Sam Adams

Sam Adams

Agrees with the Tomatometer 75% of the time.

Publications:
AV Club , Chicago Tribune , IFC.com , Los Angeles Times , Philadelphia City Paper , Salon.com , Time Out Chicago , Time Out New York
Critics' Group:
National Society of Film Critics
Total Reviews:
944

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 944
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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
2/5 —— And Now A Word From Our Sponsor (2013) " A decade behind the times." — Time Out New York
Posted May 7, 2013
B- 83% What Maisie Knew (2013) " It fails to bring much insight to what essentially amounts to a massive parental guilt trip." — AV Club
Posted May 2, 2013
C+ 78% The Source Family (2013) " Great stories don't always make for great documentaries, although it's easy to confuse the two." — AV Club
Posted May 2, 2013
1/5 0% Generation Um... (2013) " Generation Um... devolves into a heap of sub-American Beauty profundities and strained confessionals ..." — Time Out New York
Posted Apr 30, 2013
B 76% Kon Tiki (2013) " Although Heyerdahl's book about the expedition became an international bestseller, and the documentary he directed on the same subject won an Oscar, the anthropology field has remained stubbornly unmoved. But in Kon-Tiki, the dream is all that matters." — AV Club
Posted Apr 25, 2013
B- 53% The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013) " When Nair tries to take in the larger picture, her focus goes slack, and all that's left is a blur." — AV Club
Posted Apr 25, 2013
B+ 81% The Place Beyond The Pines (2013) " It's easy to roll your eyes at the film's overreach, but every movie should be so flawed" — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Apr 12, 2013
C+ 68% Trance (2013) " A cracking thriller built around art auctioneer James McAvoy' convenient amnesia, Danny Boyle's Trance jumps the rails in the closing stretch. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Apr 12, 2013
B+ 42% To The Wonder (2013) " Malick doesn't reach for the sublime so much as lunge, arms outstretched, face turned to the sky. He stumbles, but still, it's a beautiful fall." — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Apr 12, 2013
B- 75% No Place On Earth (2013) " No Place On Earth mixes present-day interviews with re-enactments that illustrate the speakers' words without adding much to them." — AV Club
Posted Apr 4, 2013
B+ 92% Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (2013) " In spite of its attention-grabbing opening and provocative title, Free Angela And All Political Prisoners is less a work of agitprop than straightforward history, intriguing but never unsettling." — AV Club
Posted Apr 4, 2013
1/5 27% The Brass Teapot (2013) " The film feels like it's over long before the credits roll-or perhaps that's just wishful thinking." — Time Out New York
Posted Apr 3, 2013
A- 90% Beyond The Hills (2013) " Mungiu works in long takes and at a measured pace, burying the story's true-crime origins for half the film's two-and-a-half-hour length. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 30, 2013
B+ 79% Ginger & Rosa (2013) " Potter's take on the '60s occasionally slides into Big Chill cliché, but with her actors, she's on virgin ground." — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 30, 2013
B+ 100% White Elephant (2013) " [Trapero is] as thoughtful and perceptive a filmmaker as ever, using tools appropriate to the goal of drawing attention to systemic social ills." — AV Club
Posted Mar 28, 2013
B+ 73% Violeta Went to Heaven (2013) " Unlike most awards-grubbing biopics, this one feels no need to telegraph its own difficulty." — AV Club
Posted Mar 28, 2013
2/5 51% Welcome to the Punch (2013) " So redolent of adolescent fantasy, you can practically hear a 12-year-old shouting "Blam!"" — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 26, 2013
2/5 40% Mental (2013) " Artistic inspiration can be close to madness, but Mental is just plain nuts." — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 26, 2013
B+ 67% Stoker (2013) " Works mostly as a mood piece, but what a mood it is." — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 21, 2013
A- 92% No (2013) " A canny comedy and cutting critique, Pablo Larraín's No looks back at the 1980 vote to extend or end Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet's rule through an adman's eyes. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 21, 2013
A- 93% Barbara (2012) " Petzold handles personal, formal and political concerns in such harmony that it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 21, 2013
D+ 27% Everybody Has a Plan (2013) " Everybody Has a Plan isn't overburdened so much as stretched pitifully thin, and the double-the-fun result is closer to the dueling-Elvises vehicle Kissin' Cousins than, say, Dead Ringers." — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 21, 2013
D+ 45% On the Road (2012) " Clutching Jack Kerouac's peripatetic roman à clef like a besotted sophomore, Walter Salles trails Kerouac and Neal Cassady's novelistic doppelgängers like an eager puppy. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Mar 21, 2013
C- 0% Silver Circle (2013) " Like a Rand Paul rally rendered in the style of Grand Theft Auto, Silver Circle engineers the perfect marriage of sub-par animation and sloppy thinking." — AV Club
Posted Mar 21, 2013
2/5 93% The Sapphires (2013) " The Sapphires might pass muster as escapist fluff, but its pretensions of significance go woefully awry." — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 19, 2013
2/5 39% The Call (2013) " Crude as it is, The Call milks its jump scares and don't-go-down-to-the-basement tension for all they're worth. See it with a full house, if you absolutely must see it at all." — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 19, 2013
B- 67% Philip Roth: Unmasked (2013) " Sticking to what's on the page pays off, especially with regard to Roth's undervalued late novels, but also means he has [the filmmakers] just where he wants them." — AV Club
Posted Mar 14, 2013
D 30% Reincarnated (2013) " Essentially an MTV Cribs episode padded out to feature length, Andy Capper's obsequious doc shadows Snoop Dogg-now Snoop Lion-during the making of his first reggae album." — AV Club
Posted Mar 14, 2013
4/5 81% From Up On Poppy Hill (2013) " Shows a different side of the Japanese animation house, one that finds equal wonder in comparatively mundane affairs." — Time Out New York
Posted Mar 12, 2013
C- 47% The Sweeney (2013) " The only thing more tiresome than a gritty reboot of a TV series is a gritty reboot of an unfamiliar TV series." — AV Club
Posted Feb 28, 2013
B+ 56% The End of Love (2013) " Shot with tiny digital cameras to minimize the sense of intrusion, The End Of Love sometimes feels like a home movie, but that's also the source of its strength." — AV Club
Posted Feb 28, 2013
4/5 96% War Witch (2013) " The film's subject is almost too horrible to contemplate, but it finds a way to space out the blows without softening them." — Time Out New York
Posted Feb 26, 2013
B 92% Future Weather (2013) " Feels like the product of an explosion at the Sundance factory: a rural setting here, a wisp of mildly quirky indie rock there. " — Time Out Chicago
Posted Feb 23, 2013
B- 87% Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2013) " Unmistakably part of the director's canon, and just as unmistakably a minor addition to it." — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Feb 23, 2013
A- 98% 56 Up (2013) " In 49 Up, many of the series' subjects seemed to be just settling into their bliss; now they're committed to it, and the foreclosed possibilities that come alongside. " — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Feb 23, 2013
B- 19% Inescapable (2013) " It's a deeply confused movie, sometimes productively so." — AV Club
Posted Feb 21, 2013
3/5 57% High Tech, Low Life (2013) " An engaging study of the disparate characters who are drawn to speak out when the authorities crack the whip." — Time Out New York
Posted Jan 9, 2013
A 93% Barbara (2012) " Barbara is Hoss' fifth film with Petzold, and the movie rests on the depth and subtlety of their working relationship." — AV Club
Posted Dec 20, 2012
2/5 95% West of Memphis (2012) " It's hard to imagine how someone could study this case for so long and yet miss its most critical lesson." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 18, 2012
2/5 44% Save The Date (2012) " Date works best as a collection of winsome, unconnected vignettes; its ideal distribution model would be piece by piece on YouTube." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 11, 2012
B- 35% Cheerful Weather For The Wedding (2012) " Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way." — AV Club
Posted Dec 6, 2012
3/5 80% Only The Young (2012) " At times, the film's lyrical drift shades into incoherence, spackled with globs of free-floating voiceover and Larry Clark-like indolent moments." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 4, 2012
2/5 64% The Fitzgerald Family Christmas (2012) " A starchy, flavorless pudding." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 4, 2012
1/5 33% Deadfall (2012) " Ruzowitzky may be an occasionally interesting visual stylist, but storytelling-wise, his second English-language effort couldn't be more stillborn." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 4, 2012
1/5 42% Heleno (2012) " From its flash-forward framing sequence to its glossy black and white images, the film emulates Raging Bull in nearly every particular, while failing to capture even a sliver of that tortured-soul sports-movie's insight or visceral power." — Time Out New York
Posted Dec 4, 2012
3/5 67% California Solo (2012) " Lewy's film functions largely as a delivery system for Carlyle's performance. Luckily, Carlyle's tough, tender turn is strong enough to carry the load." — Time Out New York
Posted Nov 27, 2012
2/5 —— My Brothers (2012) " There's not much to dislike in My Brothers' sweet inconsequence, but even less to quicken the pulse or stir the heart." — Time Out New York
Posted Nov 27, 2012
A- 100% Wake in Fright (2012) " Many reissues claim the mantle of lost masterpiece, but Wake in Fright is the genuine article." — Philadelphia City Paper
Posted Nov 15, 2012
B 92% Silver Linings Playbook (2012) " It's clever and cute and never lets you forget it, winning in spite of how much it insists on it." — Los Angeles Times
Posted Nov 15, 2012
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