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Max Nelson
Max Nelson's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Film Comment Magazine
The New York Review of Books
Cinema Scope
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Text of Light (1974) |
The transporting sixty-seven-minute Text of Light came entirely from footage of the refraction of the sun's beams in an ashtray. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Dec 03, 2018
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The Dante Quartet (1987) |
Brakhage's films train you to look at the world as if it were-as he wrote in the first paragraph of his 1963 book Metaphors on Vision-"alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement." - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Dec 03, 2018
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Window Water Baby Moving (1962) |
The last minute of Window Water Baby Moving contains a series of extraordinary shots. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Dec 03, 2018
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Dog Star Man (1964) |
A dazzling feature for which Brakhage used increasingly colorful and multilayered superimpositions to intersperse Jane's footage of himself climbing a snow-covered hill with his images of her and their infant daughter. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Dec 03, 2018
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In Another Country (2012) |
It's scary to imagine that some higher authority has a hold on the smallest, laziest moments of daily life... It's still scarier to think that this authority might belong to a god figure as playful and carefree as Hong. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) |
Is it enough for a feature film to just focus on the details and character of Middle-Earth? When it's a film as imaginative as The Hobbit... so rich in its sense of history and place, I'm inclined to answer with a confident nod. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Night Across the Street (2012) |
Night Across the Street feels like one big excuse for Ruiz to try out his favorite tricks all over again - as eloquently and as mischievously as ever. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Love Is All You Need (2012) |
Love Is All You Need is a slight but harmless romantic comedy mistakenly warped somewhere between conception and execution into a cruel case of audience shaming; taken less charitably, it's a candy-coated poison pill. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012) |
The premise might be vintage noir, but the format is anything but. Without the logic that bears most noirs along, from doomed inception to fatal conclusion, we're left with only a backdrop. And maybe, Rodrigues suggests, that's all you need. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Museum Hours (2012) |
A strange and rare kind of movie: a narrative feature about how we look at things. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Oldboy (2013) |
Oldboy has little of the self-generating forward momentum that set apart Inside Man, Lee's previous foray into big-budget Hollywood action moviemaking. If that film was a prolonged sprint, this one is closer to a sped-up ride on a moving sidewalk. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Visitors (2013) |
Too blunt, didactic, and accusatory to induce the kind of poetic reverie Reggio seems to be shooting for, and too vague and associative to cohere as an argument about the state of the modern world. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Her (2013) |
Her accepts from the get-go that technology has become a deeply ingrained component of our emotional lives, rather than some handy satellite hovering tastefully, neutrally around us. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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The Last of the Unjust (2013) |
Where Shoah was about inventing a system of memory... The Last of the Unjust is about suggesting alternative systems as yet untried. If that film was the lighting of a flame, this one is the passing of a torch. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) |
It's a deeply discomfiting image of artistic taste as a literal, primal thirst - specifically, a thirst for the lived experience of others. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Jimmy P. (2013) |
At its best, Jimmy P is a chance to see two terrific actors propose two very different strategies for working through - and with - language. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Gebo and the Shadow (2012) |
What's remarkable is the extent to which Oliveira manages to keep us uneasy about the movie's continued survival, or unsure of our ability to predict its end. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Jealousy (2013) |
Jealousy seems to come from a time when movie subjects didn't have to act, only exist; when you didn't need a story to make a film, only a handful of faces and an excess of space. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Life of Riley (2014) |
It's a film made in the spirit of old age rather than that of youth - but few swan songs cede the floor to a younger generation this graciously, or with such mischievous parting words. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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National Gallery (2014) |
It's as if Wiseman's camera, by opening itself up to these objects and bodies, had the power to make them open themselves up to it in turn, confess some unspeakable truth. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) |
What redeems the film, to my mind, is the productive tension it sets up between its melancholic picture of Europe in decay and the manic, whiz-bang adventure story that makes up its central narrative. - Los Angeles Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 08, 2018
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Let the Sunshine In (2017) |
Her desires give the film its energy and rhythm; [Juliette Binoche is] rarely offscreen and we miss her the moment she is. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted May 02, 2018
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Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) |
Has Assayas gone slack? - n+1
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| Posted Nov 15, 2017
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45 Years (2015) |
45 Years is about what happens when people do entrust their lives to one another, and the consequences of discovering that the person to whom you've entrusted your life might not have entrusted his as fully, or as consistently, to you. - n+1
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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Anomalisa (2015) |
[Lisa] comes off as a convenient device: pathetic enough to generate sympathy but simple enough not to threaten Michael as the film's center of attention. - n+1
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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Nainsukh (2010) |
[A] dreamy, intoxicating tribute to the life . - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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Redemption (2013) |
Redemption [is] at once so funny and so profoundly sad. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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Will You Dance With Me? (1984) |
For Jarman, 16mm and Super 8 were the best means with which to catch, as he might have put it, the dryads lurking around Britain's corners. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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The Pearl Button (2015) |
Guzmán's predilection for naïve wide-eyed wonder weighs down his recent films, never eclipses the most striking feature of his work: the way in which dreamy musings and far-fetched speculations coexist with toughness, prickliness, and matter-of-factness - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 14, 2017
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Hermia & Helena (2016) |
What knits this parade of conversations and encounters together are Pieiro's rapport with his actors, his eye for telling peripheral details, and his skill at sketching out a coherent space within even the most casual composition. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 08, 2017
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The Human Surge (2016) |
As an immersive, unpredictable sensory experience, on the other hand, this is a prodigious accomplishment from a filmmaker full of ideas about rhythm, texture, and scale. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 03, 2017
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Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) |
Hong is interested in the technical challenges lengthy shots pose. How can a filmmaker glean the benefits of long takes while still suggesting that each shot represents only one possible arrangement of the many elements from which it's combined? - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 03, 2016
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The Treasure (2015) |
The Treasure is both another testament to his eye for telling details and Porumboiu's most seamless combination yet of fiction and fact. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 04, 2016
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The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) |
It's an immersive, if not entirely factual, restaging of six days that were already, on several levels, theater. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jul 02, 2015
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White God (2014) |
"Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó's brave and tantalizing movie" - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Mar 06, 2015
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Two Days One Night (2014) |
Two Days, One Night has the interpretive open-endedness of a parable, the ambiguity of an ethical thought experiment, and the limpid clarity of a folk ballad. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 06, 2014
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Listen Up Philip (2014) |
The film feeds off Philip's tart anti-energy; it helps that Schwartzman, in what might be the performance of his career, gives an exhilarating charge even to his ill-tempered sulks. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2014
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A Summer's Tale (1996) |
If it lacks its predecessor's subtlety and depth, it compensates with its own abundance of more immediate pleasures. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jun 26, 2014
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Burning Bush (2014) |
[An] absorbing, intelligent account of the fallout resulting from a young Czech student's symbolic self-immolation at the close of the Prague Spring [...] - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jun 12, 2014
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Night Moves (2013) |
Reichardt is a filmmaker too wedded to details and sense data to subsume a well-defined setting and its inhabitants under a stock narrative--or at least do so without showing where the seams start to bust or the genre elements fail to fit - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 09, 2014
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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) |
Nearly everyone in the film is creaking under the weight of the past. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 14, 2014
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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) |
For all its close thematic ties to Scorsese's previous studies of young men with God complexes, this might be closer in spirit to the director's concert films, with their blurring of the divide between the movie's audience and the on-screen crowd. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Dec 16, 2013
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Black Nativity (2013) |
To my eyes, Black Nativity is the cinematic equivalent of a Christmas tree ornament: shiny, hollow, sheathed in decorative, artificial linings, mass-produced and, given the cost of today's movie theater tickets, overpriced. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Dec 09, 2013
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Gimme the Loot (2012) |
When the next American new wave rolls around, it'll be thanks to moments like these, and movies like Gimme the Loot. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 05, 2013
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The Angels' Share (2012) |
With this shaggy-dog tale of four petty Glaswegian criminals and their improbably successful scheme to steal the world's most valuable whiskey, Loach turns navet into a sort of moral philosophy. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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Wish You Were Here (2012) |
It's too easily satisfying, too traditionally well-made to be an honest portrait of dissatisfaction. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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Byzantium (2012) |
Clara becomes more the subject of Jordan's empathy than the object of his lust (although there's some of that, too). - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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Pacific Rim (2013) |
Feels like it's always struggling to break through the screen-if only to grab you by the scruff of the neck and drag you in. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer (2013) |
The resulting film is low-key and, at least as far as its subject is concerned, decidedly uncritical. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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Carrie (2013) |
What makes it execrable is the way it drains the original movie of all its erotic tension, only to ramp up the final-act violence. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2013
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