Creative Loafing

Creative Loafing is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Allison Keene, Felicia Feaster, Matt Brunson
Rating Title/Year Author
2.5/4 Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) Matt Brunson The four films released thus far in the so-called MonsterVerse ably demonstrate that King Kong still reigns supreme. EDIT
Posted Jun 19, 2021
2/4 The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (2021) Matt Brunson It's not loud in an appreciable way, with cool lightsaber zaps or T-Rex roars. It's loud because the actors spend all the time screaming at each other. The yelling is so intense, I expect it would manage to come through even if this were a silent film. EDIT
Posted Jun 19, 2021
American Psycho (2000) Felicia Feaster Graced with a smart, pathos-laden meditation on male competition and the blood-drawing ferocity of a money-centered culture, along with screenwriter Guinevere Turner, Harron does a transformative voodoo on an often repugnant source. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Felicia Feaster [T]here's very little to hold onto in this lackluster, uninspiring film with the disappointing inertness of a deflated balloon. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Raising Victor Vargas (2002) Felicia Feaster Few films capture how hostile and enormous the world can be for children and the defenses they create to cope, but this easygoing, lovely film does, to great, tender effect. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
The Ten (2007) Felicia Feaster More than simply unentertaining, The Ten comes from an America of silly, laddish self-regard and hollow protest. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Lady Chatterley (2006) Felicia Feaster Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is as exquisite and memorable for the way it burrows beneath its characters' skin, into the discrete and lonely worlds they occupy. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Masked and Anonymous (2003) Felicia Feaster Bloated by self-regard, Masked and Anonymous is the essence of the self-aggrandizing benefit concerts it weakly parodies. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Spider (2002) Felicia Feaster Cronenberg's thoroughly creepy and hypnotic film often has the texture of damp wool, his evocation of claustrophobic brooding so intense you can nearly smell the mildew. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Talk to Her (2002) Felicia Feaster Unfortunately, the Spanish enfant terrible's iconoclastic artistic hysteria never rises to the surface in Talk to Her. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Auto Focus (2002) Felicia Feaster For all its tantalizing forays into the narcotic, head-swimming loss of self and perspective in addiction, Auto Focus never quite extends its sympathy to its characters or convinces us that they are real people. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
The Quiet American (2002) Felicia Feaster The Quiet American is an accurate if not entirely soul-quaking adaptation of Greene's style to film. It establishes such a believable atmosphere of quiet, old-fashioned gentility that when a moment of violence occurs, the carnage is even more devastating. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Frida (2002) Felicia Feaster The strangest of birds - a film about a Communist, bisexual, hirsute, maverick artist aimed squarely at a mainstream audience - Frida may, in fact, turn out to be more radical than it first appears. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Wordplay (2006) Felicia Feaster Diverting though Wordplay may be, when it moves into tournament-mode, the film suffers from the essentially undramatic nature of this solitary "sport." EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
The Twilight Samurai (2002) Felicia Feaster Twilight Samurai contains a powerful pacifist message about a hero free from the supposedly innate male taste for violence. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2020
Murderball (2005) Felicia Feaster Murderball tends to buck the feel-good vibe and good guy-bad guy arc of that genre... Instead, the film depicts a more profound and lifelong battle waged between these men and the circumstance they find themselves in. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Everything Is Illuminated (2005) Felicia Feaster Rather than aiming to please, the film expects a certain patience on the viewer's part as it ambles and slowly shifts from an often forced quirkiness to a bone-deep melancholy. That change of tack proves worth waiting for. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Art School Confidential (2006) Felicia Feaster Art School Confidential is as visually uninteresting as it is idea-parched. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
One Hour Photo (2002) Felicia Feaster While honoring the suspense-building engine of a thriller, One Hour Photo creates a nightmare portrait of American life. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Birth (2004) Felicia Feaster Glazer leaves narrative threads dangling and a purposeful ambiguousness that seems less a desire to subvert Hollywood closure as a fey, fancified gesture of presumed depth on the film's part. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
The Namesake (2006) Felicia Feaster [Nair's] film covers so much ground that it's hard to sustain emotional investment in its characters. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Kandahar (2001) Felicia Feaster Less interesting as a Westerner's primer on Afghanistan's horrors, the film becomes truly transfixing when it assumes the languid, neorealist style of the Iranian cinema. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004) Felicia Feaster [A] ponderously "important" but emotionally hollow analysis of infidelity's cruel undertow. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Pretty Persuasion (2005) Felicia Feaster Pretty Persuasion is a slutty little movie pretending to be an important one. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
XX/XY (2002) Felicia Feaster A film about the necessity of growing up could have profited from its own advice. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Old Joy (2006) Felicia Feaster If you succumb to its unique rhythms and let it, Old Joy is a film that will break your heart. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
The Girl on the Bridge (1999) Felicia Feaster Girl on the Bridge is pure, buttery fantasy with all the attendant empty calories. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Forty Shades of Blue (2005) Felicia Feaster Their script is infused with the romantic highs and lows of a million country songs. But it's the haunting melody, soaked in longing and agony that words can convey only in small part, that really gets you. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) Felicia Feaster It's hard to fault Anderson for striving - with clearly considerable effort - to create a film world more complete and satisfying than the real one. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Color Me Kubrick (2005) Felicia Feaster Color Me Kubrick is not without its wacky charms principally driven by John Malkovich's contortions as Conway. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) Felicia Feaster Marrying extreme set design and sublime casting... Burton's film showcases his usual interest in gothic effects and the original Willy Wonka's psychedelia. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela (2004) Felicia Feaster What is clearly a sacred event to the Indian and non-native participants becomes a crazed, depth-less spectacle of cinematic tourism in the hands of the filmmakers, who drop us into the midst of the fracas with no sense of perspective, insight or voice. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Sylvia (2003) Felicia Feaster When there are so few stories dedicated to female creativity and pathos, you resent this one all the more for mishandling what might have been. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Jesus Camp (2006) Felicia Feaster After the filmmakers' 200th shot of kids weeping at the words of the lord, the message changes from educational to freak show. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Inside Deep Throat (2005) Felicia Feaster [S]o much of the material is served up with a wink and "a giggle," the possibilities for real revelation are scarce. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Send a Bullet (2007) Felicia Feaster [A] bizarre, often riveting film about contemporary Brazil. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
Town & Country (2001) Felicia Feaster A film of low expectations, Town & Country feels like the kind of calculated, lifeless product written by jaded Hollywood hacks in response to what they think middle-America might want. EDIT
Posted Feb 3, 2020
American Pimp (1999) Felicia Feaster American Pimp is for the most part a depressing, crashing bore, full of sanctimonious, money-obsessed predators with taste that would make Minnie Pearl cringe, selling a dirty business as a higher calling. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Oliver Twist (2005) Felicia Feaster Polanski's Oliver Twist is a flawed but harrowing, empathetic view of the world seen through the eyes of its most powerless and invisible citizens. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Knocked Up (2007) Felicia Feaster Knocked Up crafts pathos and spit-takes from the truism that life will invariably make adults of us all whether we like it or not. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Delirious (2006) Felicia Feaster Delirious is definitive DiCillo: goofy and cartoonish at the edges, at times a little obvious in its caricature of our celebrity-obsessed culture, but humble and funny enough to compel viewers to overlook its flaws. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Breaking and Entering (2006) Felicia Feaster Minghella takes Haneke's gravitas and transforms it into the brand of sorrowful yuppie chow and shallow treatment of alienation favored by angsty Hollywood melodramas such as Crash. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) Felicia Feaster When rendered in visual terms, many of the most delicious qualities of Bridget Jones's Diary also become highly smelly, like a wedge of cheese that's overstayed its welcome. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Blue Crush (2002) Felicia Feaster Something just feels right about a girl-power movie in which the football players are the spoiled, clueless ones and the rough-around-the-edges surfer girls look far more world-weary and tough. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Wet Hot American Summer (2001) Felicia Feaster But like many a "Saturday Night Live" gag, Wet Hot American Summer also can overstay its welcome and drag interminably on, its joke about the longest day in the world backfiring as it moves sputteringly toward a resolution. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Dark Blue (2002) Felicia Feaster Dark Blue is a bitter, often stunning sewer elegy for the little-man-as-monster, the nobody who thinks he's somebody but who is just a stooge trapped within a corrupt system. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Nico and Dani (2000) Felicia Feaster A brutally, often uncomfortably frank film about the fierce, intense friendships that develop between teenagers. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
The Clearing (2004) Felicia Feaster An evolutionary thriller, The Clearing not only reinforces the status quo, it grinds the face of the economy's losers in the dirt and does a victory dance on their head. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
The Barbarian Invasions (2003) Felicia Feaster [A] subtle and scrupulously intelligent film. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) Felicia Feaster Marshall has instead crafted a mildly smarmy, heavy-breathing fantasy about some super-hot babes knocking each other down to get to the man meat while ignoring the fact that they are essentially sex slaves. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2020