|
B
|
66%
|
Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) (2010) |
"
Camera movements, graphic matches, and strange tonal balances carry a lot of expressive weight in this story about chance encounters, creepy follow-ups, and abrupt changes of heart."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 15, 2010
|
|
B+
|
88%
|
The Abyss (1989) |
"
The Abyss gains in some ways from its own Achilles heels, in a way most movies don't... its formal technique, its reckless obsessiveness, and its gutsy emotionalism are what I can't stop turning over in my mind."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 4, 2010
|
|
C
|
87%
|
Cropsey (2010) |
"
The conceptual, even poetic inquiry that percolates in the opening scenes gives way to flat-footed and unresolvable detective work that makes the filmmakers too important."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 29, 2010
|
|
A
|
67%
|
Cremaster 4 (1995) |
"
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 19, 2010
|
|
A
|
75%
|
Cremaster 1 (1996) |
"
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 19, 2010
|
|
A
|
83%
|
Cremaster 5 (1997) |
"
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 19, 2010
|
|
A
|
77%
|
Cremaster 2 (1999) |
"
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 19, 2010
|
|
A
|
65%
|
Cremaster 3 (2003) |
"
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 19, 2010
|
|
D+
|
68%
|
Shutter Island (2010) |
"
Sadly, a horrible case of reverse-proportion mandates that the actors with the largest parts give the weakest performances, including yet another limp outing from DiCaprio."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Feb 22, 2010
|
|
B-
|
82%
|
XXY (2007) |
"
Even when the film overdoses on its own downcastness or on dubious similes and symbolisms, you can feel why the characters as well as the filmmakers are humbled in more than one way by the conceptual intricacies and the high emotional stakes of the essent"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Feb 10, 2010
|
|
B
|
88%
|
The Curse of the Cat People (1945) |
"
One of those movies that coheres more interestingly because of its own odd heterogeneities, largely because the brio and friskiness of the filmmaking remain fairly constant over the short 70 minutes, even as the idioms keep moving around."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 25, 2010
|
|
B+
|
——
|
Wing and a Prayer (1944) |
"
Feels tougher and more focused as it continues, and it editorializes much less obviously than most movies of its genre and period do about who on screen is to be admired and who is to be regarded with unresolved ambivalence."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 18, 2010
|
|
B-
|
85%
|
The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) (2009) |
"
Our second chance in Awards Season '09 to watch a world-class film technician and not-infrequent producer of great movies make a big, awkward lunge for that Entomology Ph.D. he has always wanted."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 17, 2010
|
|
B-
|
100%
|
Experiment Perilous (1944) |
"
I wish that the strongest passages of Experiment Perilous were more representative of the film's overall achievements. It's practically an essay in the boons and the perils of starting off wonderfully."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 17, 2010
|
|
B
|
100%
|
Jane Eyre (1944) |
"
The whole picture seems to fuse a relentless, revisionist Mercury Theater "take" on Jane Eyre to an obvious attempt on the part of Fox to ride the post-Rebecca wave of Gothic romantic mystery."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 17, 2010
|
|
C
|
91%
|
Crazy Heart (2009) |
"
Crazy Heart finally disappoints because it's so manifestly a character in search of a movie."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 12, 2010
|
|
C-
|
——
|
Mrs. Parkington (1944) |
"
Proof that the Academy has always a reserved a certain quota of its major nominations for films for which I doubt even their makers wished profoundly to be remembered."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 8, 2010
|
|
B-
|
78%
|
12 (2007) |
"
I've sampled this core material twice now, and even left to my own devices, I'm still a hung jury."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 3, 2010
|
|
C+
|
——
|
Hairy Ape () |
"
One of those films that profits in some tiny but intriguing way from being such a bastardization of the source material."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 3, 2010
|
|
A-
|
90%
|
Pandora's Box (1929) |
"
The film...is more interested in the waywardness of almost everyone's longings and in their failures of self-preservation than it is about Lulu's particular immorality or recklessness."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 3, 2010
|
|
F
|
70%
|
Sherlock Holmes (2009) |
"
One of the sourest experiences of my movie year, not a mindless sequel, but...the needless dumbing-down, almost gleeful sacralizing, and generic homogenizing of an established property so that it can yield mindless sequels."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 1, 2010
|
|
B-
|
100%
|
12 Angry Men (Twelve Angry Men) (1957) |
"
12 Angry Men has some shrewd observations to sell about argumentation and group behavior, but they're not the ones of which the film seems most proud."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Dec 28, 2009
|
|
C-
|
94%
|
Miracle on 34th Street (1947) |
"
I kept wondering: what would Jesus think about this movie, a kiddie pic that indicts America for losing sight of the one person that Christmas was always supposed to be about, and that's Santa."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Dec 28, 2009
|
|
B
|
91%
|
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009) |
"
Frequently plays as though Daniels conceived it as a mash-up of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Rob Marshall's Chicago... Finally and semi-subversively denies that 'everything is a gift of the universe.'"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 18, 2009
|
|
C-
|
40%
|
Donne-moi la main (Give Me Your Hand) (2009) |
"
It's almost hard to see the movie inside all the recycled beats and diaphanous construction, much less to feel its pulse."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2009
|
|
B+
|
95%
|
Mary and Max (2009) |
"
I'd be a sucker for most movies where a strategic slick of rooster s*** plays a decisive role in enabling an emotional communion, or where a young girl thinks to ask, "If a taxi goes backwards, does the driver owe you money?""
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 12, 2009
|
|
B
|
——
|
Partners (2009) |
"
Partners has its fingers confidently on the pulse of what is heedlessly passionate and what is utterly desultory about late adolescence and extremely nascent "adulthood.""
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 11, 2009
|
|
D
|
71%
|
Lovely, Still (2010) |
"
Lovely, Still made me feel sorry for its venerable stars, despite my fondness for their legacies and my gratitude for their committed best efforts through most of the film."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 11, 2009
|
|
B+
|
100%
|
My Neighbor, My KIller (2009) |
"
Few documentaries are quite as rigorous and artful in exposing the complex stakes behind pointing a camera and a microphone at scenes of profound social injury."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 10, 2009
|
|
C-
|
76%
|
The Eclipse (2010) |
"
The Eclipse shoots willy-nilly for too many registers of fear, and it never emanates a confident sense of what we are learning about these men and women by watching them panic, shudder, and second-guess themselves."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 8, 2009
|
|
C
|
43%
|
Air Doll (Kûki ningyô) (2009) |
"
Plays like a middling installment of some softballed international portmanteau like Paris, je t'aime, but maddeningly inflated to at least ten times the recommended scale."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 7, 2009
|
|
B
|
83%
|
Paranormal Activity (2009) |
"
Paranormal Activity has the universally craved but preciously rare knack among modern horror movies of seeping into the skin and the cerebellum."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 5, 2009
|
|
A-
|
78%
|
Georgia (1995) |
"
Might be my favorite example of a movie that compels you toward binaristic assumptions but keeps outwitting them, with its immersed conviction in the palpable, sonic, psychological, atmospheric world that it inhabits and constructs."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 30, 2009
|
|
A-
|
97%
|
Spirited Away (2001) |
"
Spirited Away exalts the young girl Chihiro's uncanny experiences into an adventure that is as thrillingly ambiguous as it is vividly soundtracked and illustrated."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 25, 2009
|
|
C-
|
77%
|
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) |
"
The Coens are like party acquaintances who keep changing the subject and then staring at you quizzically when you can't follow the thread, or when you stop wanting to follow it, but who then block all your exit routes from their obnoxious conversation."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 22, 2009
|
|
C
|
88%
|
Two Family House (2000) |
"
Unfortunately, the look, pace, and structure of the film stop feeling elegantly restrained and pass into something like boilerplate mediocrity."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 22, 2009
|
|
D+
|
51%
|
Chéri (2009) |
"
Lying on a mattress and staring out with inarticulate wistfulness is to this film what answering the phone and marveling at the odd stag were to Frears's The Queen."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 15, 2009
|
|
B-
|
25%
|
Mission To Mars (2000) |
"
Whatever's shoddy or limp about Mission to Mars, however conspicuous while the film unfolds, all becomes admirably pale as the full viewing experience recedes and the good stuff emerges in proud bas-relief."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 14, 2009
|
|
B+
|
64%
|
La Captive (The Captive) (2003) |
"
For the high-minded, literary, and formally invested viewers who are receptive to how she works and what she worries about, the film offers a starkly insinuating exercise in the contemplation of love."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 7, 2009
|
|
B+
|
81%
|
Wonder Boys (2000) |
"
If Douglas and Hanson have aimed to make Grady as simultaneously weary and jazzed...as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning theme song is, they have come enticingly close, with marvelous highs along the way (not just the narcotic kind), but they haven't fully got th"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jul 1, 2009
|
|
B-
|
61%
|
Adoration (2008) |
"
No one else would have made a film about these people, exploring these ideas and taking these kinds of mysterious risks... but it all amounts ambiguously to being either the best of Egoyan's weaker films or the shakiest of his good ones."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jun 30, 2009
|
|
B+
|
——
|
The Battle of Midway (1942) |
"
As provocative as a new (and an old) way to contemplate Ford as it is seminal as a time-capsule for martial history and for wartime image-mongering and tribute-paying in the days before television."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 19, 2009
|
|
B+
|
100%
|
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) |
"
Mr. Jordan has the right kind of love for itself: it isn't self-glorifying or self-fetishizing so much as it is contagiously warm toward its characters and besotted with its tenderly ambitious script"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 13, 2009
|
|
B+
|
94%
|
The Wolf Man (1941) |
"
The Wolf Man's tantamount pleasures are its economy and speed, its silvery manipulations of light and shadow, and the panache with which the lighting, the story, and the rich cast navigate [its] tone."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 10, 2009
|
|
C-
|
62%
|
Changeling (2008) |
"
Writer J. Michael Straczynski and director Clint Eastwood keep abducting their own movie and flagrantly replacing it with a different one."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 12, 2008
|
|
D+
|
88%
|
I've Loved You So Long (2008) |
"
If this movie is as patient, delicate, and introspective as it pretends, what to make of all the bludgeoning, obvious tactics that keep serving to remind us of its impeccable tact?"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 11, 2008
|
|
A
|
69%
|
Synecdoche, New York (2008) |
"
Brazen and witty and starkly serious...Synecdoche stands in relation to Kaufman's best previous screenplays in the same way that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE stood in relation to Mulholland Drive."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 11, 2008
|
|
B
|
96%
|
Waltz with Bashir (2008) |
"
Waltz with Bashir represents another honorable stride toward this gestating breakthrough in adult animation, though I'm as disappointed as I am pleased to call it 'honorable.'"
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 29, 2008
|
|
B
|
64%
|
Quantum of Solace (2008) |
"
Lively with color but dotted with chic black-on-white motifs, splashed with escapist enticements without losing its grip on James's curdled spirit, suggestive of interesting fragilities in the time-honored MI6 chain of command."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 28, 2008
|
|
C+
|
69%
|
Delta (2009) |
"
Delta, quite easy to laugh at, and deserving, at least, of impatience if not contempt, has a keen eye and a flexibility of expression as well as subtle intimations of depth that are worth sounding out."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 26, 2008
|
|
C+
|
76%
|
Let it Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie) (2010) |
"
It's one of those right-down-the-middle affairs that puts its script front and center, selling punchlines and double-takes under a thin gloss of continental sophistication."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 22, 2008
|
|
C
|
82%
|
Two Lovers (2008) |
"
An early suicide attempt, complete with potent sound design, confers a life-and-death gravity on the picture that its story about a faltering manchild with a frustrated crush doesn't fully earn."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 22, 2008
|
|
B+
|
92%
|
Ballast (2008) |
"
A doleful movie that often has a lump in its throat, but it's also a poetic and illuminating movie that earns its attitudes and effects, including the lumps."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 22, 2008
|
|
C
|
79%
|
Genova () |
"
[Winterbottom] can't quite decide which well-trodden path to walk, either of domestic drama or of supernatural riddle, which should have been a sign that he hasn't really committed to this project."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 22, 2008
|
|
A-
|
74%
|
Julia (2009) |
"
The film has the focused derangement of a suicide bomber...but I for one am elated to see such brazenness, such mystery, and such crazy, highwire ambition back in the movie theater."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 19, 2008
|
|
C
|
61%
|
The Duchess (2008) |
"
Dibb conceived of the right, poignant atmosphere for a glimpse at rarefied 18th-century life but barely read the Cliff's Notes for whose life he was staging, or why he was doing it."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2008
|
|
D+
|
54%
|
Mamma Mia! (2008) |
"
A chintzy valentine to the world-shaking ebullience of one's own flimsily "empowered" friendships and one's most offhanded and tarted-up whims."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 15, 2008
|
|
D
|
83%
|
Tropic Thunder (2008) |
"
Tropic Thunder, full of punchlines about Milli Vanilli and Being There, stitches the tired cultural references of one generation to the utterly debased expectations of their heirs."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 15, 2008
|
|
A
|
100%
|
The Third Man (1949) |
"
If The Third Man is a tragedy, it isn't just the tragedy of a hobbled city, scribbled with ruins and parsed into zones of occupation that can't communicate and don't cooperate."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 13, 2008
|
|
B+
|
85%
|
Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore) (1971) |
"
Beware of a Holy Whore is the film you would make if you spent the previous ten years on a steady diet of Godard and Warhol, with occasional afternoons cleared for Antonioni and every night reserved for hard drinking."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 23, 2008
|
|
C
|
82%
|
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) |
"
Long ago, Allen became interested in "the artist" only as a theme and rhetorical figure. The actual making of art, whether as his subject or as embodied by his own films, no longer grips him. It may actually bore him."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 22, 2008
|
|
C+
|
50%
|
Smart People (2008) |
"
Smart People aims [at] enlisting Quaid's intelligence and self-awareness without denying him the wit and the grins that keep him so likable on screen. He handles the role well, but you couldn't say he owns it or thrives with it."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Apr 27, 2008
|
|
B-
|
57%
|
Turn the River (2008) |
"
Turn the River, sometimes like Kailey herself and sometimes not, has a laudable habit of pulling back at the right moments and proving its mettle in unexpected ways."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Apr 26, 2008
|
|
B
|
45%
|
Fay Grim (2007) |
"
The nicest surprise of the movie is how long and how well Fay Grim works as a contemporary screwball comedy, a genre from which Hartley's diffuse yet severe sense of irony would seem to disbar him."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Jan 3, 2008
|
|
B
|
78%
|
Crazy Love (2007) |
"
Crazy Love...sidles up to us, thrills and surprises us, seduces us with the pop flavor of its mid-century paperback aesthetic and its titillating tabloid tale. Crazy Love is chummy."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 15, 2007
|
|
C-
|
31%
|
Making Love (1982) |
"
On its own baby-step terms, and despite its moneyed vanilla-himbo vision of gay masculinity and desire, Making Love plays now as a bemusing anachronism but not an insulting or self-inflating one."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 13, 2007
|
|
B-
|
——
|
The Joy of Life (2005) |
"
The Joy of Life offers a truncated and incomplete but a nonetheless promising start to that looming and hopefully brilliant career."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 12, 2007
|
|
B
|
97%
|
Groundhog Day (1993) |
"
The movie deserves its fans, earns our respect, delivers richly on its initial promises if not always on its greater ones, and rewards multiple viewings, even as it carries a built-in joke about the typical shelf-life of repeated experience."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Nov 12, 2007
|
|
B+
|
100%
|
The Search (1948) |
"
Both a well-modulated immersion in the experience of stunned and stranded children and a time-capsule of the scarred land and crumbled cityscapes of Germany after the war."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 18, 2007
|
|
D+
|
35%
|
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) |
"
Elizabeth: Full Throttle. Elizabeth: The Heretic. Elizabeth: Book of Shadows. Despite all the peacock kerfluffery Kapur can conjure, this remains an inscrutable film, in intent as well as execution."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 16, 2007
|
|
B
|
90%
|
Michael Clayton (2007) |
"
The multiplex needs more movies where life, work, morality, and debt comprise the constellation of adult experience, unimpinged upon by concessions to youth audiences and unameliorated by any whiff of romance."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 16, 2007
|
|
C
|
72%
|
Stuck (2008) |
"
Assumes the stance of a transfixed but inarticulate bystander to its own premise, rather than using that premise as an aperture into revelation of character, accumulation of suspense, or persuasive ethical reflection."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 13, 2007
|
|
B
|
72%
|
Hallam Foe (Mister Foe) (2007) |
"
Hallam Foe cannot be accused of concealing its investment in the dramatic heightening of sensation, the privileging of psychic logic and hormonal pulls over safer and more quotidian forms of "realistic" storytelling."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 10, 2007
|
|
B-
|
87%
|
Control (2007) |
"
Parades so many smart, savvy strategies for avoiding the typical music-bio pablum that it's particularly dispiriting when the middle and end of the film so dully and incorrigibly embrace those very clichés."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 8, 2007
|
|
C-
|
67%
|
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) |
"
The evidence of talent persists in Anderson's work, but the prognosis of terminal solipsism and emotional dilettantism draws ever fuller support."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 8, 2007
|
|
B+
|
72%
|
Lust, Caution (2007) |
"
Lust, Caution spins a satisfying and surprising yarn, and the formal and visual motifs are more ambitious and ambiguous here [...]than anything in Brokeback."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 8, 2007
|
|
C+
|
——
|
The Good Fairy (1935) |
"
This strange, uncertain film doesn't augur or embody Wyler's subsequent trademarks so much as it calls them into relief through their very absence."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 25, 2007
|
|
B
|
90%
|
Zodiac (2007) |
"
I'm impressed with Fincher's delicate formal and tonal control in Zodiac's best passages...but sometimes this restraint feels like a gag in the movie's throat, or a damper on its affective potential."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 15, 2007
|
|
C+
|
71%
|
En la Ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia) (2007) |
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Sep 14, 2007
|
|
A-
|
85%
|
Donnie Darko (2001) |
"
The film...asks the question: what if the universe as we live it, not just as we theorize it, really isn't as we imagine it? In making the mundane as bottomless as the cosmic, Donnie Darko has the guts to remain a riddle itself."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 4, 2007
|
|
B-
|
76%
|
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) |
"
An ideal movie for DVD: you can pick and choose moments and lines to revisit while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the thematic compromises, hectoring impulses, and structural handicaps that start to engulf the film."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 4, 2007
|
|
C-
|
69%
|
Freedom Writers (2007) |
"
Ironically, the film features almost zero teaching. Despite much pedagogical posturing, it doesn't teach us much, either."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Aug 4, 2007
|
|
D
|
56%
|
Vacancy (2007) |
"
Trite and opportunistic in its feints at intellectual weight... Best, in fact, to mine from the crumbly ore of Vacancy a drinking game plated in gold."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted May 2, 2007
|
|
C
|
70%
|
Year of the Dog (2007) |
"
The film is simply too inconsistent in its writing and inadequate in its playing to click with an audience, or even to click with itself."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Apr 30, 2007
|
|
A-
|
100%
|
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) |
"
Beautiful and engaging, if factually dubious... Built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 23, 2007
|
|
F
|
54%
|
Alpha Dog (2007) |
"
As it happens, not all dogs to to heaven. Some go straight to hell, and Alpha Dog gets there faster and stays there longer than most."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 4, 2007
|
|
C
|
93%
|
The Lives of Others (2006) |
"
The formal mechanisms are so obvious and impersonal that they flatten our modes of thinking and feeling almost as much as the propaganda films that a regime like East Germany's would have approved."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 4, 2007
|
|
B-
|
84%
|
Breach (2007) |
"
Breach builds toward a few crucial moments where we get inside the mind of a turncoat long enough to sense his arrogance as well as his acrid despair."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 3, 2007
|
|
B+
|
66%
|
Black Snake Moan (2007) |
"
Black Snake Moan finally, is a comedy of faith and faithlessness, in their religious and also their sexual dimensions...A consummate act of jerking our collective chain, and making us love it."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Mar 3, 2007
|
|
F
|
65%
|
Apocalypto (2006) |
"
A web of death-drives, false devotions, lofty pretenses, auto-plagiarisms, sound but inarticulate craftsmanship, and lowest-common-denominator provisions of trauma as entertainment."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Dec 5, 2006
|
|
A
|
96%
|
Boyz n the Hood (1991) |
"
Singleton strips his art of almost all ambiguity in the service of thematic and emotional and political transparency.... A tragic purgation of pity, anger, and fear."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 26, 2006
|
|
A-
|
100%
|
Cool Hand Luke (1967) |
"
Thematic ambivalence and episodic structure start to feel like major virtues: Cool Hand Luke is one of our most lived-in and pleasurably paced odes to nonconformity."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 15, 2006
|
|
A-
|
79%
|
Hud (1963) |
"
These questions are richer than they might have been in Hud because Newman...creates Hud as a sum of conscious choices, not an animal or an icon."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 15, 2006
|
|
B+
|
88%
|
Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat) (2007) |
"
An unusually patient and good-natured portrait of rural/urban crossover...of clinical, spiritual, and popular perspectives, of romance and absurdity and barely voiced grief."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2006
|
|
0
|
72%
|
Climates (Iklimler) (The Climate) (2006) |
"
The obvious, meticulous deliberation with which Ceylan has framed his images and timed his edits does not conceal the banality of what he produces."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2006
|
|
C
|
71%
|
The Science of Sleep (2006) |
"
The backloading of the film's intelligence isn't sufficient reward for having made it through 100 minutes of capricious indulgence."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2006
|
|
C-
|
11%
|
All The King's Men (2006) |
"
Plays as a veritable autopsy of itself; to watch the movie is to watch it go wrong, to observe the tempting gleam of the film that might have been grow ever dimmer."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2006
|
|
D-
|
69%
|
Hollywoodland (2006) |
"
Never makes a case that Reeves' death is worth probing, or even mourning; as on Superman, his humanity is utterly stifled by lousy production values and unrewarding stunts."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 14, 2006
|
|
A-
|
63%
|
Home for the Holidays (1995) |
"
Has a spirit and an ostensible shapelessness that are pure Cassavetes, enveloping a script that only seems to reach for the precise calculations of 1930s screwball comedy."
—
Nick's Flick Picks
Posted Oct 2, 2006
|
76%
32%
94%
85%
45%
40%
