John Semley Movie Reviews & Previews

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John Semley

Agrees with the Tomatometer 79% of the time.

Publications:: AV Club , Slant Magazine

Total Reviews:: 57

Worst Reviewed Films

Showing 1 - 31 of 31

Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
.5/4	78%	Pieta (2013)	" Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance." — Slant Magazine Posted May 14, 2013
1/4	15%	A Good Day To Die Hard (2013)	" A wholly generic international actioner barely distinguished by the presence of Willis's banner hero." — Slant Magazine Posted Feb 13, 2013
1/4	25%	Drunkboat (2012)	" Drunkboat is a "small" movie that plays like a mawkish, Friedberg/Seltzer riff on a small movie." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 12, 2012
1.5/4	40%	Parker (2013)	" As an especial embarrassment, here Jason Statham's superficial manipulability is put in service of corny capering and costuming." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 19, 2013
1.5/4	86%	Wreck-it Ralph (2012)	" Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness it never even bothers to convincingly evoke." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 28, 2012
1.5/4	21%	Taken 2 (2012)	" Some of the basic pleasures of the original remain intact (nobody shoots up a small room of bearded Eastern European men like Neeson), but ultimately the film feels compromised." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 4, 2012
1.5/4	31%	Total Recall (2012)	" Len Wiseman's Total Recall's a trifling mess, as superfluous as a third breast." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 1, 2012
1.5/4	74%	Prometheus (2012)	" Prometheus seems to delusionally maintain that its modest thrills are being enlivened by deeper concerns. " — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 5, 2012
2/4	50%	Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)	" Like a stiff Schwarzeneggerian conqueror making good on an "I'll be back," John Hyams returns to one-up the franchise again." — Slant Magazine Posted Nov 20, 2012
2/4	70%	Men in Black III (2012)	" More like an attempt to reenergize a franchise than rebottle the lightning that electrified the original." — Slant Magazine Posted May 23, 2012
B-	50%	Citizen Gangster (2012)	" Citizen Gangster hits its marks when it's exploding the character's larger-than-life status, aided in large part by Speedman's career-best turn." — AV Club Posted Apr 26, 2012
2.5/4	88%	Django Unchained (2012)	" There's an undeniable pleasure that emerges in seeing Tarantino juggle the dynamite of his ideas, even when they prematurely pop off in his face." — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 11, 2012
2.5/4	82%	Seven Psychopaths (2012)	" If Seven Psychopaths smacks a bit showoff-y in places, it's only because Martin McDonagh has so much worth showing off. " — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 10, 2012
2.5/4	92%	The Gatekeepers (2013)	" Even when the so-called Gatekeepers offer up damning testimony against their organization, there's no real threat that they'll ever be held accountable for it. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 17, 2012
2.5/4	80%	Magic Mike (2012)	" It's as if Soderbergh expects the film to mostly resolve itself, rounded out by the asses-in-the-seats appeal of the material, rote thematic underpinning, and ample charms of the cast." — Slant Magazine Posted Jun 28, 2012
3/4	93%	Frances Ha (2013)	" Noah Baumbach's film feels like too perfect a portrait of quarter-life malady, down to the rushed redemptive endnotes and Greta Gerwig's idealized heroine." — Slant Magazine Posted May 12, 2013
3/4	62%	Evil Dead (2013)	" The setup and geography are consistent with the original, though the film never makes the mistake of trying to rebottle the lightning that electrified Sam Raimi's movie." — Slant Magazine Posted Apr 4, 2013
3/4	——	People's Park ()	" Aesthetically, People's Park continuous long take presents a gentle comment on cinema's relationship to a people's history." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 17, 2013
3/4	76%	Hors Satan (2013)	" Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity." — Slant Magazine Posted Jan 14, 2013
3/4	93%	Zero Dark Thirty (2013)	" Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker. " — Slant Magazine Posted Dec 12, 2012
3/4	——	Bwakaw ()	" This oddball Filipino film effectively mints its own genre: the light dark comedy. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 24, 2012
3/4	93%	Barbara (2012)	" Most compelling in Barbara, Christian Petzold's latest, is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 18, 2012
3/4	65%	The Expendables 2 (2012)	" It plays out like a series wet-dream scenarios, performed by a cast of vintage action figures battered and broken from overuse, bleached and slightly molted from sitting in the sun too long." — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 13, 2012
3/4	63%	Nuit #1 (2012)	" It works--quite successfully, in places--as a warming tonic against this emotional nippiness of the cinema of Canadian coldness." — Slant Magazine Posted Jul 22, 2012
3/4	94%	First Position (2012)	" The doc twists out its six narrative threads with measured compassion and even-handedness." — Slant Magazine Posted May 4, 2012
3.5/4	92%	Skyfall (2012)	" Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing." — Slant Magazine Posted Oct 26, 2012
A-	82%	Goon (2012)	" It's the rare hockey movie to approach violence head-on, without hectoring or hand-wringing, as an essential element of the sport, not some inhumane sideshow." — AV Club Posted Mar 29, 2012
4/4	94%	Room 237 (2013)	" The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft." — Slant Magazine Posted Mar 24, 2013
4/4	100%	Wake in Fright (2012)	" The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence. " — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 29, 2012
4/4	86%	Tabu (2012)	" The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke." — Slant Magazine Posted Sep 17, 2012
4/4	84%	Total Recall (1990)	" Total Recall's caricaturing of Schwarzenegger, its flip ribbing at his stocks of action-hero cache, signal the deep, almost atomic level at which its satire functions. " — Slant Magazine Posted Aug 5, 2012

Showing 1 - 31 of 31

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