Philip Martin Movie Reviews & Previews

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Philip Martin

Agrees with the Tomatometer 81% of the time.

Biography:: Author, newspaper columnist, former shortstop, songwriter and rhythm guitarist strangepup.blogspot.com
Publications:: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Critics' Group:: Southeastern Film Critics Association

Total Reviews:: 4787
Total QuickRatings:: 3390

Location:: Little Rock, Arkansas

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
88/100	94%	Room 237 (2013)	" ...all about the work of criticism - finding fresh avenues of delight." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted May 3, 2013
87/100	43%	28 Hotel Rooms (2012)	" ... one of the movie's points is that when you are cocooned with your lover, intoxicated and infatuated, you don't care much about the rest of the world" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
88/100	64%	Anna Karenina (2012)	" Maybe Wright and Stoppard have not given us a great Anna Karenina. .. this movie is too derivative and flashy for that, but they have connected the romantic and philosophical poles...The heart wants what it wants, and will destroy itself to have it." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
88/100	88%	Starlet (2012)	" ...has a sunny SoCal vibe that belies its tawdry milieu" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
89/100	84%	The Flat (2012)	" It's a mesmerizing detective story ...with an oddly uplifting ending that suggests a commonality of the human spirit that supersedes ideology." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
87/100	79%	The Other Son (2012)	" Somehow Levy - and her actors - avoid sentimentality and trite homilies. The Other Son explores the age-old nature vs. nurture divide, and ends up as refutation of ignorance and hate." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
82/100	52%	This is 40 (2012)	" ...a collection of demos, obviously inessential but interesting to the cultists." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
82/100	33%	Deadfall (2012)	" An excellent cast and an admirable refusal to give in to its audience's pleas for relief from its blue-gray bleakness aren't enough to raise Stefan Ruzowitsky's Deadfall above your run-of-the-mill snowbelt-set nihilistic noir." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
82/100	38%	Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)	" ...you certainly could do worse than enjoy a fanciful little film about a gentle president, his supposedly homely lover and two twittish English people appalled by hot dogs. I just wish they'd gone ahead and changed the names." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
86/100	81%	The Impossible (2012)	" ... a terrific horror movie, one that genuinely grips and shocks its audience and forces empathy with the would-be victims. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
87/100	51%	Promised Land (2013)	" ... Van Sant's eye and sense of poetry no doubt elevate what's essentially an updated Frank Capra story ..." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
83/100	63%	Hitchcock (2012)	" ... a slight, forgettable movie. Sometimes that's enough." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
92/100	93%	Zero Dark Thirty (2013)	" ...a somber, black-winged benediction for what we might count as a lost decade." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
83/100	82%	Rust and Bone (2012)	" ...while all the admittedly well-wrought details engage us on an intellectual level and keep us watching, the film doesn't linger in the imagination the way truly great cinema does" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
86/100	37%	Stand Up Guys (2013)	" It's hardly great, but it's refreshingly old school." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 27, 2013
87/100	75%	Murph: The Protector (2013)	" ... a documentary with the limited but entirely honorable mission of commemorating the life and sacrifice of Navy Lt. Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who died in a firefight in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in June 2005." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
90/100	92%	The Gatekeepers (2013)	" ...a riveting and sobering documentary about Shin Bet that raises important if unanswerable questions about the morality of state-sanctioned violence in the name of internal security. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
86/100	96%	War Witch (2013)	" ... driven by a remarkably natural, unaffected performance by Mwanza. And Nguyen, despite relying a little too heavily on the initial voice-over for exposition, is a confident and sensitive intelligence behind the camera." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
81/100	45%	On the Road (2012)	" If our On the Road is a barely coherent tightrope act - a fizzy word drunk stand-up speed-rapped by an aspiring poet posing as a dumb saint prole - then it's tough to take this pretty version, populated by Gap models in retro Americana fashions." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
77/100	31%	Emperor (2013)	" ...probably the most disappointing 2013 film I've seen so far." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
88	90%	Beyond The Hills (2013)	" Strikingly shot and punishingly long ..." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
86/100	79%	Ginger & Rosa (2013)	" ...probably Potter's most accessible movie to date, but the script is perhaps nothing special ..." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
87/100	54%	The Company You Keep (2013)	" Redford's direction feels tighter and and less ruminative than it has in years, and his acting is still marked by a kind of intelligent alertness. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
89/100	98%	Mud (2013)	" ...a movie about relationships that are tenuous and inescapable, desperate and fraught with misplaced romance." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Apr 26, 2013
86/100	89%	Compliance (2012)	" I admire the workings of the movie, in the same cool way I might regard a machine gun as a work of art ..." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Nov 4, 2012
87/100	88%	The Other Dream Team (2012)	" ...a deeply interesting, if conventionally structured and unflashy, documentary ... about the reassertion of national identity after generations of foreign oppression and the role of sport in nation building." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Nov 4, 2012
85/100	——	Restless Heart: The Confessions Of Augustine ()	" ...those who get their history from the movies get the history they deserve - still, if Restless Heart causes people to Google terms like "Manichaeism" and the "Donatist schism," we might count that as an aggregate good." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Nov 4, 2012
89/100	——	Ann Richards' Texas ()	" ...an entertaining and energetic film about an indomitable woman" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Oct 15, 2012
87/100	96%	Searching for Sugar Man (2012)	" Rodriguez, once he emerges from the mists, appears to be a sweet, decent - and remarkably intact - soul. One wonders if he had achieved his rock 'n' roll dreams, would his daughters have turned out so well? " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Oct 15, 2012
88/100	96%	Argo (2012)	" ...the best kind of Hollywood movie, a gripping, suspenseful story leavened with dry grim humor and resolved in well-earned uplift." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Oct 15, 2012
80/100	33%	Death by China (2012)	" ...unabashed agitative propaganda in the style of Michael Moore. It's selective in its facts, and it doesn't really engage its putative audience as adults, opting instead for cutesy graphics. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Oct 10, 2012
73/100	56%	For a Good Time, Call... (2012)	" The idea that phone sex workers can turn out to be quite different than their disembodied voices imply might be worth exploring by a more earnest, diligent and engaged intelligence than whatever drove this project." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Oct 3, 2012
80/100	43%	Hotel Transylvania (2012)	" ...there's nothing terribly bad about Hotel Transylvania, it's just not very special." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 28, 2012
88/100	100%	The Invisible War (2012)	" makes a compelling case that the military is, as a retired Army general says, "a target-rich environment" for sexual predators. It is a difficult film to watch, but it should be harder to ignore." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 28, 2012
88/100	93%	Looper (2012)	" ... a smart and sharply realized vision of a not-too-distant, not-too-dystopian future [that] doesn't get too fussy with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 28, 2012
88/100	88%	Neil Young Journeys (2012)	" ...just Young and his insinuating voice (which I'm inclined to credit more now than I was 40 years ago), various guitars, harmonica and piano, over which he displays a great and tender command. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 28, 2012
87/100	55%	Bachelorette (2012)	" ...there's no soft center here, no sweetness lurking to cut the tart. This is a raw and genuinely brave film that falters here and there, but gets up swearing and snarling, a razor in its pretty little hand. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 21, 2012
82/100	67%	Unconditional (2012)	" While the script is a bit thin and the murder mystery overlay feels a bit forced, Unconditional is a gentle and sincere movie about the power and potential of love. And Papa Joe is a character worth getting to know. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 21, 2012
88/100	85%	End of Watch (2012)	" ... a maddeningly entertaining piece of pulp fiction, a solid B-movie artfully distressed for the sort of middlebrow audience that might dismiss Dredd 3D as a cinematized first person shooter game. Which means that film critics like me will love it." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 21, 2012
86/100	82%	Bill W. (2012)	" ... provides us with a surprisingly nuanced picture of one of the most important Americans of the 20th century." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 14, 2012
77/100	0%	Last Ounce of Courage (2012)	" ... sort of a Red Dawn for those who believe that Christmas is under assault by secular forces. It is the very first movie that comes with "The Chuck Norris Seal of Approval."" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 14, 2012
81/100	85%	Sleepwalk With Me (2012)	" yet another film about an underachieving (but bright and talented) character trying to make it in world of straights who don't immediately recognize how wonderful he is. " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 14, 2012
85/100	73%	Barbarella (1968)	" ...like a lot of truly terrible things from the '60s, Barbarella has acquired the patina of the cult classic, which means that as the cultural context has changed we are able to enjoy it for reasons other than those intended by the filmmakers" — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
90/100	94%	Moonrise Kingdom (2012)	" ...it reminds us of the way we (mis)apprehended the world when we were children, the way we strained to hear the adults in conference, the way we looked for clues in their manner and fastened our attention on ... random or inconsequential details." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
89/100	88%	Polisse (2012)	" ...a tough and mostly rewarding ride, sort of like a full season of a novelistic cable drama like The Wire compressed into a two-hour serving ... " — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
83/100	22%	Darling Companion (2012)	" I enjoyed Lawrence Kasdan's Darling Companion on several levels, even as I realized that it's not - by any standard criteria - a terribly good movie." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
86/100	52%	Where Do We Go Now? (2012)	" ... a mess, but a cheerful one." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
92/100	86%	Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)	" Wild is ... a visual tone poem. To try to impose any orthodox sensibility, much less political correctness, on the film is close to blasphemy ... something more than the ordinary miracle that is your average well-realized movie." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012
89/100	88%	Targets (1968)	" ...we don't, we can't, know why a Charles Whitman, a Bobby Thompson, a Michael Clark or a James Holmes does what he does. So we say they are mad." — Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Posted Sep 10, 2012

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