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
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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
Read More | Posted Feb 28, 2015
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| 2.5/4 | 100% | 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
Read More | Posted Jan 10, 2014
|
| 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Apr 25, 2013
|
| 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
Read More | Posted Apr 16, 2013
|
| 2.5/4 | 90% | 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
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2013
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| 3/4 | 78% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2013
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| 3/4 | 57% | 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
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2013
|
| 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
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2013
|
| 88% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Jan 27, 2013
|
| 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 30, 2012
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| 2/4 | 43% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 10, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 79% | Wagner & Me (2012) |
Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 93% | The Central Park Five (2012) |
Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 10, 2012
|
| 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 8, 2012
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| 3.5/4 | 45% | The Comedy (2012) |
Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it. ‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | Posted Nov 4, 2012
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| 3.5/4 | 65% | This Must Be The Place (2012) |
The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 84% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 3, 2012
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| 3/4 | 69% | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 1, 2012
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| 3/4 | 79% | 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
Read More | Posted Sep 23, 2012
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| 2/4 | 10% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Sep 9, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 89% | Ornette: Made in America (2012) |
Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | Posted Aug 26, 2012
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| 60% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Aug 20, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 22% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Aug 5, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | No Score Yet | Abendland (2012) |
The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Jun 5, 2012
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| 2.5/4 | 82% | 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
Read More | Posted May 28, 2012
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| 1.5/4 | 74% | 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
Read More | Posted May 22, 2012
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| 4/4 | 76% | 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
Read More | Posted May 15, 2012
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| 4/4 | 95% | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2012
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| 2/4 | 38% | The Beat Hotel (2012) |
The Beat Hotel was but one of many domiciles, too small to possess anything but their ephemeral bodies. ‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | Posted Mar 28, 2012
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| 2/4 | 88% | Breathing (2012) |
Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism? ‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | Posted Mar 24, 2012
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| 3/4 | No Score Yet | Dissolution (2012) |
Nina Menkes's camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.‐ Slant Magazine
Read More | Posted Mar 7, 2012
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