|
71%
|
Natural Selection (2012)
|
"The loser junkie and the chaste Christian lady make an odd couple, in an odd film, but the oddity gives way to an effortless, persuasive charm. They give us something to believe in."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
77%
|
The Other F Word (2011)
|
"These cute little domestic interludes give The Other F Word a light humor and large awwwww factor that's unavoidable, understandable and entirely un-punk."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
24%
|
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)
|
"Breaking Dawn - Part 1 and the upcoming Part 2 were both directed by Dreamgirls' Bill Condon, who keeps the lunacy moving apace."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
78%
|
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (2008)
|
|
|
|
47%
|
Anonymous (2011)
|
"The digitally wrought period settings are simply gorgeous."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
84%
|
Puss in Boots (2011)
|
"Puss in Boots prances along on three basic truths. One, cats are funny. Two, vain Spanish cats in high-heeled musketeer boots are even funnier. Lastly, booted, vain Spanish cats voiced by a breathy Antonio Banderas are flat-out hilarious."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
33%
|
Texas Killing Fields (2011)
|
"The characters will be familiar to fans of police procedural shows and TV movies."
|
Lana Berkowitz
|
|
40%
|
The Big Year (2011)
|
"Its charms are as small as its singing feathered friends, but they're real enough, and gentle enough, to lift it and give it flight."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
41%
|
Straw Dogs (2011)
|
"[It] doesn't bring anything new to the table."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
17%
|
I Don't Know How She Does It (2011)
|
"Spiffy-looking, well-intentioned but ultimately witless."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
14%
|
Seven Days In Utopia (2011)
|
"Supporting bits, like the saintly love interest played by Deborah Ann Woll, function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood characters in a lively story."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
58%
|
Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011)
|
"The film looks good, it sounds great (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders' score is full of darkly murmuring woodwinds), and Madison is a pip of a lead."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
95%
|
The Guard (2011)
|
"Crisp, acid-tongued and sharply acted, it's the sort of exercise in tangy Celtic cynicism that's become one of the Emerald Isle's most reliable imports."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
64%
|
Another Earth (2011)
|
"In emphasizing poetry over plot, mood over mechanics, Another Earth fails to answer the most pressing question of all: Umm, why haven't the tides been affected?"
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
60%
|
Glee: The 3D Concert Movie (2011)
|
"The layers of artifice are many, but they always are; the original show has never aspired to be anything but a cheeky, tuneful and multicultural spin on hoary high school stereotypes."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
25%
|
The Change-Up (2011)
|
"Pee-pee humor abounds in The Change-Up. There's also a lot of poo-poo humor. And ta-ta humor."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
76%
|
The Help (2011)
|
"A splendid entertainment -- a film that makes us for root for the good guys, hiss at the bad and convulse in laughter when good wreaks vengeance with a smile."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
79%
|
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
|
"Scrawny Steve is such a guileless and likeable little dude that his sweetness endures long past the super-sizing."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
96%
|
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011)
|
"Well done, Harry! You've saved the best for last."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
84%
|
A Better Life (2011)
|
"It's straight, true and heartbreaking, a masterstroke of raw emotional minimalism."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
36%
|
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
|
"Bay provides his usual Bayisms: bloated close-ups, manly slo-mo, visual hyperbole and glamour shots of a hot babe standing amid the wreckage."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
87%
|
Submarine (2011)
|
"An exercise in briny Welsh Weltzschmerz that tracks the inner and outer worlds of a confused teenage boy."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
44%
|
Bad Teacher (2011)
|
"The best lines were harvested for the trailer -- so if you've seen that, you've seen it all."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
18%
|
The Art of Getting By (2011)
|
"Even slumped over Camus, Highmore's a charmer -- and he carries the movie well on his slim shoulders."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
26%
|
Green Lantern (2011)
|
"Half-campy, half-compelling."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
76%
|
Rejoice & Shout (2011)
|
"Footage from that golden era still makes Rejoice & Shout worthwhile, from the groups that created variations on the barbershop quartets to competing ensembles from the South that were formed at schools for the blind. It is moving stuf."
|
Andrew Dansby
|
|
19%
|
Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer (2011)
|
"[A] canned piece of so-called family entertainment, which slathers on the bright colors and peppy eccentricity but fails to capture the books' childlike voice and essential, grumbling charm."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
77%
|
In A Better World (2011)
|
"Susanne Bier's latest meditation on grief and the boundaries of family -- which won this year's foreign-film Oscar -- is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
88%
|
X-Men: First Class (2011)
|
"Uneven, occasionally silly -- true, but it's still an improvement over 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
34%
|
The Hangover Part II (2011)
|
"Despite all the similarities, despite the same madcap plotting and hysterically unhinged comic filth, The Hangover Part II veers into much darker territory."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
38%
|
Skateland (2011)
|
"Like so many other films set in the Reagan era, Anthony Burns' directorial debut fails to acknowledge the lingering and pervasive angst that shaped anyone growing up in the late Cold War."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
90%
|
Bridesmaids (2011)
|
"A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
55%
|
Jumping the Broom (2011)
|
"True, the script overreaches, crammed with too many characters, subplots and stereotypes. But at least it's trying. And at least there isn't a phony in the bunch."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
77%
|
Thor (2011)
|
"The visuals are breathtaking without it, all swirling cosmic nebulae and mythic cityscapes of the Norse-god capital Asgard."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
34%
|
Prom (2011)
|
"They're a ridiculously cute pair and ridiculously at odds over this whole prom thingy, which is, by its very nature, ridiculous. So the ridiculous quotient is extremely high."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
74%
|
The Big Uneasy (2010)
|
"The Big Uneasy, a damning new look at the onset and effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is agitating by design."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
71%
|
African Cats (2011)
|
"Anyone with a fondness for bambinos of any species should melt at the sight of mamas with nuzzling cubs."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
72%
|
Rio (2011)
|
"The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
26%
|
Your Highness (2011)
|
"The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination -- its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
94%
|
Win Win (2011)
|
"Giamatti excels as the weak-kneed Mike, nicely working his gift for inner conflict and outer bumbling. As his wife, Amy Ryan is a ballast of unflinching moral certitude."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
47%
|
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules (2011)
|
"Rodrick Rules marks an improvement on the original Wimpy Kid, but it still has a mean streak a mile wide."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
70%
|
Limitless (2011)
|
"The visuals are giddy, illustrating Eddie's high with fun house lenses, over-exposed colors, supersonic edits -- and, when side effects kick in, dizzying flights through the streets of New York."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
83%
|
The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)
|
"Lincoln is smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
11%
|
Red Riding Hood (2011)
|
"Red Riding Hood is just another movie about a girl pining for a boy, defined by a boy, held back by a boy. And that's not pretty."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
88%
|
Rango (2011)
|
"The film itself is a magically strange hybrid, a spoofy computer-animated Western acted out by anthropomorphic desert creatures."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
29%
|
Take Me Home Tonight (2011)
|
"very last joke in the movie -- verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves -- is crushingly literal."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
35%
|
The Grace Card (2011)
|
"Movie goers likely will look over The Grace Card's entertainment value to focus on this simple prescription for how to gracefully love your neighbor."
|
Kate Shellnut
|
|
7%
|
Immigration Tango (2011)
|
"A minor, sometimes likable romp through miscellaneous narrative clichés, all of them rendered with the snug medium shots and predetermined character arcs that are coin of the realm on the tube."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
32%
|
I Am Number Four (2011)
|
"Granted, I Am NumberFour is a little better and makes loads more sense than Eagle Eye, Caruso's most recent vehicle for comely young actors in peril. But neither one has the sass and pluck of Disturbia. Watch that instead."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
|
90%
|
My Dog Tulip (2010)
|
"It's an oddity, this film: a wry, wobbly cartoon made expressly for grown-ups, featuring quirky hand-drawn animation and very little dialogue outside the central voiceover."
|
Amy Biancolli
|
73%
78%
61%
52%
26%
4%
