Noel Murray Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Noel Murray

Noel Murray

Agrees with the Tomatometer 81% of the time.

Publications:: AV Club , Nashville Scene
Critics' Group:: Southeastern Film Critics Association

Total Reviews:: 720

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 720

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
C+	43%	Aftershock (2013)	" Aftershock becomes perversely predictable after a while. Just imagine what a conventional disaster movie would do, and wait for the opposite to happen." — AV Club Posted May 9, 2013
B	65%	Greetings From Tim Buckley (2013)	" Badgley is terrific, and even if he doesn't quite succeed in making Jeff Buckley likeable, he does make the singer's standoffish attitude understandable." — AV Club Posted May 2, 2013
B-	60%	Kiss Of The Damned (2013)	" What distinguishes Kiss Of The Damned is its look, which combines the garish gore and muted tones of '70s Euro-horror with the subtle glow of modern moviemaking; and its sound design, which frequently mixes in a hellish throb." — AV Club Posted May 2, 2013
C-	54%	At Any Price (2013)	" The dialogue and performances in At Any Price are about at the level of a Founders' Day pageant." — AV Club Posted Apr 25, 2013
C	24%	Arthur Newman (2013)	" Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it's all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path." — AV Club Posted Apr 25, 2013
A-	88%	In the House (2013)	" In The House bares the voyeurism inherent in all stories-and the class-consciousness inherent in voyeurism." — AV Club Posted Apr 18, 2013
B	47%	The Lords of Salem (2013)	" Zombie proves once again that he understands how many different ways there are to give an audience the creeps." — AV Club Posted Apr 18, 2013
B	64%	Antiviral (2013)	" The movie can be repulsive at times, but Cronenberg is more interested in ideas than in blood and guts." — AV Club Posted Apr 11, 2013
B-	77%	André Gregory: Before and After Dinner (2013)	" Before And After Dinner ... has a lot of value, because Gregory is such a remarkable individual whose career has gone under-recorded on film and video." — AV Club Posted Apr 4, 2013
B+	96%	Blancanieves (2013)	" Blancanieves' plot is gimmicky, but Berger mainly uses it as a line on which to hang one craftily shot and cut setpiece after another ..." — AV Club Posted Mar 28, 2013
A-	94%	Room 237 (2013)	" The effect of Room 237 is intense. It's a deep dive into the rabbit hole of semiotics, designed to train viewers to become alert to what they're really seeing." — AV Club Posted Mar 28, 2013
C-	56%	Hunky Dory (2013)	" Director Marc Evans and screenwriter Laurence Coriat fumble both the musical side of their movie and the coming-of-age side." — AV Club Posted Mar 21, 2013
A-	91%	Gimme The Loot (2013)	" Gimme The Loot has an energy that's been missing from independent film lately. It's not dreary or quirky; not excessively stylish or stubbornly formless." — AV Club Posted Mar 21, 2013
B-	79%	Ginger & Rosa (2013)	" This is a movie about a young woman figuring out what her identity should be, set against a time of dramatic change." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
B+	81%	From Up On Poppy Hill (2013)	" While this story might've been just as engaging in live action, Miyazaki's animation does clear away the extraneous detail, re-creating the world of 50 years ago and instilling it with the poignancy of a family snapshot." — AV Club Posted Mar 14, 2013
C-	30%	Gut Renovation (2013)	" What's lacking is a larger cultural, historical, and aesthetic context." — AV Club Posted Mar 7, 2013
B-	65%	Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey (2013)	" Diaz ... emphasizes the uplifting aspects of Pineda's Journey experience, describing how he came from poverty and delinquency, before he dedicated himself to his craft, caught a lucky break, and became an inspiration to struggling nobodies everywhere." — AV Club Posted Mar 7, 2013
A-	75%	Leviathan (2013)	" Leviathan is an immersive experience, plunging viewers into darkness and chaos, amid a rush of vivid color and rapid movement." — AV Club Posted Feb 28, 2013
B	70%	Bless Me, Ultima (2013)	" Lots of films (and lots of books) have charted a boy's path to manhood. Bless Me, Ultima is special because it's about this boy, in this time and place, where his peers and elders are rushing to label him before he can forge his own identity." — AV Club Posted Feb 21, 2013
B-	82%	Like Someone in Love (2013)	" Is this the stuff of gripping drama? Not at all. But like nearly all of Kiarostami's films, it's the stuff of good conversation." — AV Club Posted Feb 14, 2013
B+	91%	Caesar Must Die (2013)	" In Caesar Must Die, the characters are both actor and audience, looking at themselves through the lens of a centuries-old fictionalization of history." — AV Club Posted Feb 7, 2013
C-	52%	The Playroom (2013)	" What little story there is has no sense of real life, no matter much the film pretends to be about children learning hard truths." — AV Club Posted Feb 7, 2013
A-	89%	Koch (2013)	" Koch doesn't try to do anything radical as a piece of filmmaking, but Barsky -- a former newspaper reporter -- covers Koch's story magnificently as a journalist." — AV Club Posted Jan 31, 2013
D+	20%	Girls Against Boys (2013)	" Girls Against Boys is undone by Chick's apparent supposition that he's the first filmmaker to notice how men sometimes take advantage of women, or how putting a gun in an actress' hands can be a complicated symbol of empowerment." — AV Club Posted Jan 31, 2013
B	60%	John Dies at the End (2013)	" John Dies At The End sometimes strains to live up to its midnight-movie reputation, but not every B-horror picture combines demonic creatures and ultra-violence with musings about what it means to be alive in a world that's getting more unreal by the day." — AV Club Posted Jan 24, 2013
B+	87%	Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2013)	" Vasyukov and Herzog are united in their fascination with the particulars of how to thrive in some of the harshest conditions on Earth." — AV Club Posted Jan 24, 2013
C	36%	LUV (2013)	" Luv is split right down the middle between preposterousness and truth, and between amateurishness and confidence." — AV Club Posted Jan 17, 2013
C	18%	My Best Enemy (2013)	" A movie largely devoid of attitude or suspense." — AV Club Posted Jan 10, 2013
C-	56%	Fairhaven (2013)	" "Not overwritten" can easily shade into "underwritten," which is the case with Fairhaven." — AV Club Posted Jan 10, 2013
B+	52%	This is 40 (2012)	" It's 134 minutes long, and substitutes loosely related situations for plot. But a few broadly comic moments aside, This Is 40 also captures the rhythms and concerns of real life in ways that slicker Hollywood comedies don't." — AV Club Posted Dec 20, 2012
B+	69%	Not Fade Away (2012)	" While Not Fade Away is undeniably a mess, it's a loveable kind of mess, where the missteps come from daring, not caution." — AV Club Posted Dec 20, 2012
C	45%	On the Road (2012)	" They don't seem like real people savoring their youth, but rather like illustrations in a book about how the Beats behaved." — AV Club Posted Dec 20, 2012
B+	81%	The Impossible (2012)	" The Impossible confirms that Bayona is a major talent, with a skill for constructing sequences that build tension as masterfully as Steven Spielberg did in his '70s heyday." — AV Club Posted Dec 20, 2012
B	77%	Any Day Now (2012)	" Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific-as is Isaac Leyva as their ward-that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements." — AV Club Posted Dec 13, 2012
C+	50%	In Our Nature (2012)	" In Our Nature lumbers a lot, especially early on, as Savelson introduces the cast and has Gilford and Slattery keep coming up with weak excuses to stall the movie's premise from kicking in." — AV Club Posted Dec 6, 2012
C-	32%	Deadfall (2012)	" Bana and Wilde sport bad Southern accents and deliver overly mannered dialogue while dropping hints about their abusive childhood." — AV Club Posted Dec 6, 2012
B-	67%	California Solo (2012)	" The movie becomes a character sketch, carried by its wealth of detail and a fantastic Carlyle performance." — AV Club Posted Nov 29, 2012
B+	97%	Beware Of Mr. Baker (2012)	" The life story of a man who's led one hell of a fascinating life." — AV Club Posted Nov 29, 2012
A-	88%	Santa sangre (Holy Blood) (1990)	" Drawing on his training in mime and his fascination with Gnosticism, Jodorowsky converted a story about a bizarre murderer into a grand work of art, full of symbols and imagery that reach beyond language to something primal and original." — AV Club Posted Nov 26, 2012
B	94%	The Central Park Five (2012)	" It never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless." — AV Club Posted Nov 22, 2012
B+	53%	Citadel (2012)	" A bare-bones man-against-his-worst-fears white knuckler, shot through deep, menacing shadows." — AV Club Posted Nov 15, 2012
B-	33%	Buffalo Girls (2012)	" Kellstein gives viewers more or less the same show that the fans and gamblers get." — AV Club Posted Nov 15, 2012
C	5%	Nature Calls (2012)	" The humor in Nature Calls tends toward the dopey and obvious ..." — AV Club Posted Nov 8, 2012
C-	47%	A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman (2012)	" And now for something almost completely useless." — AV Club Posted Nov 1, 2012
B+	76%	The Bay (2012)	" Maybe it takes an old pro like Levinson to show how an increasingly played-out genre can be improved." — AV Club Posted Oct 31, 2012
C+	79%	The Other Son (2012)	" The Other Son's setup is too contrived, carried along by conversations that are either confrontational or artificially elusive." — AV Club Posted Oct 25, 2012
B+	93%	Sleep Tight (2012)	" This is a crime story with little to no interest in the who or the why, but only the what and the how. It's a reverse-procedural, tracking not the solution of a crime, but all of its awful particulars." — AV Club Posted Oct 25, 2012
A-	94%	Photographic Memory (2012)	" Quietly devastating." — AV Club Posted Oct 11, 2012
B+	86%	The Iran Job (2012)	" The sports drama gives The Iran Job a strong hook, while the cultural context enriches the movie's real story, which is less about Sheppard's life in Iran than about the people he meets." — AV Club Posted Oct 11, 2012

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