For 4,810 reviews, this publication has graded:
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68% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.7 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,904 out of 4810
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Mixed: 1,357 out of 4810
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Negative: 549 out of 4810
4,810
movie reviews
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Lives happily ever after because it's such a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Beautiful, wise, and poker-faced comedy of discombobulation. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.- Posted Nov 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The London universe Leigh creates (employing his trademark improv techniques to unite his ensemble, many of whom make their film debuts) isn't so much a reality as a hope, and an invitation to find joy and grace in everyday moments. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The enthralling spirit of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its righteous liberal ''meaning.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 83
Ang Lee's film of the Jane Austen novel slavishly follows the gospel according to Merchant Ivory, swooning over characters declaiming modestly while surrounded by topiary. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Cove is the rare documentary specifically designed as a thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
If this is the sound of a new generation, then it may be the first generation cautious enough to embrace friendship as mightier than love. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.- Posted Nov 27, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Bridges' guileless performance makes this piquant little indie tale of country music, redemption, and the love of a pretty younger woman such a sad-song charmer. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There are moments in A Little Princess--particularly Cuaron's Indian play-within-the-play, which is nearly avant-garde in its conception--when you may just want to clap from pleasure. My advice to you is: Go ahead, you're a grown-up. [26 May 26 1995] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.) -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Although it shares a bitter interest in slum desperation with last year's Brazilian-underbelly docudrama ''City of God,'' Bus 174 pulls ahead, I think, by not confusing cinematic pizzazz with the content of misery. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on "The West Wing" are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please! -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Feels delightfully organic, eccentrically rambling, the found artistic collage of a woman who herself loves to collect. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Fierce, loving, and electric, this movie's got bite as well as bark. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.- Posted Jul 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Paranoid Park has the slightly glum insularity of minimalist fiction, but it's the first of Van Sant's blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down. -
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- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Don't be fooled: In this unpeaceable kingdom, the den mama is also ready to eat her young. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Hugo both ticks and flies by, a marvel meant to be pulled from the cabinet and enjoyed again and again.- Posted Nov 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A funny and madly arresting new documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A muscular sequel to To's riveting 2005 gangster picture "Election." -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The 3-D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The picture moves with stealth, enjoying its own thriller-ness as hints are laid and mislaid. There's a sense that Hitchcock is hovering in the background and cheering for Auteuil, who musters all his French superstardom to play a man having his mask of blandness torn off. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
I will salute the deftness and intelligence with which Goldfinger observes the reactions of the living to the revelations of the dead.- Posted Nov 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The movie is so finely minced a mixture of Sondheim's original melodrama and Burton's signature spicing that it's difficult to think of any other filmmaker so naturally suited for the job. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore." -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.- Posted Aug 29, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.- Posted Oct 27, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.- Posted Dec 20, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.- Posted Apr 19, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).- Posted Mar 21, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The film's style is so ''objective'' it's a bit subdued, yet this is a sports drama of total originality, as well as the most authentic inside view of the immigrant experience the movies have given us in quite a while. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A disturbingly avid re-creation of the last six weeks in the life and slow, self-imposed wasting of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The Trip looks like a lark - and is - yet there's a sneaky resonance to the way it celebrates what acting means to these two rogue cutups.- Posted Jun 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith. -
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- Posted Mar 9, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Where "No End" is cool and measured, Taxi is hot, anguished, and sometimes as difficult to watch as pictures of torture ought to be. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.- Posted Mar 7, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.- Posted Apr 14, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.- Posted Nov 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Expertly sinister, office-as-devil's-playground French thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. It's a ride for the gut AND the brain. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This enveloping dream of an epic narrative experiment comes from the great Chilean-born, France-based filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained).- Posted Aug 4, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A tale of ordinary Americans scraping bottom, yet there's a redemption in that. The film asks: If you were this desperate, wouldn't you do the same? -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Watch for the director's own mother, Lili Kosashvili, a standout as Zaza's fierce, stately mama. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
An amazing thing -- a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Raquel's devotion to her employer is barbed with hatred, need, and an insecurity she manifests through constant tiny acts of sabotage that would be funny if they weren't also so chilling -- bordering on psychotic. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Huppert has never been this cheerful, or lethal, and the movie itself is like Hitchcock's ''Rebecca'' reshot for House & Garden, with all the ghosts pulled out of the closet. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
David Cronenberg's brilliant movie -- without a doubt one of the very best of the year. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
What's lost in translation is recovered easily enough in Michael Sheen's astonishing performance as Clough. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy, leaves political debate at the ticket counter and focuses solely on what it's like for Juno MacGuff to be Juno MacGuff. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.- Posted Dec 29, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar). -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda musters the power of classical filmmaking and personal emotional investment to dramatize a stunning atrocity long covered up. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
French mood-and-feeling master filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her youth for an intense, mysterious drama exploring revolution and loss.- Posted Dec 14, 2010
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
That his (writer-director Tom McCarthy) strange, often funny film is so well-disciplined and deadpan refreshing is an achievement. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
A peculiar combination of willful meandering and matter of fact violence, and it occasionally confounds in its attempts to exalt. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Rohmer treasures the undervalued glories of discourse and the intimacy of conversation over the obviousness of action or sexual display. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The serious accusations are leavened by the moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The movie darts, dreams, and sometimes seems to dance. The great Plummer, meanwhile, creates an inspiring, fully rounded man in late bloom, and McGregor responds with a performance to match.- Posted May 29, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
British filmmaker Andrew Haigh's background in editing (from Gladiator to Mister Lonely) is evident in the casual beauty of moments that only appear "found," giving Weekend an engrossing documentary feel.- Posted Sep 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
You need know nothing about Italian politics to completely enjoy the fantastical, Fellini-fied, tragi-comic, biographical fun-for-all Il Divo. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.- Posted Feb 13, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The son is obsessive and petulant, punishing and self-pitying, and by the time he gets to a talk with his hurt old mother, we understand why. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
In the very funny cop comedy Hot Fuzz, overachieving London police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) commits a very British sin: He's too good. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Yet another outstanding little movie in the exciting Romanian New Wave. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The high-low setting effectively reinforces the emotional geography of both lost souls. Gillian Anderson makes a brief, well-placed appearance as one of the rich.- Posted Oct 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This beautiful, terrible story is not easily forgotten. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Their love story was inevitably complicated. And so is the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story -- not simply a love letter to love -- by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies. -
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Critic Score 100
Director Bruce Beresford's tightly focused adaptation retains all the impact of its Pulitzer Prize-winning stage original. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give exceptional performances as the aging widow and the sage black chauffeur who enlightens her in the segregated South.- Posted Feb 20, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The archival footage is so breathtaking, the reminiscences so piquant, that even a stranger to dance can't help but be swept up by this peek into such exquisite, now vanished glamour. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
A fizzy and delirious high-camp message-movie musical that may just turn out to be the happiest movie of the summer. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.- Posted Jul 25, 2012
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Critic Score 83
Gerwig, who previously starred in Baumbach's "Greenberg," is charmingly awkward. And Sumner (Sting's daughter) is an ace with deadpan one-liners.- Posted May 15, 2013
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.- Posted Nov 14, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Wendy and Lucy is like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Antonioni. What's piercing about it, and also disturbing, is that Reichardt views the renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity -- as a lefty romantic dream. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The lyrical animation, with its meditative attention to nature, bears the unique stamp of Japan's Studio Ghibli, cofounded by the great "Spirited Away" animator Hayao Miyazaki.- Posted Feb 15, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
A movie masterpiece...is Lars von Trier's ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end.- Posted Oct 19, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
A succulently entertaining movie that invites you to splash around in the dreams and follies of folks so rich they're the 1 percent of the 1 percent. It's like a champagne bath laced with arsenic.- Posted Jul 11, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
While never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
As tricky and satisfying as any of David Mamet's airless cinematic shell games. Mamet's films are all plot and no atmosphere; this one has a squalid, urban-greed-meets-the-gutter mood that lends its filigreed cleverness an unusually resonant kick. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Truer than the John Wayne showpiece and less gritty than the book, this True Grit is just tasty enough to leave movie lovers hungry for a missing spice.- Posted Dec 15, 2010
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
Loosely based on real events, this harrowing, superbly made drama by fast-rising filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode) is Mexico's 2012 submission for Best Foreign Language Film - rightfully so.- Posted Jan 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The best thing about this long-awaited feature-length project, a classic Simpsonian interplay of family psychology, social commentary, and brainy visual and verbal jokes tossed off at rat-a-tat speed, is how relaxed it manages to be. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.- Posted Mar 27, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
The movie version, directed with unobtrusive precision by James Foley, stays amazingly true to the play's feisty spirit. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Known for distinctive horror movies like "Cure" and "Pulse," inventive Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds just the right melancholy tone to suit a new and all too familiar kind of horror: economic downsizing. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 100
The first great, mind-tickling treat of the new movie year. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Good Night, and Good Luck has a small-scale time-capsule fascination, yet its hermeticism is really a form of moral caution -- a way of keeping the issues neat, the liberal idealism untainted. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
A stunning study of one desperate woman's conscience. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.- Posted Jan 5, 2011
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 91
The film casts a hypnotic spell all its own. It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.- Posted Jan 9, 2013
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
Surges with an energy and visual verve that improve the play and enhance the themes of dramatist Peter Morgan's script. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
With exemplary use of archival footage, director Asif Kapadia expertly contrasts episodes of adrenaline-rush speed with moments of reflective slow motion to capture the addictive thrill and danger of the sport, as well as the personal values of the humble, spiritual sportsman.- Posted Aug 10, 2011
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The Sessions is first and foremost about Hawkes' virtuoso performance, one of those "My Left Foot"-y transformations that make audiences verklemmt and generate awards talk.- Posted Oct 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 91
The charm and art of De Felitta's gentle domestic sketch expand far beyond biographical borders. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Great, restrained performances of Beatty and Schreiber, delicately framed by the filmmaker's taste for visual compositions. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long. -
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- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 100
It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul. -
