Alan Dale
Tomatometer-approved critic
The Pawn Shop, Doktor Mabuse, Pandora's Box, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Rules of the Game, The Wizard of Oz, The Magnificent Ambersons, A Streetcar Named Desire, Magical Maestro, Jules and Jim, Bay of the Angels, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Pennies from Heaven, Shoot the Moon, My Beautiful Laundrette, Six Degrees of Separation
http://www.weirdprofessortype.com
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Confusions of an Unmarried Couple (2009) |
[The moviemakers'] straightforwardness about ... sexual relationships is beyond refreshing[,] ... as if sugarcoating were chemically impossible. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 01, 2009
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Closer (2004) |
Marber looks at farcical giddiness with a hard-won sobriety.... Closer is a voguish farce that, rather than making you wish you were like the characters, makes you wish that you hadn't been. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted May 28, 2007
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Notes on a Scandal (2006) |
The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Apr 17, 2007
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L'Amour Fou (1968) |
The irony is subtle ... but irresistible for anyone interested in narrative paradox. L'Amour fou is one of the few movies, and one of the best, to deal directly with a literary subject. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Mar 13, 2007
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Dreamgirls (2006) |
I could have happily sat through the first half a second time, though I was barely able to sit through the second half once. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Feb 15, 2007
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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) |
It's theatrical genius: Cohen has devised a split-level act in which being hooked off the stage by his in-the-movie audience makes for success with his at-the-movie audience. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 05, 2007
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Strangers With Candy (2005) |
[R]eplicate[s] in a raunchy cartoon how the chaos of our experience correlates more than we may care to admit to the chaos of our personalities. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 05, 2007
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The Queen (2006) |
To give the narrative depth, bite, or oomph, as naturalism, irony, or romance, or some combination ... Morgan would have to have invented more (as Shakespeare and Schiller did with their historical royalty).... - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 31, 2006
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Stranger Than Fiction (2006) |
[J]ust the kind of numbskull movie that critics call 'smart'. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 31, 2006
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The Last King of Scotland (2006) |
[T]he movie's emphasis on Nicholas's misadventures, as if the audience couldn't get into the story of Uganda without an educated, white, middle-class European as a protagonist, is a huge let-down in its own terms. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 18, 2006
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Flags of Our Fathers (2006) |
The movie ... debunks the [government's] use of the boys as symbols and then turns them back into symbols, though of something else. There's not a fully realized personality in 132 minutes. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 03, 2006
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Infamous (2006) |
[Covering] the same period of the author's life as Bennett Miller's Capote..., Infamous is not only the more entertaining movie, it's the more sophisticated, and the more emotional, as well. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 03, 2006
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The Departed (2006) |
The movie gains life entirely from the interplay among the actors, and both of the young stars are wonderful. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Nov 01, 2006
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Ask the Dust (2006) |
Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject. [His] canniness as a writer and casual sophistication do wonders for the actors. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Nov 01, 2006
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Shortbus (2006) |
[Shortbus] will give adults who aren't put off by zoo-naked sex more to talk about, even in disparagement, than anything showing at the Cineplex. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Nov 01, 2006
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Intolerable Cruelty (2003) |
As Miles, Clooney doesn't make any direct emotional appeal to the audience and yet his high style is so smashingly effective that Miles stands open to us: macher, lover, patsy. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 26, 2006
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Fargo (1996) |
[Marge is] a good cop because everything abnormal stands out like a stain against her white-on-white sanity.... [H]er incomprehension [of criminality] is not only her strength as a detective, it justifies the deadpan style of the movie. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 26, 2006
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Frida (2002) |
[A]s in soap opera, drama is synonymous with the torments of love. Hayek is a brave, tireless performer, ... but given the script she can only play Kahlo the "beguiling personality" she liked to think of herself as ... rather than Kahlo the artist. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 26, 2006
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About Schmidt (2002) |
[Y]ou laugh with a growing sense of dread because it makes you feel what it's like to realize it's too late to help yourself. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 26, 2006
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The Loved One (1965) |
Perhaps the only way to enjoy it is to accept that saying something offensive is better than saying nothing at all. The Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One might have agreed with that, at any rate. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 15, 2006
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World Trade Center (2006) |
The movie's real mistake is to take as its focus the single least unusual aspect of September 11--the fact that the murdered and wounded loved their families and were loved back. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Sep 01, 2006
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Friends With Money (2006) |
[I]t's hard to distinguish [Holofcener's] more tentative approach to narrative [here] from an identity crisis. Maybe that's why McDormand's material has by far the most bite. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 30, 2006
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The Break-Up (2006) |
[I]t combines a naked desire to please the audience with a try-anything approach of the kind that made Wedding Crashers such a desperate stab at entertainment. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 30, 2006
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Nacho Libre (2006) |
Nacho Libre is all it needs to be--ridiculous from beginning to end. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 26, 2006
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The Great New Wonderful (2005) |
[Maggie] Gyllenhaal ... slips into character with greater ease than any other young American actress now in the movies. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 26, 2006
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Mikey and Nicky (1976) |
Considering the gross overextension of the shoot and the indulgence of the actors, ... it makes perfect sense that the movie feels like the result of a game of 52 pick-up rather than the realization of a design. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 21, 2006
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The Devil Wears Prada (2006) |
If ... the heroine is going to be as immune to temptation as Andy is ... then the spiritual dimension better be staggering ... because the narrative will have no suspense. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jul 21, 2006
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The Proposition (2005) |
The Proposition depicts male brutality, both within and without the confines of the law, in a beautifully measured way that doesn't kill the intensity of the narrative--wild contrasts, ironic similarities, and all. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jun 28, 2006
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The Graduate (1967) |
Nichols takes an ad hoc approach to comic irony and the movie seems to have been enshrined by American audiences because each moment in isolation "works," no matter that they tend to cancel each other out. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jun 25, 2006
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The Heartbreak Kid (1972) |
Sometimes it seems that nobody ever has any idea what it is he's chasing after, and so the chase never ends.... It's a good day when you can laugh about it, which is what The Heartbreak Kid lets you do. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jun 25, 2006
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Bloody Sunday (2002) |
Bloody Sunday demonstrates an historical thesis formulated in retrospect, which fits oddly with Greengrass's continuous-present technique. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jun 24, 2006
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United 93 (2006) |
Greengrass is a refined political artist, but United 93 goes pretty much entirely for gut reactions. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jun 24, 2006
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Guilty of Treason (1949) |
Guilty of Treason is a B-movie, budget and soul, and yet its political judgments are grounded in an accurate journalistic evaluation of a deplorable reality. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted May 03, 2006
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The Prisoner (1955) |
What Guinness does with his eyes alone ... provides a seminar on acting. And that's just from the neck up. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted May 03, 2006
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Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) |
[Sophie and Hans] embody the adolescent faith that any political action is better than none, and the movie couldn't treat them more glowingly if their actions had been effective. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted May 03, 2006
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Kapò (1959) |
Pontecorvo is not the visionary firebrand of The Battle of Algiers here. He cares about the subject passionately--as a Jew, and as a Communist leader in the Italian Resistance--but he turns it into pap. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Apr 18, 2006
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16 Blocks (2006) |
The movie isn't good enough for him, but all the same [David] Morse manages to give as fine a performance as the material allows. Finer. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Apr 11, 2006
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Naked Among Wolves (1963) |
Naked Among Wolves, an epic of Soviet-bloc, Remember-the-Alamo! heroism, is as phony as the war was long. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Mar 22, 2006
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Life Is Beautiful (1997) |
Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator--he lets the liberating nonsense triumph. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Mar 22, 2006
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The Pianist (2002) |
[I]t takes six or seven people to keep one half-dead Jew alive.... Wladyslaw's situation is extraordinary but what's happening on screen doesn't really feel so extraordinary. There's almost no emphasis, no point of view. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Mar 22, 2006
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Fateless (2005) |
No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Mar 22, 2006
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Munich (2005) |
[T]he brow-scrunching and ethical debates don't grow out of the assassinations, they merely follow them, and are not only inadequate but irrelevant. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Feb 27, 2006
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Syriana (2005) |
Gaghan piles one storyline on another but is only interested in suggesting where they trend, working like a (cynical) editorialist who has made up a few examples to support his views. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Feb 27, 2006
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Match Point (2005) |
Allen develops characters and situations here as if he had jotted the major points down on the back of an envelope and then used the envelope as his shooting script. The movie is so thin-textured it's ludicrous. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 17, 2006
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Melinda and Melinda (2004) |
Allen presents the side-by-side stories as if to compare the comic and tragic views of experience, and it might work but for the fact that the two [playwrights] come up with dissimilar plots featuring different characters played mostly by different actors - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 17, 2006
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Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) |
Allen starts with a sketchy premise and after working it through for 107 minutes he still has no more than the premise he started with. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 17, 2006
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Zelig (1983) |
Allen is one of the most recognizable, and least protean, performers.... [P]erhaps ... someone else as Zelig ... could have got the idea across without the blandly explicit dialogue and brought more dimensions to the role, besides. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 17, 2006
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Brokeback Mountain (2005) |
[T]he movie plays like any soap opera about a love that cannot be--the weeper mechanism is entirely familiar from hetero movies.... Brokeback Mountain isn't a gay western, it's a gay Back Street. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Jan 09, 2006
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Knife in the Water (1962) |
[The movie suggests that a] young man will either become like his corrupt elders, and presumably get a trophy woman of his own, or drown.... To Polanski, surviving in such a society, in such a world, is not the same as winning. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 26, 2005
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Oliver Twist (2005) |
[T]he maddening thing is not just that we hardly need another movie adaptation of [Oliver Twist] ... but that there are other Dickens books that haven't been given the major movie treatment that would better suit Polanski's temperament. - Blogcritics.org
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| Posted Dec 26, 2005
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