|
2/5
|
8%
|
Runner Runner (2013) |
"
This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions. It wallows endlessly by the swimming pool and then gives a perfunctory frown of pious disapproval."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 26, 2013
|
|
1/5
|
31%
|
Austenland (2013) |
"
So actively inept and so horribly precarious that it becomes curiously engrossing, like watching a monkey spin some plates or a blindfolded dog attempting to ride a unicycle."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 26, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
58%
|
Cold Comes The Night () |
"
Seldom come the thrills in this dogged bag-of-loot B-movie, which chases its tail in scurrying circles around a downscale motel in upstate New York."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 19, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
69%
|
The Unknown Known () |
"
The film winds up as a tense, frustrating stalemate."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 13, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
55%
|
Child Of God () |
"
Multi-hyphenate renaissance man James Franco has finally delivered the goods with this great, grisly Cormac McCarthy adaptation"
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 13, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
76%
|
Joe () |
"
Joe serves up a bloody cut of Southern Gothic and a bullish portrait of masculinity in crisis, perfectly embodied by Nicolas Cage. "
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 13, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
89%
|
Locke () |
"
Having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man - they make a classic error of overcompensation. Locke, it occurs, is quite the most garrulous exercise in minimalism I've witnessed in years."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 8, 2013
|
|
5/5
|
88%
|
Under the Skin () |
"
A story that plays as a kind of malarial dream, bathed in cold sweat and seeing hallucinations in every corner."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 3, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
58%
|
The Zero Theorem () |
"
A sagging bag of half-cooked ideas, a dystopian thriller with runaway dysentery, a film that wears its metaphorical trousers around its metaphorical ankles. In fits and starts, I quite enjoyed it."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 2, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
46%
|
Parkland (2013) |
"
If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 2, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
81%
|
The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2014) |
"
I wanted to love it, tried to love it and then went down in flames."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 2, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
78%
|
Night Moves () |
"
Reichardt (the talented director of Old Joy and Meek's Cutoff) takes this volatile story and handles it with care and precision, as if transporting unstable nitroglycerin."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 2, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
93%
|
Philomena (2013) |
"
An ongoing, confounding delight of a film."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 2, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
98%
|
Gravity (2013) |
"
A brilliantly tense and involving account of two stricken astronauts; a howl in the wilderness that sucks the breath from your lungs."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Aug 28, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
50%
|
Looking for Hortense (Cherchez Hortense) () |
"
The performances are tart and tannic, ensuring the film goes out with a graceful dying fall."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Aug 8, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
84%
|
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa () |
"
It's knowing and it's funny, and Coogan's persona remains so perfectly realised that he's able to survive when the plot over-reaches and blows out the levels."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Aug 8, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
38%
|
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) |
"
The kids are charmless, the adults bemused."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Aug 8, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
98%
|
Wadjda (2013) |
"
You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 18, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
100%
|
Les Invisibles () |
"
Gives a face to the unseen and a voice to the inaudible, spinning a sedate, respectful account of the gay rights movement as experienced by its foot soldiers."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 11, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
31%
|
The Lone Ranger (2013) |
"
The Lone Ranger staggers drunkenly from antic comedy to soulful solemnity to bloody horror without ever quite settling, or deciding what it is."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 11, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
72%
|
The Wall (2013) |
"
Julian Roman Pölsler's bewitching debut manages to be at once a creepy sci-fi parable, a feminist Robinson Crusoe and a clear-eyed ode to the wonders of nature experienced in solitude. Walden pond with added wall."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 4, 2013
|
|
1/5
|
9%
|
The Seasoning House (2013) |
"
Hyett earned his reputation as a prosthetics wiz on films like The Descent and The Woman in Black; the human monsters he gives us here might as well be made out of cardboard."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jun 20, 2013
|
|
|
43%
|
Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight () |
"
Frears's drama is harmless; it stings like a butterfly."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 22, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
62%
|
Les salauds (The Bastards) () |
"
I had the sense that Denis's painstaking approach was little more than an act of concealment; that her actual story was thin and tacky and that her elaborate style was precisely that."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 21, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
——
|
Grand Central () |
"
The film has tobacco on its breath and sweat-rings at its armpits, although it's not as brawny as it would have us believe."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 19, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
67%
|
Blood Ties () |
"
I'm not convinced that this hoary, hackneyed old cop-opera is entirely to be trusted ... although it is served with such relish that the fun proves infectious."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 19, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
94%
|
Fruitvale Station (2013) |
"
One has the sense of a man being slowly, surely written back into being."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 17, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
89%
|
The Congress () |
"
It hunts high and low for the human element in a virtual world. And yet for all its modish gestures, there is something endearingly retro about Folman's handling."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 16, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
97%
|
A Hijacking (2013) |
"
Danish director Tobias Lindholm spins an exacting drama out of a crisis on this deft, verite-style account of Somali piracy in the Indian ocean."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted May 9, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
89%
|
Shell () |
"
A hushed and haunting coming-of-age drama, pungently played out in the remote Scottish highlands, where the wind boings off the microphone and passing lorries set the crockery rattling."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Mar 14, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
29%
|
Broken City (2013) |
"
It's stolid, it's dogged, it knows where it's going. Back and forth around the same old scenery."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 28, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
69%
|
Stoker (2013) |
"
Beneath all the silk and powder, it transpires that Stoker is actually nothing more than a schlocky, screeching B-movie; an animated skeleton sent up to spook us. It's at its most entertaining when it shakes off its clothes."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 28, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
66%
|
Mama (2013) |
"
Extended from a 2008 short and starring Jessica Chastain, this has become a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 21, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
93%
|
Lore (2013) |
"
As with all the best fairytales, there is a blackness and brutality at its centre."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 21, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
66%
|
Cloud Atlas (2012) |
"
Unfortunately, these bold ambitions come to naught. They confuse the cosmos with the costume department and wind up lost in a world of wigs and bonnets."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 21, 2013
|
|
4/5
|
98%
|
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God (2012) |
"
A kind of unintentional leaving gift for the outgoing Pope Benedict, though it is not one he is likely to relish."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 14, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
46%
|
Beautiful Creatures (2013) |
"
The plot is wildly silly and shot full of holes, maundering endlessly on its slow trawl towards the climax. But the cast at least play it like they mean it, and keep it honest for a spell."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 14, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
14%
|
A Good Day To Die Hard (2013) |
"
I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Feb 14, 2013
|
|
2/5
|
46%
|
Bullet to the Head (2013) |
"
A wilfully old-fashioned, oddly soothing sprawl of cool cars, heavy weaponry, chain-link fences and cackling crooks."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jan 31, 2013
|
|
3/5
|
74%
|
Rise of the Guardians (2012) |
"
If Rise of the Guardians is finally never more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves have real appeal."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Nov 14, 2012
|
|
3/5
|
92%
|
Skyfall (2012) |
"
Works terrifically well up to a point."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Oct 13, 2012
|
|
4/5
|
75%
|
Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (2012) |
"
Gertten's film deftly lifts the lid on the black ops of 21st-century "brand management". Dole comes out smelling of ordure."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 20, 2012
|
|
4/5
|
66%
|
Spring Breakers (2013) |
"
[Korine] bounces back like a man possessed, rekitted as some 21st-century Russ Meyer, playing disreputable paterfamilias to a fresh breed of supervixens."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 5, 2012
|
|
5/5
|
85%
|
The Master (2012) |
"
Offers catnip for the senses and succour for the soul, riffing lightly off the life of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard to conjure up a film that is both expansive and intimate, confident and self-questioning."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Sep 1, 2012
|
|
4/5
|
88%
|
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) |
"
The dark knight duly rises for the bruising final stanza in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a satisfying saga of revolution and redemption that ends the tale on a note of thunder."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 16, 2012
|
|
2/5
|
63%
|
The Prey (2013) |
"
A rough diamond con on the trail of a serial killer can't outrun this French thriller's weight of familiarity."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 12, 2012
|
|
3/5
|
100%
|
Les géants (The Giants) (2011) |
"
Even the tale's sagging, aimless middle section feels oddly of a piece."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jul 12, 2012
|
|
3/5
|
93%
|
King of Devil's Island (2011) |
"
Robust acting and crisp direction eases the old-rope material through to the inevitable conflagration."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jun 28, 2012
|
|
2/5
|
53%
|
Think Like a Man (2012) |
"
Beware beaming self-publicists bearing relationship advice. Those bold, bright one-liners point the way to a life of abject humiliation."
—
Guardian [UK]
Posted Jun 21, 2012
|
