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51 Birch Street (2006) |
"A deeply self-indulgent picture that exemplifies the worst, navel-gazing preoccupations of so many contemporary documentarians." |
Kevin Koehler |
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A Nos Amours (1983) |
"The meandering quarrels, beatings, and post-coital chit-chats all have the feel of work-shopping actors being put through an exercise rather than real life, even the life of a sexually-obsessed French person." |
Kevin Koehler |
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A Scanner Darkly (2006) |
"Perhaps we are sick only so someone can sell us the cure." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Ace in the Hole (1951) |
"As a filmmaker, the problem with being ahead of your time is that most audiences/critics/quasi-Luddites won't like your movie." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Atonement (2007) |
"I have little doubt that this all worked a lot better in the book." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Babel (2006) |
"With some irony, the byzantine Babel is the one that babbles, speaking without actually saying much of anything." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Back to the Future (1985) |
"I'm tempted to call Back to the Future one of the more subversive films about the Reagan era, but that would imply intent. I honestly don't believe Robert Zemeckis knew what he was making." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Bad Timing (1980) |
"Roeg has taken what is a relatively mundane plot, a few uninspiring characters, added some bizarrely sordid plot developments, placed this whole unappetizing concoction in a food processor and let rip." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Beauty and the Beast (1946) |
"It doesn't make much sense, and it's not supposed to: the picture is surrealist in its truest sense, governed by dream logic." |
Kevin Koehler |
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A Canterbury Tale (1944) |
"What a peculiar little film this is." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Children's Hour (1962) |
"Of course, you try to critique the film they made, not the one you would have preferred. This being said, you rather wish they'd picked a different lie." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) |
"Often what makes films great are the questions they pose, not the ones they solve. Chloe in the Afternoon is full of questions." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Claire Dolan (1998) |
"This world is an ominous place and few people are made more aware of it than the titular Claire Dolan." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Clean, Shaven (1995) |
"Clean, Shaven is most effective when we're forced to reexamine our own preconceived notions about mental illness." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Cloverfield (2008) |
"Scenes featuring the monster are oddly the most realistic." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Coffy (1973) |
"Like Russ Meyer, [director Jack] Hill doesn't empower women so much as act out his fantasies about large-chested women who can beat him up." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Courage of Lassie (1946) |
"Imagine Lassie goes off to war... Lassie returning home shell-shocked, twisted by his war-time experiences. Imagine a judge orders Lassie put down. A courtroom trial. Lassie defended by the Wizard of Oz." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Da Vinci Code (2006) |
"The filmmaking here is at times inexcusably awkward and clumsy." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Das Boot (1982) |
"Das Boot, first and foremost, is an action film - but not an always engaging one." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Dazed and Confused (1993) |
"Blissful, prelapsian adolescent endangerment, familiar to a bygone era before the country became so uptight about everything and anything that could maybe, possibly, under the right circumstances, kill you." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Departed (2006) |
"Freud claimed the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis. Scorsese goes about proving him wrong." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) |
"The Devil and Daniel Johnston would have you believe its titular documentary subject...is insane and a genius. I'm only sure that one of these is true." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Double Life of Veronique (1991) |
"There are other worlds besides the one we think we see, ones that might have been and still could be, and in these worlds we can be the people whom we hoped we would." |
Kevin Koehler |
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A Fistful of Dollars (1964) |
"If this is blasphemy in certain quarters, then so be it. No masterpiece, Dollars is highly regarded for reasons generally outside its own artistic merits." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Fitzcarraldo (1982) |
"Werner Herzog sure has a soft spot for obsessive idealists engaged in hopelessly enormous tasks." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Foxy Brown (1974) |
"Like Russ Meyer, [director Jack] Hill doesn't empower women so much as act out his fantasies about large-chested women who can beat him up." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006) |
"Unfortunately, the romanticism of Fur falls flat - a miscast Kidman trying to pretend Robert Downey Jr.'s foul-mouthed wolfman is dangerous and sexy. He is neither." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Golden Compass (2007) |
"More thought seems to have went into providing grist for future [sequels] that have not been made than the film that was." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Gremlins (1984) |
"Either the slyest satire of consumerism you will ever see or a filmmaker, reared on action figures and electric trains, acting out his childhood fantasies of being locked in a department store at night." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Grey Gardens (1976) |
"Just as people like the wrong movies for the wrong reasons, people can like the right movies with similar faulty logic." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Grindhouse (2007) |
"I almost feel bad for Robert Rodriguez, insofar as he has the misfortune to make a generally entertaining feature only to have it eclipsed by some sublime genre work by Quentin Tarantino." |
Kevin Koehler |
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A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) |
"Despite such rarely-observed hubris, first-time filmmaker [Dito] Montiel managed to make a strong motion picture." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Gung Ho (1986) |
"If Assan Motors wants their employees to to act like Japanese people, why not build the plant in Japan?" |
Kevin Koehler |
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Half Nelson (2006) |
"Gosling's fashioned a very special performance that carries the picture on its back, saving it from its worst intentions." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Happy Feet (2006) |
"Happy Feet, the dark tale of one flightless bird's struggle against cultural orthodoxy and the marine harvesting industry." |
Kevin Koehler |
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High Sierra (1941) |
"It's not a great film... There are some great moments, though." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Idiocracy (2006) |
"Idiocracy is polemic in search of a punch line or plot, and often finding neither." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Imagine Me & You (2006) |
"Not to completely bash this trifle of a movie, as I'm sure writer/director Ol Parker is an entertaining gentleman at parties, but it really is emblematic of everything that is wrong with current independent filmmaking." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Inland Empire (2006) |
"Does David Lynch know he's weird?" |
Kevin Koehler |
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Jesus Camp (2006) |
"Jesus Camp [is] one of the most frightening films of 2006." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Juno (2007) |
"It's not as good as you heard." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Kicking & Screaming (1995) |
"Kicking and Screaming is really about the biggest things there are: our dreams in a lonely, chaotic world where we think we know God, only to find He's not so much dead as just not answering the phone." |
Kevin Koehler |
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L'Enfant (2006) |
"There is a very short list of films that have actually made me physically ill. It's not necessarily a bad thing." |
Kevin Koehler |
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La Bête Humaine (1938) |
"A film that doesn't just feature the darker elements of our carnal natures, but is consumed by them." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Lady in the Water (2006) |
"A director's love letter to himself, the martyred, fashionably-dressed messiah whose work may someday save the world if only we'd let it." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Last American Virgin (1982) |
"Virgin's mesmeric final moments...are really what elevate the picture from mere cultural curiosity to unheralded subversive brilliance." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Last Kiss (2006) |
"I won't reveal how the whole situation resolves itself, only that there is a musical montage featuring Coldplay...Jacinda Barrett breaks character and speaks in an Australian accent...and some other things happen that...are always happening in movies." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Longest Yard (1974) |
"The Longest Yard asks what it means to be criminal in a system without fairness, where...violence is cloaked in duty and righteousness." |
Kevin Koehler |
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The Maltese Falcon (1941) |
"As great as The Maltese Falcon is, the picture has two fairly significant shortcomings that no one really wants to talk about." |
Kevin Koehler |
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Man Bites Dog (1993) |
"Media doesn't simply reflect who we are - it tells us. It is the mirror but so are we." |
Kevin Koehler |
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