Authors

Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus

Rating Title | Year Quote Author
93%

Turn Me On, Dammit! (2012)

"Its even-handed treatment of imperfect characters compares quite favorably with mainstream Hollywood stuff like Easy A."

Bryant Frazer

41%

Silent House (2012)

"Despite spending too much screen time sobbing, shrieking, or putting on a game face as the camera peers down her shirt, Elizabeth Olsen comes out ahead. "

Bryant Frazer

80%

Haywire (2012)

"Soderbergh's approach is a little too stripped-down - when you're making a conventional genre movie, the absence of conventional genre elements becomes distracting in itself."

Bryant Frazer

98%

The Artist (2011)

"The Artist plays less like an original take on the early sound era than as fan fiction set in the world of Singin' in the Rain."

Bryant Frazer

78%

A Dangerous Method (2011)

"Scenes built on line after line of historically accurate but awkward, overly mannered dialogue distract and eventually grate."

Bryant Frazer

86%

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

"You get the sense Blomkvist and Salander might march with Occupy Sweden protesters; in its way The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is another movie about the 99 percent."

Bryant Frazer

95%

Pina (2011)

"It's not an overview of Bausch's career or a statement on her art, but a celebration of her work and the dancers who bring it to life."

Bryant Frazer

72%

The Dead (2011)

"You get used to the sight of the slow-moving undead swaying against the film's natural landscapes like half-imagined phantoms, and somehow that makes them more unnerving."

Bryant Frazer

——

Rote Sonne (Red Sun) (1970)

"Puts an alluring, unnerving, yet weirdly dispassionate spin on social unrest in Germany circa 1969."

Bryant Frazer

91%

Tabloid (2011)

"First-tier documentarian Errol Morris finds himself slumming a bit with Tabloid."

Bryant Frazer

88%

X-Men: First Class (2011)

"I'm generally sick of remakes and relaunches and reboots, but this revamped X-Men origin story is kind of fun."

Bryant Frazer

84%

The Tree of Life (2011)

"Terrence Malick is hardly the first filmmaker to show us characters who cry out at the silence of God, but he is perhaps the most unquestionably American."

Bryant Frazer

34%

Hall Pass (2011)

"Sporadically funny, but it wastes a lot of time on dreary clichés."

Bryant Frazer

96%

The Social Network (2010)

"There's a real mischievousness to David Fincher's approach."

Bryant Frazer

——

Soul Patrol (2001)

"Gives off a subtle but unusual vibe that's somehow suggestive of the rifts in South African culture."

Bryant Frazer

100%

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

"Immaculately designed, evocatively photographed, and easy to watch but also spiky, morally complex, and ultimately unsettling."

Bryant Frazer

36%

Repo Chick (2011)

"It shouldn't even be watchable, but writer-director Alex Cox manages to keep the cheese factor low."

Bryant Frazer

73%

The Housemaid (2011)

"The perverse thing is that the film goes down so easily and elegantly, like a fine chocolate and a swig of merlot."

Bryant Frazer

87%

Black Swan (2010)

"Robert Altman's paean to this behind-the-scenes process was affectionately dubbed The Company. Aronofsky's may as well be titled Army of One."

Bryant Frazer

88%

Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) (2011)

"This is one of the great films about film, a master class in performance and character and narrative."

Bryant Frazer

90%

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2011)

"Uncle Boonmee is less a case study in death by degrees than it is a magical and baffling tone poem on the idea of reincarnation."

Bryant Frazer

72%

Enter the Void (Soudain le vide) (2010)

"Full of stimulating, often challenging imagery that's rooted in a kind of sentimentality."

Bryant Frazer

86%

Buried (2010)

"Cleverly written and staged with plenty of wound-up energy, plus a climax that sucks the air out of the theater."

Bryant Frazer

94%

The Town (2010)

"The Town has showcase heist sequences and car chases that avoid the usual pitfalls of over-the-top silliness and/or incoherence."

Bryant Frazer

85%

Easy A (2010)

"The whole affair is PG-13 toothless and TV slick - I kept feeling that the movie was insisting on its own embraceability, and I resisted."

Bryant Frazer

92%

Dogtooth (Kynodontas) (2010)

"Director Giorgos Lanthimos may be influenced by Michael Haneke's clinical approach as well as by David Lynch's affection for the weird."

Bryant Frazer

86%

Inception (2010)

"Christopher Nolan's films are things of beauty, precisely constructed and expertly executed. But you wouldn't want to live there."

Bryant Frazer

55%

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

"In this terrific, magnetic performance, Affleck is a bit charismatic, somewhat awkward, and utterly despicable, all at the same time"

Bryant Frazer

94%

Winter's Bone (2010)

"Strikingly unsentimental. Winter's Bone has no time for backstory, moral lessons, or other cute stuff."

Bryant Frazer

74%

Splice (2010)

"When Splice is in full flower, there's something magnificent about it."

Bryant Frazer

96%

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)

"A treatise on Bad Art and a screed against tone-deaf patterns of consumption that drive trends in the art world."

Bryant Frazer

92%

Vincere (2010)

"Evokes the historical weight of Europe's Fascist tragedy on a small, resolutely humane, scale."

Bryant Frazer

30%

Survival of the Dead (2010)

"This one's really for fans only."

Bryant Frazer

53%

Green Zone (2010)

"This is a kind of experiment, and it's only partly successful. But, set against the most expansive, otherworldly backdrop this side of James Cameron's Pandora, it's an appropriately spooky experience."

Bryant Frazer

83%

The Ghost Writer (2010)

"Too many scenes here are a bit perfunctory, but they're balanced out well enough by the occasional directorial flourish or long moment of nicely sustained tension."

Bryant Frazer

74%

Banlieue 13 - Ultimatum (District 13: Ultimatum) (2009)

"When D13: Ultimatum is firing on all cylinders, it's a bad-ass action movie. When it functions as a delivery mechanism for a social message, it's corny as all hell, but still pleasant enough."

Bryant Frazer

90%

Fish Tank (2010)

"Fish Tank walks well-trod ground, but it's still riveting from start to finish."

Bryant Frazer

42%

Jennifer's Body (2009)

"Jennifer's Body is full of ideas, but it doesn't have much in the way of tonal control."

Bryant Frazer

64%

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

"An invigorating paean to the revelatory powers of entertainment."

Bryant Frazer

88%

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

"Nicolas Cage, a born Hollywood skin-walker, somehow hints at a spiritual dimension to all this lunatic mayhem."

Bryant Frazer

93%

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

"Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't exactly a kids' movie. It's just kid-friendly."

Bryant Frazer

39%

2012 (2009)

"2012 is the expensive, large-scale version of the same spectacle presented by downmarket counterparts like the Final Destination and Saw franchises."

Bryant Frazer

48%

Antichrist (2009)

"For this kind of Satan-in-the-woods scenario, Von Trier is doing a little too much Scenes From a Marriage and not quite enough The Evil Dead."

Bryant Frazer

55%

Hardware (1990)

"They say all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. But if you've got a girl and a killer robot, then you're really onto something."

Bryant Frazer

100%

Playtime (Play Time) (1967)

"Tati is constantly fiddling with his images, constructing sets and placing his camera in exactly the right place to execute a visual transformation of space."

Bryant Frazer

88%

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

"It's a violent wish-fulfillment fantasy, and if such a thing is necessarily immoral, then Inglourious Basterds is immoral. But it's also -- necessarily -- a provocation."

Bryant Frazer

67%

Grace (2009)

"Grimaces its way through 85 long, low-key minutes just to marvel again and again that, gosh, mommies really love their babies."

Bryant Frazer

87%

Flammen & Citronen (Flame & Citron) (The Flame and the Lemon) (2008)

"Despite the panache, Flame & Citron maintains a generally dour sensibility."

Bryant Frazer

7%

Ghosted (2009)

"A blandly romantic drama with just the whiff of the otherworldly about it."

Bryant Frazer

55%

Orphan (2009)

"Its many outright depictions of children in jeopardy are scary, but its marital drama is even more unsettling."

Bryant Frazer

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