Joseph Jon Lanthier

Joseph Jon Lanthier's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Slant Magazine
Publications:
Slant Magazine,
House Next Door
Movie Reviews Only
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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3/4 | 91% | Homicide (1991) |
The Pulitzer-winning playwright's movies are often a few steps ahead of their audiences, but Homicide seems to have intuitively anticipated its now-exemplary status. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 12, 2017
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2/4 | 47% | The Providence Effect (2009) |
Rollin Binzer's tribute only underscores the mind-bogglingly hazardous crapshoot we take when entrusting our children to local classrooms anywhere in the U.S. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 28, 2015
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2.5/4 | 95% | Purple Noon (Plein soleil) (1961) |
Its mechanical aesthetic suggests that rather than having to sublimate what remorse Tom Ripley might feel toward his actions, he simply doesn't experience any. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 10, 2014
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2/4 | 96% | Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton As Himself (2013) |
The doc's looseness adequately portrays George Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for the man's legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 17, 2013
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3.5/4 | 80% | Out-Takes From The Life Of A Happy Man (2013) |
Jonas Mekas's camera is never passive, often seeming to feed upon sensation that energizes it to the point of jittery transcendence. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 25, 2013
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3.5/4 | 100% | Portrait of Jason (1967) |
Shirley Clarke counters Jason's queen-bitch attitude by reminding us with vocal and technological interjections that this is a performance, and that aesthetic judgments have been made while recording it. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 16, 2013
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2.5/4 | 93% | Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2013) |
It never bothers to attempt the one thing we'd expect and hope from a documentary about Ricky Jay: It doesn't try to bamboozle us. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 14, 2013
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3/4 | 75% | André Gregory: Before and After Dinner (2013) |
Perhaps the most valuable insight that the film provides about its subject is that he acts even as he directs. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 5, 2013
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2.5/4 | 65% | Dog Pound (2010) |
The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 25, 2013
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3/4 | 59% | Heaven's Gate (1980) |
Michael Cimino's film represented a slight return to classicism--to larger-than-life Panavision spectacle and crane shot-managed majesty, however contradicted by narrative bleakness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 16, 2013
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3/4 | 100% | Cuchillo de palo (108) (2013) |
Renate Costa's doc gradually simplifies into an elaborate seesaw between general, journalistic scoopery and unabashedly personal confrontation. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 16, 2013
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89% | The Unspeakable Act (2013) |
Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 26, 2013
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3.5/4 | 93% | Little Fugitive (1953) |
The not-to-be-underestimated singularity of Little Fugitive is such that its legacy nearly contradicts its nature. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 27, 2013
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3/4 | 67% | Nana (2013) |
Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 23, 2013
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4/4 | 100% | Black Narcissus (1947) |
Michael Powell was right when he called Black Narcissus an "erotic film," but the attraction is pure Pygmalionism. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 30, 2012
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2/4 | 44% | On the Road (2012) |
The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 17, 2012
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4/4 | 89% | Consuming Spirits (2012) |
Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 10, 2012
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2.5/4 | 80% | Wagner & Me (2012) |
Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 4, 2012
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1.5/4 | No Score Yet | My Brothers (2012) |
An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 27, 2012
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2.5/4 | 92% | The Central Park Five (2012) |
Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 16, 2012
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4/4 | 100% | The Man in the White Suit (1951) |
That Stratton proves so unable to resist his hubris surely provides the film with a cautionary subtext, but this is beautifully complicated by an ending that denies the possibility of rehabilitation. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 10, 2012
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96% | Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton As Himself (2013) |
Tom Bean and Luke Poling's doc is rightfully less than certain of the quality of its subject's output, and no potential excuse for Plimpton's occasionally clunky wordplay is left unmentioned. - House Next Door
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| Posted Nov 8, 2012
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83% | Persistence Of Vision (2012) |
One of the least stylistically handicapped documentaries ever produced about animation. - House Next Door
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| Posted Nov 8, 2012
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3.5/4 | 47% | The Comedy (2012) |
Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 4, 2012
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3.5/4 | 67% | This Must Be The Place (2012) |
The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 28, 2012
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2.5/4 | 80% | Orchestra Of Exiles (2012) |
Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 21, 2012
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2.5/4 | 85% | The Flat (2012) |
Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 14, 2012
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3.5/4 | 94% | Photographic Memory (2012) |
Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 5, 2012
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3/4 | 100% | It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012) |
By favoring the repetition of gestures over plot or graphics, Don Hertzfeldt argues that animation is, at its essence, a kinetic rather than simply visual form of expression. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 3, 2012
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3/4 | 68% | Wuthering Heights (2012) |
In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 1, 2012
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3/4 | 80% | Tales of the Night (2012) |
The recent cartoons of Michel Ocelot cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 23, 2012
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2/4 | 14% | About Cherry (2012) |
The lack of plausible conflict mars the movie's highly commendable depiction of San Francisco as a the new porn capital. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 16, 2012
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3/4 | No Score Yet |
What keeps the doc from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 9, 2012
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2.5/4 | 90% | Ornette: Made in America (2012) |
Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 26, 2012
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43% | My Son John (1952) |
Leo McCarey's sociopolitical hysterectomy finally hits home video in a Blu-ray that appears downright ashamed of its contents. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 21, 2012
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42% | Little White Lies (2012) |
The specific narrative handicaps throughout are mostly too banal to warrant exegesis, though the choice of vintage pop tunes for dramatic underscoring is particularly grating. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 20, 2012
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2.5/4 | 20% | True Wolf (2012) |
The doc veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 12, 2012
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3.5/4 | 94% | Ouwehoeren (Meet the Fokkens) (2012) |
Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's doc is an unusual and welcome polemic. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 5, 2012
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2.5/4 | 100% | Abendland (2012) |
The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 22, 2012
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2.5/4 | 67% | It's The Earth Not The Moon (2012) |
After 30 minutes or so, Gonçalo Tocha's anthropological proposition slides into dubiousness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 9, 2012
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2/4 | 50% | Patagonia Rising (2012) |
While it might be silly to fault the doc for stopping short of a call to action for North American audiences, the lack of one turns the viewer into a powerless bystander. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 5, 2012
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2.5/4 | 83% | A Cat in Paris (2012) |
An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 28, 2012
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1.5/4 | 75% | The Intouchables (2012) |
A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 22, 2012
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4/4 | 78% | The Color Wheel (2012) |
Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 15, 2012
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4/4 | 96% | Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating) (1974) |
If cinema can indeed "think," Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie is an epistemological treatise. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 30, 2012
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3/4 | 55% | Downtown Express (2012) |
The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 13, 2012
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2/4 | 60% | How to Grow a Band (2012) |
The movie is unsurprisingly devoted to peddling up-and-comer Chris Thiele as something daring, something new. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 9, 2012
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4/4 | 100% | Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) |
Leo McCarey's masterpiece is a schizo, slack-jawed, preemptive rejoinder to Frank Capra's saintly sober "everyman." - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 29, 2012
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2/4 | 44% | The Beat Hotel (2012) |
The Beat Hotel was but one of many domiciles, too small to possess anything but their ephemeral bodies. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 28, 2012
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2/4 | 90% | Breathing (2012) |
Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism? - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 24, 2012
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