Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus

Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Bryant Frazer
Rating Title/Year Author
B- Piercing (2018) Bryant Frazer Dark, contrasty imagery complements increasingly uncomfortable action on-screen, as Piercing settles into an entertainingly twisted groove and a compelling rhythm of give and take. EDIT
Posted Jan 30, 2019
B Disobedience (2017) Bryant Frazer Director Sebastián Lelio's portrayal of the orthodox community is exceptionally even-handed; he doesn't soft-pedal its stifling and anachronistic nature, but neither does he present it as hopelessly cruel or unyielding. EDIT
Posted Aug 8, 2018
C Brimstone (2016) Bryant Frazer It's Gaspar Noe without the freaky-deaky audacity and grandiose concern for the human condition or, maybe more to the point, Lars Von Trier without the formal elegance. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
B Elle (2016) Bryant Frazer Elle is as entertaining as any film Verhoeven has made, which might seem like an odd thing to say about a film that conjures a brutal rape scene abruptly and repeatedly. EDIT
Posted Sep 26, 2016
B- Vlees (Meat) (2010) Bryant Frazer A pretty good example of a 21st-century grindhouse film. Think Luis Buñuel crossed with Jörg Buttgereit. EDIT
Posted Sep 19, 2016
61/100 The Neon Demon (2016) Bryant Frazer Part tragedy and part comedy, but also part horror movie and part pornography. EDIT
Posted Jun 23, 2016
Sherlock, Jr. (1924) Bryant Frazer Buster Keaton's artistic breakthrough remains to this day absolutely the funniest film ever made. EDIT
Posted May 29, 2015
58/100 A Most Violent Year (2014) Bryant Frazer The compelling moral dimension is matched in a couple of places by fairly riveting action, but the film lacks any commanding narrative insight into its milieu. EDIT
Posted Dec 29, 2014
84/100 Boyhood (2014) Bryant Frazer Director Richard Linklater approached this decade-spanning project with a novelist's ambition and patient determination -- it's unique in its rhythms. EDIT
Posted Jun 17, 2014
94/100 Under the Skin (2013) Bryant Frazer As avant garde in execution as any narrative film I can think of. EDIT
Posted Apr 13, 2014
C+ 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) Bryant Frazer More than any other element, Eva Green's performance singlehandedly elevates the film from the doldrums of its hermetic conception and execution. EDIT
Posted Mar 14, 2014
88/100 Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) Bryant Frazer Maybe the first Coen Bros. film that seems to settle into sampler territory. But it sure sticks with you. EDIT
Posted Dec 5, 2013
61/100 You're Next (2011) Bryant Frazer You're Next is pretty satisfying as a semi-horror film, sparring gamely with genre conventions rather than embracing or spoofing them outright. EDIT
Posted Sep 11, 2013
B- Inserts (1975) Bryant Frazer A self-reflexive text (and dark satire) on the movie industry's depiction of sex on screen in the early years of the MPAA ratings system. EDIT
Posted Sep 9, 2013
B Turn Me On, Dammit! (2011) Bryant Frazer Its even-handed treatment of imperfect characters compares quite favorably with mainstream Hollywood stuff like Easy A. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2012
C- Silent House (2011) Bryant Frazer Despite spending too much screen time sobbing, shrieking, or putting on a game face as the camera peers down her shirt, Elizabeth Olsen comes out ahead. EDIT
Posted Mar 11, 2012
B- Haywire (2011) Bryant Frazer Soderbergh's approach is a little too stripped-down - when you're making a conventional genre movie, the absence of conventional genre elements becomes distracting in itself. EDIT
Posted Jan 23, 2012
B- The Artist (2011) Bryant Frazer The Artist plays less like an original take on the early sound era than as fan fiction set in the world of Singin' in the Rain. EDIT
Posted Jan 10, 2012
C+ A Dangerous Method (2011) Bryant Frazer Scenes built on line after line of historically accurate but awkward, overly mannered dialogue distract and eventually grate. EDIT
Posted Jan 10, 2012
B+ The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) Bryant Frazer You get the sense Blomkvist and Salander might march with Occupy Sweden protesters; in its way The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is another movie about the 99 percent. EDIT
Posted Jan 10, 2012
B Pina (2011) Bryant Frazer It's not an overview of Bausch's career or a statement on her art, but a celebration of her work and the dancers who bring it to life. EDIT
Posted Jan 10, 2012
B- The Dead (2010) Bryant Frazer You get used to the sight of the slow-moving undead swaying against the film's natural landscapes like half-imagined phantoms, and somehow that makes them more unnerving. EDIT
Posted Oct 7, 2011
B- () Bryant Frazer Puts an alluring, unnerving, yet weirdly dispassionate spin on social unrest in Germany circa 1969. EDIT
Posted Aug 18, 2011
B Tabloid (2010) Bryant Frazer First-tier documentarian Errol Morris finds himself slumming a bit with Tabloid. EDIT
Posted Jul 15, 2011
B X-Men: First Class (2011) Bryant Frazer I'm generally sick of remakes and relaunches and reboots, but this revamped X-Men origin story is kind of fun. EDIT
Posted Jun 8, 2011
A- The Tree of Life (2011) Bryant Frazer Terrence Malick is hardly the first filmmaker to show us characters who cry out at the silence of God, but he is perhaps the most unquestionably American. EDIT
Posted Jun 1, 2011
C Hall Pass (2011) Bryant Frazer Sporadically funny, but it wastes a lot of time on dreary clichés. EDIT
Posted Feb 25, 2011
B+ The Social Network (2010) Bryant Frazer There's a real mischievousness to David Fincher's approach. EDIT
Posted Jan 19, 2011
C+ Death of a Snowman (1978) Bryant Frazer Gives off a subtle but unusual vibe that's somehow suggestive of the rifts in South African culture. EDIT
Posted Jan 19, 2011
A+ The Maltese Falcon (1941) Bryant Frazer Immaculately designed, evocatively photographed, and easy to watch but also spiky, morally complex, and ultimately unsettling. EDIT
Posted Jan 19, 2011
C Repo Chick (2009) Bryant Frazer It shouldn't even be watchable, but writer-director Alex Cox manages to keep the cheese factor low. EDIT
Posted Jan 19, 2011
B+ The Housemaid (2010) Bryant Frazer The perverse thing is that the film goes down so easily and elegantly, like a fine chocolate and a swig of merlot. EDIT
Posted Jan 19, 2011
C+ Black Swan (2010) Bryant Frazer Robert Altman's paean to this behind-the-scenes process was affectionately dubbed The Company. Aronofsky's may as well be titled Army of One. EDIT
Posted Dec 6, 2010
A Certified Copy (2010) Bryant Frazer This is one of the great films about film, a master class in performance and character and narrative. EDIT
Posted Sep 30, 2010
A- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) Bryant Frazer Uncle Boonmee is less a case study in death by degrees than it is a magical and baffling tone poem on the idea of reincarnation. EDIT
Posted Sep 25, 2010
B- Enter the Void (2009) Bryant Frazer Full of stimulating, often challenging imagery that's rooted in a kind of sentimentality. EDIT
Posted Sep 23, 2010
B+ Buried (2010) Bryant Frazer Cleverly written and staged with plenty of wound-up energy, plus a climax that sucks the air out of the theater. EDIT
Posted Sep 23, 2010
B The Town (2010) Bryant Frazer The Town has showcase heist sequences and car chases that avoid the usual pitfalls of over-the-top silliness and/or incoherence. EDIT
Posted Sep 17, 2010
C+ Easy A (2010) Bryant Frazer The whole affair is PG-13 toothless and TV slick - I kept feeling that the movie was insisting on its own embraceability, and I resisted. EDIT
Posted Sep 17, 2010
B+ Dogtooth (2009) Bryant Frazer Director Giorgos Lanthimos may be influenced by Michael Haneke's clinical approach as well as by David Lynch's affection for the weird. EDIT
Posted Jul 15, 2010
B- Inception (2010) Bryant Frazer Christopher Nolan's films are things of beauty, precisely constructed and expertly executed. But you wouldn't want to live there. EDIT
Posted Jul 15, 2010
B+ The Killer Inside Me (2010) Bryant Frazer In this terrific, magnetic performance, Affleck is a bit charismatic, somewhat awkward, and utterly despicable, all at the same time EDIT
Posted Jun 17, 2010
A- Winter's Bone (2010) Bryant Frazer Strikingly unsentimental. Winter's Bone has no time for backstory, moral lessons, or other cute stuff. EDIT
Posted Jun 16, 2010
B+ Splice (2009) Bryant Frazer When Splice is in full flower, there's something magnificent about it. EDIT
Posted Jun 6, 2010
A- Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) Bryant Frazer A treatise on Bad Art and a screed against tone-deaf patterns of consumption that drive trends in the art world. EDIT
Posted May 3, 2010
A- Vincere (2009) Bryant Frazer Evokes the historical weight of Europe's Fascist tragedy on a small, resolutely humane, scale. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2010
C+ Survival of the Dead (2009) Bryant Frazer This one's really for fans only. EDIT
Posted Mar 5, 2010
B- Green Zone (2010) Bryant Frazer This is a kind of experiment, and it's only partly successful. But, set against the most expansive, otherworldly backdrop this side of James Cameron's Pandora, it's an appropriately spooky experience. EDIT
Posted Mar 5, 2010
B The Ghost Writer (2010) Bryant Frazer Too many scenes here are a bit perfunctory, but they're balanced out well enough by the occasional directorial flourish or long moment of nicely sustained tension. EDIT
Posted Feb 23, 2010
B District 13: Ultimatum (2009) Bryant Frazer When D13: Ultimatum is firing on all cylinders, it's a bad-ass action movie. When it functions as a delivery mechanism for a social message, it's corny as all hell, but still pleasant enough. EDIT
Posted Feb 4, 2010