invigorating survey of its subject's life and times." — eye WEEKLY Posted Feb 18, 2011

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