|
——
|
Within Our Gates (1920)
|
"Within Our Gates is full of surprises, following a multitude of characters and plotlines without settling into predictable allegiances."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
95%
|
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
|
"The movie is not a wild river but a humid delta of stagnant frustration and stymied movement, so it's all the more impressive that it's such a gripping spectatorial experience."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
93%
|
The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)
|
"For an audience that takes pleasure in the all-too-rare art of faithful adaptations that vivify rather than embalming their sources [...] Asquith's conservative handling is just what the confirmed and secret Bunburyist ordered."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
92%
|
The Laramie Project (2002)
|
"The Laramie Project is not really about Matthew Shepard but about this question of identification with Matthew, and of identification with the larger community of Laramie that admitted, sustained, eliminated, grieved, and civilly avenged Matthew."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
The Actress (1953)
|
"Sadly, if she was guilty of trying too hard or of trying in the wrong way, Cukor appears totally and uncharacteristically checked out... The Actress exposes the kinds of fraying seams that Cukor was usually so careful to conceal even in tattier projects."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
71%
|
Rumble Fish (1983)
|
"Rumble Fish is like a unisex Sweet 16 gift for children whose favorite hangouts are the pool hall, the Cinématheque Française, and the rings of Saturn."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Tim (1979)
|
"Tim comes close to reproducing the plot of Doubt, in negative-space fashion. That is, for this go-round, we spend all our time with the uncomprehending kid (if he is uncomprehending?) and his teacher-nurturer-desirer."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
67%
|
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
|
"The surprise and also the disappointment of The Long Kiss Goodnight is much simpler, and less politically inflected: it's badly made, or too close to badly made."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
83%
|
The Fountainhead (1949)
|
"The Fountainhead is by turns exciting, handsome, astoundingly awkward, fully committed, untowardly relentless, very strange, and a little creepy in its compulsive watchability."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
100%
|
Gaslight (1940)
|
"So much goes right in this film version, all without sparking a corresponding bump in my enthusiasm, that it's all the more obvious that I find some foundations of this text perennially problematic."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
78%
|
Barfly (1987)
|
"As I write about Barfly, I do seem to be talking myself into greater admiration for it, or at least into a sense of welcome design beneath its superficial inertia."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
75%
|
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
|
""There was no real Peter Sellers"... As a theme, it smells of the tired cop-out, somewhere in the same clubhouse of desiccated phrases as "I love you, but I'm not in love with you" and "In a crazy world, only the mad people are sane.""
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937)
|
"In Rainer's case, The Emperor's Candlesticks seems unusually revealing, doffing the dropcloth from exactly the sort of peculiar, temporarily arresting artifact she was, guaranteed to inspire buyer's remorse."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
74%
|
Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (1998)
|
"I started watching the film by thinking, "They should film more of the comedies," and probably They still should, but I ended by thinking, "They really ought to hire movie directors to make movies.""
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Heroes for Sale (1933)
|
"A Pre-Code Battle in Seattle... Heroes for Sale is not a perfect film, and not particularly interested in perfection, but really and truly, pretend this isn't a cliché: they don't make 'em like this anymore."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
67%
|
The Little Drummer Girl (1984)
|
"Stark criticisms are unavoidable, even as I'm forced to admit that the film is one of those wrongly-assembled movies that is built on such an unusual Hollywood premise...that it eventually becomes halfway fascinating."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
The Glass Menagerie (1950)
|
"The Glass Menagerie has a lot going for it, even if director Irving Rapper (Now, Voyager) misses several opportunities to take the characters deeper."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
69%
|
sleep furiously. (2011)
|
"A certain polite withholding, even if it masks some firm conviction or desire, seems to be a coin of the realm in Trefeurig, so it may well be apt that Koppel often films in a register very close to this one."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
100%
|
Cactus (1987)
|
"A qualified accomplishment ... Part and parcel of its limitations, though, is Cactus's genuine will to stand apart, offering rich textures and unexpected pleasures."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Esther (1985)
|
"Merging straight Biblical storytelling with modern gimmicks, Amos Gitai half-succeeds at both... Even when he stutters or flaunts his affectations, you cannot write him off as having nothing to say."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Ópera do Malandro (Malandro) (1986)
|
"Ópera do Malandro is way more Love's Labour's Lost than Moulin Rouge!, both in formal execution and in its awkward orientation to World War II. The film means to be ersatz but perhaps not this much."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
29%
|
Max My Love (Max Mon Amour) (1996)
|
"If you've wondered what kind of continental TV pilot Sherwood Schwartz might have devised from watching Zoo, here's your answer."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
93%
|
She's Gotta Have It (1986)
|
"Light, scrappy entertainment that flatters everything funky and fresh about Lee, tempting you to forgive what is stunted or abrasive in the film. A major swaying element is his own on-screen persona."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
85%
|
The Decline of the American Empire (Le Déclin de l'Empire Américain) (1986)
|
"What Arcand has devised is a kind of Nia Vardalos movie in tenured-faculty clothing: Our Big Fat Bourgeois Salon ... It trades only the crudest ironies and screenwriting mechanics."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
83%
|
Offret (The Sacrifice) (1986)
|
"Visually potent ... humblingly vast ... [and yet] the movie oscillates between compelling our thunderstruck confidence and testing our patience with unfulfilled promise and highbrow clichés."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
80%
|
Tenue de Soirée (Evening Dress) (Ménage) (1986)
|
"Quite funny for the first half and deeply weird for the second, with a laudable courage of its own bizarre conviction throughout, even as it reveals a nasty undertone."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
89%
|
After Hours (1985)
|
"[Scorsese's] tendency toward hollow showboating has rarely been more in evidence ... Ends as a tolerable but annoyingly atonal exercise made by artists with little if anything on their minds."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
96%
|
Mona Lisa (1986)
|
"The bracing peaks of image, acting, and narrative architecture handily win the day over a scenario that always feels more like a willfully engineered exercise than a fully plausible reality."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar (Love Me Forever or Never) ()
|
"Love Me Forever or Never may be more committed to its bright, calico surface and its abrupt transitions in focus and tone than it is to the relations between the two people on screen."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
75%
|
Fool for Love (1985)
|
"The basic friction between Altman's lightness and Shepard's portentousness serves the movie in rich and ever-expanding ways, and not just because you can't ever predict how the narrative will swerve."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
71%
|
Hanna (2011)
|
"The movie feels alive in a thrilling way, sometimes even a funny way, even when its thrills are cheap, confused, or diaphanous."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Scream of the Ants ()
|
"This side of Makhmalbaf is exhilarating at its best but still feels essential at its petulant and shapeless worst."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
93%
|
Lourdes (2010)
|
"The withholding of judgment persists across Lourdes, which is comic, haunting, sweet, pious, unsettling, agnostic, and wholly deadpan at various moments."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
87%
|
Black Swan (2010)
|
"Why tell this story in such elaborate terms? And why coax Nina just barely out from beneath her mother's thumb, only to pinion her just as harshly underneath Aronofsky's?"
|
Nick Davis
|
|
73%
|
The Housemaid (2011)
|
"The Housemaid just feels rudely conceived, unresolved, and maybe a little confused about which among its many ideas and impulses are the most interesting."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
71%
|
Never Let Me Go (2010)
|
"Strangely, Romanek often feels disarmed of exactly these vital organs that might have made him a sturdy, sharp renderer of this story. One senses he's too saddened by the tale he is spinning to take a risk on a demanding image."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
97%
|
Mugabe and the White African (2010)
|
"The filmmakers leave massive and sometimes reactionary holes in a film that could easily have pled a more accommodating and sophisticated yet equally airtight case."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
71%
|
Valhalla Rising (2010)
|
"I appreciate Refn for pushing against conventions of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some grand, over-arching abstraction."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
73%
|
The Last Exorcism (2010)
|
"Any film that forges as unruly a connection as this one does with its audience deserves some applause, especially when the film belongs to a genre where all too many of its peers come across as rote or as thoughtlessly, remorselessly heartless."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
90%
|
Lebanon (Levanon) (2010)
|
"Not all films that attempt to govern their audiences so strictly, or so overtly advertise their own architectures of form and theme, have nearly the punch that Lebanon does."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
86%
|
The Square (2010)
|
"The Square gets plenty of early elements in place to promise something more special than it ultimately becomes... Even a strong first impression can't survive such a flailing resolution."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
58%
|
Make Out With Violence (2011)
|
"Builds a real air of mystery around the captive girl, what she is, what she is or isn't capable of doing, and what we're invited to feel about her or her caretaker-captors... Made with real filmmaking flair."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
92%
|
Only When I Dance (Vida Ballet) (2010)
|
"It becomes impossible to take Only When I Dance seriously as more than the superficial account of a frustratingly tentative bystander."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
——
|
Borom Sarret (1963)
|
"Sembene's early short film encapsulates everything that is angry, witty, pellucid, and healthily, uncynically skeptical about his cinema."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
97%
|
Animal Kingdom (2010)
|
"Almost every scene in Animal Kingdom includes some shot, some edit or avoidance of edit, some lighting effect, some performance gesture, or some sound element that breaks the scene out of the simplest grooves it might have obeyed."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
81%
|
Cairo Time (2010)
|
"A reflective, surprisingly subtle piece about character and about location, when I had expected either a completely anodyne travelogue or a dogmatic, 'Yes'-style disquisition."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
89%
|
Alle Anderen (Everyone Else) (2010)
|
"Maren Ade's sophisticated, incisive storytelling relies not on screaming matches but on the leads' marvelous attunement to each other, the ways in which they snag on the barest flickers of intimated feeling in each other's performances."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
74%
|
Greenberg (2010)
|
"Greenberg is inevitably, productively divisive in tone and topical focus-and this in itself strikes me as a good thing-but you cannot say the filmmakers aren't trying to use all the resources available to the form."
|
Nick Davis
|
|
69%
|
Life During Wartime (2010)
|
"Life During Wartime is what you'd get if you watched Happiness and thought, 'I like it, but I wish it were more pitiless. And uglier.'"
|
Nick Davis
|
|
62%
|
Salt (2010)
|
"Shame about the nonsense at the front end and the dunderheaded ending, but the middle act was worth the ticket price."
|
Nick Davis
|
73%
21%
63%
85%
46%
40%
