|
28%
|
The Vow (2012)
|
"Though it's based...on a true story, 'The Vow' comes across as a totally synthetic tearjerker in the Nicholas Sparks mode. "
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
52%
|
Safe House (2012)
|
"Wants to be smart, edgy and exciting. Instead it's dumb, ugly and, despite all the mayhem, curiously dull."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
43%
|
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012)
|
"Perhaps adequate as a surrogate babysitter for parents of pre-teen boys who need a ninety-minute rest from the kids' constant badgering, but is otherwise less engaging than its predecessor. "
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
95%
|
Pina (2011)
|
"Wenders and the Tanztheater company have combined to offer a masterful tribute to Bausch's unique vision, one that's enhanced by 3D."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
63%
|
The Woman in Black (2012)
|
"A gloomy, turgid bore...Radcliffe should have brought along Harry's wand and wished [it] away--or at least off his resume."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
72%
|
Big Miracle (2012)
|
"Manipulative in the extreme but surprisingly enjoyable nonetheless...It's a minor miracle that 'Big Miracle' is as pleasant as it is."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
76%
|
The Innkeepers (2012)
|
"A satisfyingly old-fashioned haunted-house thriller, less about shocks and violence than atmosphere and dread."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
85%
|
Chronicle (2012)
|
"A bargain-basement 'X-Men' with a heavy dose of teen angst told in the all-too-familiar 'found footage' style. [The] final reel...comes across like bad outtakes from 'Superman II.'"
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
99%
|
A Separation (2011)
|
"A quietly lacerating portrait of familial discord that morphs into a wider portrait of society and law...While the setting might be foreign, its concerns are universal."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
93%
|
Coriolanus (2011)
|
"Fiennes' film represents an honorable, and mostly successful, attempt to translate Shakespeare to the screen."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
2%
|
One for the Money (2012)
|
"A muddled, tonally clumsy adaptation of the first of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
32%
|
Man on a Ledge (2012)
|
"Things get so bad at points during 'Man on a Ledge' that you might be inclined to join the more nasty elements among the sidewalk onlookers and shout 'Jump already!'"
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
77%
|
The Grey (2012)
|
"Despite some cliches, it's a mostly gripping survival story, expertly shot and anchored by Neeson's powerful performance."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
53%
|
Albert Nobbs (2012)
|
"By thrusting the story about women who pass themselves off as men in nineteenth-century England into close-up, this film version accentuates its implausibility to fatal effect. "
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
29%
|
Underworld Awakening (2012)
|
"No better or worse than the previous entries in the franchise, which have been uniformly awful. It does, however, possess the virtue of brevity."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
36%
|
Red Tails (2012)
|
"The Tuskegee Airmen are true national heroes, and it's unfortunate that 'Red Tails' should prove such a hokey collection of war movie cliches."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
80%
|
Haywire (2012)
|
"For what it aims to be, 'Haywire' is certainly a success. A pity it doesn't aim to be much more than a brisk, mindless action flick with a butt-kicking heroine."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
——
|
Ride the Divide (2010)
|
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
48%
|
Contraband (2012)
|
"A dull, inert action movie...a shipment it's easy to label return to sender."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
34%
|
Joyful Noise (2012)
|
"When it finally culminates after two hours with a prefabricated stem-winding finale, you may feel like shouting 'Hallelujah!'--but not for the reasons Graff intended."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
15%
|
The Divide (2012)
|
"One of the drearier, more unpleasant pictures to appear in quite some time...you'll feel as trapped watching it as the characters are in the story."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
54%
|
The Iron Lady (2012)
|
"Even a performance as formidable as Streep's can't overcome the unhappy fact that 'The Iron Lady' is a sadly superficial treatment of the life and times of one of the late twentieth century's most influential, and controversial, political figures."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
5%
|
The Devil Inside (2012)
|
"A tired riff on an old formula that loses steam even before its atrocious ending."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
96%
|
Pariah (2011)
|
"Overcomes its flaws to emerge as a sporadically revealing portrait of a young girl's struggle to find herself in a cruelly hostile environment--a promising debut for Rees and a triumph for Oduye."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
45%
|
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2012)
|
"Confuses profundity with bathos, narrative elegance with literary archness and emotional power with sentimental handwringing."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
73%
|
Rampart (2012)
|
"A dour, depressing character study that doesn't so much develop and expand as simply repeat the same points over and over again, to diminishing effect."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
12%
|
The Darkest Hour (2011)
|
"A small-scaled, thoroughly predictable 'War of the Worlds' clone devoid of interest except for its Moscow setting, a few neat visual touches and brevity...this year's lump of cinematic Christmas coal."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
76%
|
War Horse (2011)
|
"Aching to be magical, the picture instead comes off as a 'Wonderful World of Disney' retread on steroids...what might have been heart-on-sleeve becomes bleeding heart instead."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
97%
|
The Artist (2011)
|
"Essentially a stunt, but an expertly executed one that's immensely enjoyable, especially for movie buffs...a nimble, exuberant lark."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
63%
|
We Bought a Zoo (2011)
|
"Nothing more than an old-fashioned, family-friendly tearjerker that's good-natured but not very successful at strumming the heartstrings, which is what it obviously wants to do."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
75%
|
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
|
"It's a visual marvel and, like the Energizer Bunny, never stops going, but in the end proves more exhausting than exhilarating."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
87%
|
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
|
"Justifies its existence by improving on Niels Arden Oplev's serviceable but unspectacular Swedish predecessor, though it can't overcome the flaws of the original book."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
71%
|
Carnage (2011)
|
"Enjoyable enough on the surface, but it's essentially meretricious--so much, in fact, that you'll be a bit ashamed at having had a fairly good time watching it."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
80%
|
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2012)
|
"Despite the degree of control Ramsay exercises, what's likely to stick with you...is the portrait Miller draws of unfathomable malice and Swinton of tortured incomprehension."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
93%
|
Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011)
|
"A big-boned, bombastic summer-style action movie served up as a Christmas treat for fans suffering winter withdrawal pangs for such fare."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
13%
|
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (2011)
|
"The inexplicably popular live action/animated series featuring a bevy of screechy-voiced singing rodents reaches its third--and one fervently hopes, final--installment."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
60%
|
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
|
"An improvement on its 2009 predecessor...Hardly your father's Sherlock Holmes, but...an acceptable action movie in the modern mode."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
77%
|
A Dangerous Method (2011)
|
"Mirrors its title in being--like all of Cronenberg's work--superbly methodical, but also captures the dangerous undercurrents implicit in the understanding of man that Freud and Jung were instrumental in creating."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
82%
|
Young Adult (2011)
|
"A bracing comedy-drama that's a sharp gender-bending dissection of the Peter Pan syndrome."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
84%
|
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
|
"A superb adaptation of a brilliant book, made with...fidelity, care and intelligence."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
83%
|
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby (2011)
|
"Shows little sign of the deep emotional undercurrents one might expect in a son's treatment of his father, but it does present a clear, incisive yet tantalizingly incomplete portrait of a fascinating and complicated man."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
80%
|
Shame (2011)
|
"A viscerally compelling portrait of addiction, but in the end it seems more an intellectual and artistic exercise than a fully-rounded drama."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
22%
|
The Sitter (2011)
|
"A depressing cascade of gross-out humor, slapstick violence, hipster fast-talk and drug gags, to which are added a predictable streak of sentiment and a dollop of cheap enlightenment."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
99%
|
The Interrupters (2011)
|
"Though formally conventional, it carries a powerful message about the reality of life in the inner city and the struggles of thise who live there to break the cycle of violence. "
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
8%
|
New Year's Eve (2011)
|
"The combination of cheap humor and sappy sentiment is all too pat, and...the characters are so cardboard that to call them stock sitcom types would be an insult to situation comedy."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
83%
|
Outrage (2011)
|
"If a bracing brew of criminal connivance and exquisite bloodletting is to your liking, Takeshi certainly provides it."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
61%
|
Young Goethe In Love (2011)
|
"So long as one doesn't take it as a history lesson,...a moderately enjoyable period piece...an exercise in quasi-biography that's engaging in an old-fashioned way."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
78%
|
Melancholia (2011)
|
"All the lovely packaging can't disguise the fact that the movie has far more pretension than profundity."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
97%
|
The Muppets (2011)
|
"A jovial tribute to the spirit of the old television series that's witty without being cynical and warm without going gooey."
|
Frank Swietek
|
|
94%
|
Hugo (2011)
|
"Scorsese's mastery of the medium is evident in every frame of his beguiling adaptation of Brian Selznick's children's book, which is also the director's love letter to the art of cinema itself."
|
Frank Swietek
|
