Jane Sumner

Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Dallas Morning News,
Austin American-Statesman
Movie Reviews Only
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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B+ | 31% | My All American (2015) |
No car chases. No guns. No fire-breathing monsters. Just a thrilling, inspirational film about a legendary coach and a determined undersized player. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Nov 12, 2015
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B+ | 90% | Bridge of Spies (2015) |
It's classic Spielberg with the help of master editor Michael Kahn turning up the heat in a Cold War thriller that intrigues and entertains while reminding us that more than 50 years later the Doomsday Clock is ticking louder than ever. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Oct 15, 2015
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B- | 65% | Ricki And The Flash (2015) |
Jonathan Demme still owns the groove that 31 years ago made the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense one of the great, nearly perfect concert films. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Aug 6, 2015
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B+ | 86% | The Wolfpack (2015) |
An eye-popping portrait of six brothers virtually imprisoned for most of their lives inside a 16th-floor flat in a New York housing project. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Jun 18, 2015
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B | 65% | The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015) |
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was such a worldwide sleeper hit, and its British-Indian cast so beloved, that it's no surprise that three years later they're back in Rajasthan. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Mar 6, 2015
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A | 97% | Mr. Turner (2014) |
Mr. Turner is an absolutely luminous film. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Feb 2, 2015
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A- | 95% | Finding Vivian Maier (2014) |
Slickly shot and edited by Aaron Wickenden, its more than 40 amazingly forthcoming interview subjects include acclaimed photographers Joel Meyerwitz and Mary Ellen Mark. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted May 1, 2014
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A- | 88% | The Wind Rises (2014) |
[A] spellbinding, dreamy paean to imagination. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Feb 27, 2014
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B+ | 91% | Philomena (2013) |
At last, a holiday film for intelligent life. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Nov 26, 2013
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B+ | 94% | All Is Lost (2013) |
It's supremely skillful acting reminiscent of his memorable turn more than 40 years ago as the mountain man of few words fighting to survive in Jeremiah Johnson. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Nov 7, 2013
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B- | 65% | Pandora's Promise (2013) |
With glaciers melting, seas rising and superstorms in the wings, Pandora's Promise, despite its one-sided polemics, revives a desperately needed conversation. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Jun 20, 2013
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B+ | 56% | The Conspirator (2011) |
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel paints a world lit by candles, gaslights and torches, and costume designer Louise Frogley makes the cast look like people of the period, not actors wearing rented clothes. - Austin American-Statesman
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| Posted Apr 20, 2011
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B+ | 84% | Bukowski: Born into This (2003) |
An amazing, worthy journey. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Oct 28, 2004
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B- | 62% | The Last Shot (2004) |
The Last Shot doesn't crackle and pop, but the send-up of Hollywood and the government gets off some good lines and generally endears itself with a kind of earnest scattershot loopiness. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Oct 14, 2004
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B+ | 82% | Friday Night Lights (2004) |
A hard-hitting, fast-paced, stirring film. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Oct 7, 2004
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C+ | 15% | Raise Your Voice (2004) |
It's a sweet and touching West Coast Fame, though it lacks that 1980 musical's manic energy and excitement. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Oct 7, 2004
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B | 89% | Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (2004) |
A partisan film but ultimately a powerful one. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Oct 6, 2004
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A- | 83% | The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) |
Credit Mr. Salles with making all the right artistic decisions and turning what could have been a routine polemical film into a fresh mind-changing experience. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Sep 30, 2004
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C+ | 48% | Silver City (2004) |
If Silver City isn't in the same class as [Sayles'] Texas-shot Lone Star, it's still worth a look. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Sep 16, 2004
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C+ | 69% | Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2004) |
A slight but winsome, affirmative film. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Sep 9, 2004
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B- | 74% | The Hunting of the President (2004) |
There's wit, revelation and mercifully, more about Whitewater than Monica Lewinsky. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Sep 2, 2004
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B+ | 93% | Riding Giants (2004) |
It's a big wet kiss to the heroes and history of an ancient water sport. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Aug 5, 2004
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B | 50% | A Home at the End of the World (2004) |
The best reasons [to see it] have to be the subtle, nuanced performances of Mr. Farrell, newcomer Dallas Roberts, a never-better Robin Wright Penn and the endearing evergreen Pride of Quitman, Texas, Sissy Spacek. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jul 29, 2004
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B+ | 94% | Before Sunset (2004) |
If you didn't like Before Sunrise, filmmaker Richard Linklater says, you'll hate Before Sunset. But if you treasured the original, you're sure to prize the 'romance for realists' sequel. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jul 8, 2004
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A- | 94% | The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) |
A window on a changing world most of us will never see. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jul 3, 2004
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B- | 50% | America's Heart and Soul (2004) |
A visual treat with the sweep and canvas of an IMAX film, the movie, all shot before Sept. 11, 2001, explodes like a chrysanthemum fireworks shell with red, white and blue stars. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jul 1, 2004
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D | No Score Yet | The Singing Forest (2003) |
One has to feel for actors faced with clunky, obvious lines. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 17, 2004
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B+ | 74% | Les égarés (Strayed) (2003) |
A fascinating mystery -- a halcyon idyll with a gnawing sense of terror at the edge. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 17, 2004
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C- | 31% | A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2004) |
Mr. Hernández's attempt to put an interior landscape on film a la Pasolini may seem stultifying and pretentious, but it's also a brave dark experiment. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 17, 2004
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C | 32% | Around the World in 80 Days (2004) |
Plays like a Three Stooges travelogue. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 15, 2004
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B | 94% | The Agronomist (2004) |
A lively, illuminating homage to an extraordinary man of courage, whose cry for his beloved country got him killed. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 10, 2004
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B+ | 95% | Control Room (2004) |
It's an intriguing, entertaining glimpse at the inner workings of the most-watched television channel in the world. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 10, 2004
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B | 89% | National Geographic: Forces of Nature (2004) |
With the spectacular opening of Forces of Nature, narrated by Kevin Bacon, IMAX outdoes Hollywood's fanciest effects wizards. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jun 4, 2004
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A- | 67% | Carandiru (2004) |
An urgent piece of cinema -- a shiv in the ribs and right cross to the chin -- that's also a salutation to human solidarity and the will to live. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted May 27, 2004
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B- | 64% | Coffee and Cigarettes (2004) |
It has the sad, goofy charm of a silent comedy with Buster Keaton, a Jarmusch favorite, with passive-aggressive hits and flashes of barely contained antagonism. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted May 27, 2004
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B- | 61% | Valentin (2004) |
Seen as the wishful coming-of-age of a writer, who escapes tribulation through imagination, the semi-autobiographical movie seems less sentimental and makes a lot more sense. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted May 20, 2004
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B+ | 92% | Super Size Me (2004) |
What makes all this work is that the charming Mr. Spurlock, unlike combative Michael Moore, is winning, witty and completely at ease before the camera. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted May 13, 2004
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B+ | 87% | Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2004) |
What gives this its weight and substance is that Mr. Hickenlooper came to see himself in the man whom Nancy Sinatra calls 'Peter Pan in the school of hard knocks.' - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Apr 29, 2004
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C+ | 59% | Two Men Went to War (2004) |
The mission, which the soldiers codenamed Operation Mad Dog, would have been delicious as a documentary, but director John Henderson goes for an antic Two Stooges Abroad approach. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Apr 8, 2004
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B+ | 96% | Osama (2004) |
A poignant film with stinging images. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Mar 11, 2004
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A | 93% | My Architect (2004) |
Irresistible and haunting. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Feb 12, 2004
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A | 96% | The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) |
[Morris] gave him a stage -- and Mr. McNamara took it -- to chart the tragedy of Vietnam and prove that war is too complex, too dangerous for fallible human beings in power to know what they're doing. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Feb 5, 2004
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C | 27% | Along Came Polly (2004) |
Superlative wasted cast and chamber pot-embarrassing humor. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jan 15, 2004
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B+ | 98% | Chavez: Inside the Coup (2003) |
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised may be controversial, biased and patchy, but it contains some of the most electrifying and immediate nonfiction footage seen on the big screen. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Jan 15, 2004
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B | 73% | Taking Sides: Le cas Furtwängler (2003) |
The talk in this moral debate smokes with provocative drama and actors of weight. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Dec 4, 2003
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B+ | 71% | Bonhoeffer (2003) |
There is more to the philosophy and faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer than a 90-minute documentary can begin to cover, but this is a powerful and timely introduction. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Nov 28, 2003
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B+ | 86% | Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion (2003) |
It's a rare glimpse of China's 'final solution' for a courageous people whose world view is one of forgiveness, nonviolence and love. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Nov 25, 2003
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A- | 85% | Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) |
Mr. Weir will possibly get his fifth nomination for Oscar gold, but everybody -- from costume designer Wendy Stites to Australians Iva Davies, Richard Tognetti and Christopher Gordon, who composed the classic-pop score -- deserves three cheers. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Nov 13, 2003
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B | 97% | Autumn Spring (Babí léto) (2003) |
A bittersweet charmer. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Nov 13, 2003
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B- | 64% | The Flower of Evil (2003) |
This three-generation melodrama, set in the Bordeaux region, may be just an elegant shadow of 'the gallic Hitchcock,' but even pale and dry, it's still Chabrol and sippable. - Dallas Morning News
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| Posted Nov 6, 2003
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