|
93%
|
127 Hours (2010)
|
|
David Thomson
|
|
36%
|
One Day (2011)
|
"One Day is just a gimmicky "new" way of doing an old-fashioned love story. But we'll hear much more of Sturgess, Hathaway, and Lone Scherfig."
|
David Thomson
|
|
93%
|
Midnight in Paris (2011)
|
"Woody Allen attracts promising players and does nothing with them."
|
David Thomson
|
|
97%
|
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
|
|
Otis Ferguson
|
|
97%
|
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
|
|
Otis Ferguson
|
|
98%
|
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
|
"An appealing film this new one is, with some charm, some glee in the childrens' triumphs, some share in their friendship with E.T."
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
54%
|
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
|
"In a perverse but amusing way, Money Never Sleeps sometimes seems like film noir for CNBC junkies."
|
Matt Zoller Seitz
|
|
99%
|
Metropolis (1927)
|
|
David Thomson
|
|
75%
|
Invictus (2009)
|
"[T]he epitome of Hollywood filmmaking in ways both good and bad: uplifting, overlong, ambitious in scope but simple in moral vision, well-crafted but inured to irony."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
91%
|
Up in the Air (2009)
|
"Reitman has given us a witty, elegant movie that is nonetheless, like its protagonist, somewhat aloof from the vicissitudes experienced by mere mortals."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
89%
|
Red Cliff (Chi Bi) (2009)
|
"The biggest film of the year opens this week, though you may be forgiven if you haven't heard about it, as it has committed the unpardonable sin of being in Chinese."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
93%
|
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
|
"The same eye for immaculate compositions that had seemed increasingly to hem in his human actors here serves as the basis for some of the most inventive animated set pieces this side of Nick Park."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
75%
|
The Road (2009)
|
"Is the film too grim? Or not grim enough? In a perverse way, I fear it's both."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
28%
|
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)
|
"A landmark cinematic event in 280 words, or one for every $500,000 of weekend box office."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
87%
|
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
|
"Making a bad movie this good is harder than it looks."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
91%
|
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)
|
"[I]f Precious has a crucial flaw, it is that it is at once too bleak and too hopeful in its closing scenes: too bleak in the history it unearths, and too hopeful that the mere fact of the unearthing will make that history go away."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
39%
|
2012 (2009)
|
"[J]ust as the cyclones and tsunamis of The Day After Tomorrow ultimately succumbed to a bad case of narrative frostbite, 2012's ludicrous thrills begin burning themselves out by the movie's midpoint."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
94%
|
La Nana (The Maid) (2009)
|
"How discomfiting it is to see a good film from a country that is low on any list of film-producing nations."
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
100%
|
Rembrandt's J'accuse (2008)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
94%
|
The Damned United (2009)
|
"One of [its] primary pleasures...is that, in choosing a topic as narrow and parochial as the fate of an English soccer club, Morgan has relieved himself of any duty to persuade us that the events he describes are of world-historical import."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
73%
|
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
|
"Where the Wild Things Are may not be a great film for children (or, at least, most children). But it is something rarer still: a great, and unsparing, film about childhood."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
89%
|
A Serious Man (2009)
|
"Humor and empathy alike have trouble flourishing in the grim narrative soil the Coens provide, in which every cosmic joke is a black one."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
90%
|
Zombieland (2009)
|
"[E]verything Jennifer's Body was not--fast, funny, and fully aware of the obligations and opportunities inherent in the genre."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
25%
|
Fame (2009)
|
"Way back in 1980, when the Oscar-winning theme song of the movie Fame declared "I'm gonna live forever," it was easy to believe the lyric was an example of artistic license. Now, it's not so clear."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
78%
|
The Informant! (2009)
|
"[Damon] occupies his equivocating antihero utterly, capturing the Walter Mittyish self-delusion, the desperate desire to please, and the bottomless conviction that, whatever his transgressions, he's still one of the good guys."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
43%
|
Jennifer's Body (2009)
|
"[T]here's something a bit sour about the whole enterprise, a lack of fun that becomes more evident as the injuries and indignities piled upon poor Needy accumulate, and gradually crowd out the film's early tongue-in-cheekiness."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
76%
|
Our City Dreams (2008)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
44%
|
Tussenstand (Stages) (2007)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
91%
|
Gomorrah (Gomorra) (2008)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
74%
|
Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos) (2009)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
48%
|
La Fille de Monaco (The Girl from Monaco) (2009)
|
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
63%
|
Extract (2009)
|
"[Extract] resembles its titular foodstuffs: less a fully realized comedy than the distillation of one. The ingredients are there, and the recipe as well, but Judge evidently forgot that the whole dish still needed cooking."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
88%
|
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
|
"The true moral universe in which the film unfolds is that of the spaghetti westerns...: a world in which the strong are above the law and the way to tell the good guys from the bad guys is not by their acts but by the kind of hats they wear."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
82%
|
Bakjwi (Thirst) (2009)
|
"[U]nlike most exercises in hematic excess--Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance, or Tarantino's Kill Bill--Thirst offers not the consolations of camp but the intensity of opera."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
——
|
Thirst (1979)
|
"[U]nlike most exercises in hematic excess--Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance, or Tarantino's Kill Bill--Thirst offers not the consolations of camp but the intensity of opera."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
91%
|
District 9 (2009)
|
"District 9 succeeds brilliantly as an exercise in style, but the style promises a level of substance the film never quite delivers."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
33%
|
G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (2009)
|
"Sometimes, a film defies conventional narrative and artistic standards so utterly that it seems unfair to judge it by them.... Consider this a tone poem in 40 scraps of dialogue."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
75%
|
Julie & Julia (2009)
|
"[T]he whole enterprise has a whiff of marketing to it. Did the filmmakers worry that Child wouldn't be 'relatable' to contemporary women? Was there a fear that the 18-35 demographic would decline to show up if it didn't have an onscreen representative?"
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
68%
|
Funny People (2009)
|
"The movie...feels like the work of an artist in transition, an attempt by Apatow to see how far he can push his foul-mouthed bromances toward earnest drama before finally having to let go of the dick jokes."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
13%
|
The Ugly Truth (2009)
|
"I think it's safe to say that the concerns about sexism in cinema that Heigl voiced so ardently after her career-making turn in Knocked Up have ebbed in direct proportion to the increases in her subsequent paychecks."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
97%
|
The Hurt Locker (2009)
|
"Like her protagonist, Bigelow is both a meticulous technician and a ballsy showoff. And, like him, she has ice water in her veins."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
87%
|
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
|
"Captures with such immediacy the elation and anxiety of new love, the tingle and the terror, the profound sense that you have never been more alive and the occasional wish that you could die on the spot."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
67%
|
Brüno (Bruno) (2009)
|
"It's an odd cop-out for so fiercely gifted a comedian.... This is not a man who is doomed to be Allen Funt, or for that matter, Ashton Kutcher. He doesn't need to rely on the easy titillations and voyeuristic pull of reality TV."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
67%
|
Public Enemies (2009)
|
"If John Dillinger had not existed... Michael Mann would have had to invent him."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
20%
|
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
|
"If it sounds as though the script (credited to Ehren Kruger, Robert Orci, and Alex Kurtzman) was written in serial-novel form during an all-night mescaline bender, well, I have no evidence that it was not."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
90%
|
Séraphine (2009)
|
"Provost has made a picture that is almost biblical in its simplicity and its passion."
|
Stanley Kauffmann
|
|
67%
|
Away We Go (2009)
|
"You may very well enjoy Away We Go more than I did. But rest assured that you will never love this movie as much as it loves itself."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
50%
|
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)
|
"Pelham is not merely a film that may induce seizures in those who are susceptible; it is a film that seems engineered to approximate the experience of a seizure for those who are not."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
64%
|
The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
|
"There are layers upon layers here--a porn star taking on a serious acting role in which she plays a woman whose job is to make herself an object of male fantasy--but it's unclear whether Grey is aware of any of them."
|
Christopher Orr
|
|
98%
|
Up (2009)
|
"[A] kid's adventure yarn embedded in a grownup tale about grief and regret, purposes lost and rediscovered."
|
Christopher Orr
|
