|
90%
|
Zombieland (2009)
|
"Woody Harrelson has a rip-roaring time in this comic splatterfest as a redneck from hell who is out to kill zombies. It's the kind of genre acting that doesn't get much notice, but it's a gleeful rampage of a performance."
|
Bruce Diones
|
|
98%
|
Let the Right One In (2008)
|
"A remarkably moving horror tale, about a pale, bullied twelve-year-old boy (Kåre Hedebrant) and his first love (Lina Leandersson), who happens to be a vampire."
|
Bruce Diones
|
|
89%
|
Let Me In (2010)
|
"The result, though no less creepy than the Swedish film, mislays its lyricism and otherworldliness."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
92%
|
The Devil's Backbone (El Espinazo del diablo) (2001)
|
"Del Toro's elegant pacing and gothic touches imbue the proceedings with a cool mystery."
|
Bruce Diones
|
|
87%
|
28 Days Later (2003)
|
"The picture is twitchy and annoying, flecked with blood and half-digested ideas, and too much is left unexplained."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
97%
|
Gravity (2013)
|
"Gravity is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick's techno-mystical 2001, but it's an overwhelming physical experience -- a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread."
|
David Denby
|
|
89%
|
The Immigrant ()
|
"The ambient fury of the director James Gray's teeming historical drama is built into the very fabric of his tensely unbalanced wide-screen images."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
50%
|
Thanks For Sharing (2013)
|
"Be warned: viewers may experience a violent urge to shake the characters, one by one, and tell them to get a life."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
——
|
Când se lasa seara peste Bucuresti sau metabolism (When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism) ()
|
"With the dry wit of his shrewdly repressed long takes, Porumboiu puts dialectic front and center and speculates on the artistic implications of digital technology, even as he turns to medical imaging for some outrageously moist comedy."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
80%
|
I Used To Be Darker (2013)
|
"A lyrical ballad on an intimate scale but international in scope."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
88%
|
Rush (2013)
|
"If you don't already know the story of that season, lucky you; even now, it exerts a ridiculous thrill."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
100%
|
Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But ) (Children of Tokyo) (1932)
|
"[I Was Born, But . . .] is a master class -- one of the [Ozu's] earliest -- in the art of distilling emotional intensity from quiet lives."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
82%
|
Don Jon (2013)
|
"The movie takes a roundhouse punch at male shallowness, but Jon, in and out of his clothes, is not an interesting enough man to be emblematic of anything."
|
David Denby
|
|
——
|
Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon (Nobody's Daughter Hae-Won) ()
|
"The title and setup of the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo's ironically romantic drama are a scintillating ruse."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
95%
|
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
|
"The enduring fascination of this 1938 screwball comedy is due to much more than its uproarious gags."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
75%
|
Antoine et Antoinette (2013)
|
"The director Jacques Becker laces this snappy, sentimental comic melodrama, from 1947, with streetwise details, from the stress and danger of factory work to the wiles of philandering housewives."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
34%
|
Salinger (2013)
|
"Salinger is self-important, redundant, and interminable."
|
David Denby
|
|
81%
|
Prisoners (2013)
|
"A sombrely impressive thriller in the style of Mystic River and Zodiac."
|
David Denby
|
|
78%
|
Good Ol' Freda (2013)
|
"[A] warmhearted documentary portrait ..."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
——
|
Soft In The Head ()
|
"Nathan Silver's raucous, disturbing new film is a shrewdly conceived yet emotionally unhinged blend of uproarious situations and devastating outcomes."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
91%
|
Our Nixon (2013)
|
"[A] shrewdly edited collection of news footage and "home movies" taken by members of the Nixon White House staff ..."
|
David Denby
|
|
——
|
A Girl in Every Port (1928)
|
"Hawks was a master of time, with slow builds that leap dizzyingly ahead in the flash of a glance; the unstable pace keeps the action balanced on the sharp edge of tragedy and comedy-and, in the years to come, he'd use this setup for both."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
95%
|
Enough Said (2013)
|
"What matters is Gandolfini, whose languid, burry diction and Buddha-like poise set the simplest lines and deeds spinning with life-worn worlds of feeling."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
87%
|
The Thing from Another World (1951)
|
"Set the template for a decade of alien invasions."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
98%
|
Wadjda (2013)
|
"This is not just the first feature by Haifaa Al Mansour but the first feature to be directed by a woman from Saudi Arabia. That is quite a burden, and yet by some miracle the movie bears it with lightness and grace."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
33%
|
Jayne Mansfield's Car (2013)
|
"There's a terrific movie struggling to escape from this overplotted, overedited, overdetermined stew ..."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
60%
|
Riddick (2013)
|
"David Twohy's film is scarcely original, but the sheer survivalist grind of our hero, against comical odds, becomes appealingly mad ..."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
93%
|
Philomena (2013)
|
"We prepared ourselves for an emotional explosion-not for physical violence, but for that of a bursting heart-and yet, when the time came, that is not what happened. Frears put the pin back in the grenade, as it were."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
54%
|
Lovelace (2013)
|
"Seyfried, with her huge features crowding her small face, looks like Alice in a very strange Wonderland. But whatever possibilities she may have as an actress are eradicated by the filmmakers ..."
|
David Denby
|
|
73%
|
Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)
|
"A high-minded, didactic, but irresistible entertainment ..."
|
David Denby
|
|
34%
|
Passion (2013)
|
"Despite De Palma's lavish proof of what he can accomplish with classical technique, the movie comes off as too much for too little, a collection of mechanisms that decorate mechanisms."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
23%
|
A Teacher (2013)
|
"The script offers neither verbal illuminations nor practical insights, neither psychology nor morality, and the plot is little more than the reportorial backstory to a tabloid headline."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
100%
|
Salvatore Giuliano (1962)
|
"The scenes have a raw, newsreel poetry."
|
Michael Sragow
|
|
31%
|
Austenland (2013)
|
"Everything rings false, and the spectacle of bad actors pretending to be bad actors may trouble your sleep for some time."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
100%
|
Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932)
|
"[The film conjures] inexplicable dread, on a night that feels brighter than day."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
100%
|
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
|
"The cinema's first modernist... was the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. As his most famous work, Battleship Potemkin, from 1925, shows, his analytical, quasi-scientific methods bore the mark of both aesthetic and political upheavals."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
96%
|
Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens) (Nosferatu the Vampire) (1922)
|
"The metaphysical style is most vividly rendered by Murnau's obsessive use of point-of-view shots, which force a viewer to follow the characters into the abyss of their terrifying visions."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
80%
|
True Heart Susie (1919)
|
"The psychological subtlety of the silent cinema owes much to a complex visual grammar that D. W. Griffith employed to tell surprisingly old-fashioned stories."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
100%
|
Abraham Lincoln (1930)
|
"D. W. Griffith's first sound film, from 1930, is as ungainly and majestic as its subject."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
100%
|
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
|
"Problematically, Birth of a Nation wasn't just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art -- in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
81%
|
Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013)
|
"The feel of the movie is intimate and handmade, as if Lowery were renewing, lovingly and poignantly, the landscape's ruined landmarks and infusing them with his own memories and dreams."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
80%
|
Drinking Buddies (2013)
|
"This brisk and exuberant comedy, directed by Joe Swanberg, is powered by a strong current of romantic melancholy."
|
Richard Brody
|
|
94%
|
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
|
"Jonathan Demme's thriller is artful pulp -- tabloid material treated with intelligence and care and a weird kind of sensitivity."
|
Terrence Rafferty
|
|
88%
|
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
|
"Sure, it's compelling; the nature of the material guarantees that. But it doesn't seem to be telling us much more than that the world is a scary place and murder is ugly. We knew those things. This is tabloid chic."
|
Terrence Rafferty
|
|
84%
|
Prince Avalanche (2013)
|
"Rudd, in particular, gives it everything he's got, but he is vanquished by a story that feels both inconsequential and contrived."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
69%
|
The Wolverine (2013)
|
"It's a relief to come across a blockbuster that finds a location and stays there, rather than hopping desperately from one place to the next ..."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
94%
|
Hero (2004)
|
"The result is not so much a historical epic as a kind of highly determined ballet: dreamy with bloodless violence, relying less on shades of character than on magnificence of gesture."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
91%
|
Minority Report (2002)
|
"The worst thing about the new Steven Spielberg picture is the title, Minority Report. The best thing about it is pretty much everything else."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
93%
|
Our Children (2013)
|
"There is no whodunit here -- the horror is plain in the opening shots -- and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended."
|
Anthony Lane
|
|
68%
|
Elysium (2013)
|
"It hits you as fact; the director's fiercest gift is not to invent the future, as a plausible dream, but to report on it as if it already existed"
|
Anthony Lane
|
