Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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For 1,486 reviews, this critic has graded:
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42% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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56% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.8 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Jonathan Rosenbaum's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 60 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 696 out of 1486
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Mixed: 588 out of 1486
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Negative: 202 out of 1486
1,486
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening. The only precedent that comes to mind in terms of a lyrical treatment of a child's experience of terror is "The Night of the Hunter." -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
It has few stars familiar to Americans, and it shares with "Pan's Labyrinth" the rare distinction of being a mainstream commercial movie with subtitles. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Haggis's dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
This masterpiece, an art film deftly masquerading as a thriller, seems to celebrate small-town pastoralism and critique big-city violence, but this position turns out to be double-edged. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done. Some viewers have complained, understandably, that it's incomprehensible, but it's never boring, and the emotions Lynch is expressing are never in doubt. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Hou's best film since "The Puppetmaster" (1993). It's also his most minimalist effort to date, slow to reveal its depths and beauties, and it marks a rejuvenation of his art. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Beautifully composed and deftly delivered, it becomes the libretto to Potter's visual music, creating a remarkable lyricism and emotional directness. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
All this edginess, combined with the grandeur and sweep of a classic western, demonstrates that Jones clearly knows how to tell a story -- and how to confound us at the same time. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Whether the title refers to the baby or the thief remains an open question, and the viewer is left to decide whether the theme of redemption should be perceived in Christian terms. This builds to a suspenseful climax, and as in Hitchcock's best work, that suspense is morally inflected. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional... This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he's already clearly a master. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Three Times, one of the peaks of his (Hou Hsiao-hsien) career, may be your last chance to see his work inside a movie theater. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
A great film but also one of the most upsetting films I know. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
The best documentary to date about the military occupation of Iraq. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
A dedicated, charismatic, crack-addicted history teacher is the most believable protagonist in an American movie this year. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
The period details and performances are uniformly superb (Bob Hoskins is especially good as MGM executive Eddie Mannix), and the major characters are even more complex than those in "Chinatown." -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
One reason Bamako feels like a blast of sanity is that the theoretical debates about the state of the world, particularly Africa and more particularly Mali, are only half of its agenda. The other half, broadly speaking, is the life of everyday Africans. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
This 1985 film's absolute freedom from cliches is genuinely refreshing; looking at it again after Van Sant's subsequent "Drugstore Cowboy," I found it every bit as good and in some ways even more impressive than the later film. It shouldn't be missed. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newhman do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
An early voice-over segment about the Casbah itself, before Gabin makes an appearance, is so pungent you can almost taste the place, even though the filming was clearly done in a studio. -
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Jonathan Rosenbaum 100
It's hard to think of many more galvanizing definitions of what it means to be an American than Cho's volcanic self-assessments. -
