For 6,914 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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63% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 54
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,535 out of 6914
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Mixed: 3,062 out of 6914
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Negative: 1,317 out of 6914
6,914
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Naomi Watts is a tremendous movie actress. She need only sidle on camera and glance over the terrain to claim the scene. What's her secret? Like the great Isabelle Huppert, Watts doesn't radiate feelings so much as she absorbs them. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 90
Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 90
A smart, realist drama -- I wouldn't be surprised if this one winds up on my 10-best list for '99. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 90
What saves this deeply affecting film from being merely a collection of wrenching cases is Corcuera's attention to detail. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
If you can forget the world-historic significance of the mass revolution that overthrew Europe's oldest absolute monarchy -- or rather, subsume it in the mysteries of personality -- The Lady and the Duke is the stuff of human interest. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
This extravagant family melodrama, one of the highlights of last year's New York Film Festival, runs two and a half hours and never lags, so moment-to-moment enthralling are Desplechin's narrative gambits, as well as his reckless eccentricity. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
It's an altogether remarkable piece of work, deepening the genre while whipping its skin off, satirizing an entire nation's nearsighted apathy as it wonders, almost aloud, about the nature of truth, evidence, and social belonging. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 90
With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.) -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Mood is everything, trumped up by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama, and symphonic mournfulness it's almost a movie on its own. 2046 may be a Chinese box of style geysers and earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren't bleeding humans at the center of it. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 90
Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental. -
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Reviewed by
Joshua Land 90
A triumph of documentary activism nine years in the making. -
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Critic Score 90
Unlike American counterparts "Kids" or "Dangerous Minds," this highly intelligent comedy (which cleaned up at this year's Césars) doesn't seek to shock or inspire, but merely documents teen moodiness in all its tedious unpredictability. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Keane is a painfully specific figure but at the same time a totem, lean and frightening, for a morass of modern anxieties. That might be this phenomenal film's emergent achievement: Its raw hopelessness is its universality. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Corpse Bride never skimps on the sass (as a good folktale shouldn't). And the variety of its cadaverous style is never less than inspired; never has the human skull's natural grin been redeployed so exhaustively for yuks. -
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Critic Score 90
A dreamlike travelogue that transforms a mundane world into something strange and new. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween. -
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Critic Score 90
Devos's performance is an expert workshop of internalized emotions and silent forbearance. -
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Critic Score 90
Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault--less visceral, perhaps, than "Code Unknown" and the criminally underappreciated "Time of the Wolf," but more thoughtful and, in the end, deeper in the afterplay. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Beehive is a graceful and potent lyric on children's vulnerable hunger, but it's also a sublime study on cinema's poetic capacity to reflect and hypercharge reality. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
The Fallen Idol has been overshadowed by the noir comedy, giddy style, and Cold War thematics of Reed and Greene's subsequent sensation "The Third Man," but (in similarly dealing with the nature of betrayal) The Fallen Idol is actually a superior psychological drama. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Camus's film remains a revivifying experience - and a mid-winter oasis. Born and bred in France, Camus made other films, and lots of French TV, but Black Orpheus may still be the greatest one-hit-wonder import we've ever seen. -
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Critic Score 90
A film that forges identification with its victimized heroine like none I've seen in decades. (The Nova Scotia–born Page, a Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and win.) -
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Critic Score 90
Nicholas Jarecki's The Outsider is among the great docs about moviemaking. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences. -
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Critic Score 90
Keillor's modest subservience to Altman's group dynamic feels downright gallant, and in the context of the veteran director's most humanistic movie by a wide margin, it certainly has its rewards. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 90
At once robust and ethereal, this is an existential ghost story, with fresh blood pulsing through its veins. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
It's still a feat of period filmmaking. More than that, Overlord's revivification of a wasteland Europe offers up a powerful whip lesson for the postwar complacent: that the waging of war, even this most romanticized of conflicts, means bringing a corpse-mountain hell to someone's home neighborhood. -
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Critic Score 90
Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
It seems easily the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years. -
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Critic Score 90
The audacity of making an inner-city drama in which the white-male authority figure is the crackhead finds its equal in Gosling's already legendary performance, a high-wire act that's gutsiest for its unconscionable charm. -
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Critic Score 90
Beautifully acted and handsomely mounted, this gorgeous period piece is an intelligent and intriguing exploration of "the dark arts" -- less dependent on mere hocus-pocus than on the convincing journey of the soul undertaken by its hero. -
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Critic Score 90
The result is an intellectual history of Warhol, bucking the trend toward the star-studded VH1-ization of biodocs and constructed with a mission to dispel the artist's own self-created image as high-fashion hobnobber in favor of a more profound depiction. Burns argues for a cogitating, agitating Warhol: deep thinker, cultural barometer, and world changer. -
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Critic Score 90
Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think. -
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Critic Score 90
Almodóvar isn't what he used to be (who is?), but he's a master of the medium nevertheless, deploying color and light and shadow not merely to express emotions but to tap into ours, directing the blood flow of the audience as much as he directs the movie. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
Craig, excellent in both art house endeavors (The Mother, Enduring Love) and blockbuster think pieces (Munich), has both a nasty streak and a soft side never before seen in the series; Fleming would recognize him as most like his literary creation: damaged goods in a tailored tux. -
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Critic Score 90
It's as weird and whimsical an invention as Guest's "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show," or "A Mighty Wind." -
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Critic Score 90
The special power of Eastwood's achievement is that, save for one indelible moment, the mutual recognition between sworn adversaries happens not on-screen, but later, as we piece the two films together in our minds. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology. -
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Critic Score 90
Director Gabor Csupo of Rugrats "fame" steer clear of cutesy tween stereotypes, but it's Jess's relationship with his father, played by Robert Patrick, that elevates Terabithia from a good kids movie to a classic contender. -
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Critic Score 90
If Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
Gordon-Levitt's worth the admission all by his lonesome. He's that good--the proverbial young man with an old soul who brings unexpected depth, complexity, and sincerity to what could have been just another damaged-guy role. He's the one to look out for. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form. -
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Critic Score 90
The beautiful and beguiling new film by Robinson Devor meditates on the Enumclaw incident through a hypnotic blend of original reporting, staged reenactment, testimony of involved parties (both zoophiles and local law enforcement), and pervasive, somewhat precious lyricism. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie. -
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Critic Score 90
Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier. -
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Critic Score 90
Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened. -
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Critic Score 90
The new Little Women, directed with grace by Gillian Armstrong, adapted with tact by Robin Swicord, and starring an extraordinary ensemble, has made my holiday. -
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Critic Score 90
Ratatouille is as much a feast for the senses as it is food for thought. -
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Critic Score 90
Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups. -
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Critic Score 90
Superbad is duly ribald and often achingly funny, brewed from the now-familiar Apatow house blend of go-for-broke slapstick and instantly quotable, potty-mouthed dialogue. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
Like many of the best movies about war and its lingering echo, The Hunting Party is full of dark humor. Writer-director Richard Shepard, maker of 2005's "The Matador," is becoming a master at finding the right tone, balancing the seriousness of his characters' purpose with the madness of their intentions. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to "A History of Violence." -
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Critic Score 90
It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts--and unnerves--in this most chilling of global-warming movies. -
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Critic Score 90
To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
Jeremy Kagan's excellent adaptation of William Gibson's stage play. -
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Critic Score 90
On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's "Nowhere," and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn. -
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Critic Score 90
In what has been a pretty remarkable career up to now, it's this performance that fully affirms Smith as one of the great leading men of his generation. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation--though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-'toon juggernauts--but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, "adult" comic story into moving pictures. -
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Critic Score 90
Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie—this relentless thriller stops for nothing—but as for what to call it, behold . . . al-Qaedzilla! -
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Critic Score 90
Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay (Transformers) has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise. -
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
With his elegant cadence, crisp comedic timing, and witty flipping of homophobic stereotypes--in his very choice and use of language--Bachardy is that story come to life: the student who eventually mirrored his teacher, the molded who became a duplicate of the mold. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse. -
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Critic Score 90
Exquisitely sad, idiosyncratic film à clef about an aging gay gigolo grasping at the embers of memory before they--and he--turn to ash. -
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Critic Score 90
Generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick. -
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Critic Score 90
Allen has crafted a wry and thoughtful film about the peculiar stirrings of the heart that is certainly his most accomplished piece of work since 2005's "Match Point" and arguably his funniest in the eight years since "Small Time Crooks." -
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Critic Score 90
A mischievously hedonistic, Chaplinesque farce, the film buoyantly but seriously traverses the horrors of World War II with a subtlety and sophistication that most American comedies cannot grasp. -
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Critic Score 90
The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs. -
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Critic Score 90
An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A heady plum pudding of a movie--studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery. -
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Critic Score 90
Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
The results are extraordinary. As understated as it is, the movie is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Serbis may be a raunch-fest, but it's also a mind-trip--a raunch-fest with ideas. -
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Critic Score 90
Comedy seems to have liberated Gilroy, who directs Duplicity with the high gloss and fleet-footed hustle of a golden-age Hollywood craftsman. -
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Critic Score 90
Miklahkov keeps 12 tops spinning at all times in the school gymnasium that serves as their deliberation room, and though the speech/conversion pattern grows a little pat, the movement toward consensus raises the further, richly complicated question of how to decide not only what is right, but what is best. -
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Critic Score 90
Bahrani possesses a disciplined sense of composition and form, a vision of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of his own navel, and the understanding that it is possible to make films about class and race in this country without pandering to the audience. -
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Critic Score 90
I've seen Mottola's movie twice, and both times, it has inspired feelings of joy, sadness, and a profound yearning for the unrecoverable past. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene. -
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Critic Score 90
Tyson is more like a particularly riveting therapy session, with Tyson as both analyst and patient. -
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Critic Score 90
I hurt myself laughing at this amazingly inventive mockumentary, and because it's so good, I refuse to give away much more than an insistent recommendation. -
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Critic Score 90
District 9 whizzes by with a resourcefulness and mordant wit nearly worthy of its obvious influences: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Dawn of the Dead," and "Starship Troopers." -
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Critic Score 90
Mann's exhilarating movie exists in a state of perpetual forward motion. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst. -
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
Boys is first-rate cinema archaeology. What pushes it beyond that is the brutal honesty with which the sibling rivalry between the elder Shermans is depicted; theirs is a palpable mixture of love and disdain that led to the men not socializing with each other for more than 40 years. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
It's Page, a joyful instructor and natural storyteller, who steals the spotlight (Robert who? More, please.) Only real complaint: The movie's not loud enough. They should have turned that f***er up to 11. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do. -
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Critic Score 90
Passing Strange conjures a rare kind of theatrical magic with its emotionally raw, frequently euphoric portrait of the artist as a young man. -
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Critic Score 90
Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem. -
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Critic Score 90
By turns stupendously beautiful and grimly terrifying, and best appreciated in a movie theater. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation. -
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Critic Score 90
In a remarkable performance that won her a special award from the world cinema jury at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Chilean television vet Saavedra goes through one of the most uncanny psychophysical transformations I've ever seen in a movie without the benefit of obvious makeup or other prosthetics. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
The filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy--which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Though he successfully humanizes Hirohito, who is shown happily shedding his divinity, Sokurov doesn't entirely exonerate him. He contrives a shock ending that, as measured as everything else in this engrossing, supremely assured movie, acknowledges one last blood sacrifice on the emperor's altar. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
It's merely a well-done, adult American movie--that is to say, a rarity. -
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Critic Score 90
Paley's beguiling, consistently inventive visuals and sly yet melancholy tone are about as warm and winning as heartbreak-fueled empowerment gets. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
Gorgeously mounted tale of enlightenment through art and courage. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
Removing even stage banter, the focus is entirely on performance, save for a few "candid backstage" bits--Young getting a cracked nail filed down, etc. Devotees will thrill to rarities like "Kansas" and "Mexico." -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once. -
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Critic Score 90
Océans is a jaw-dropper as a visual travelogue--even its anthropomorphic indulgences (an ocean floor is turned into a rough neighborhood, complete with trespassers and shy weirdos) are winning. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I've seen since Pascal Ferran's 2006 "Lady Chatterley." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
The movie's ending may be less satisfying than that of "Slumdog Millionaire"--a film you can love for its infectiously wishful exuberance, but never fully believe in--but Kisses is truer to the tragedy of a generation of children whom we have utterly failed. If they're anything like Kylie and Dylan, they'll be back to let us know. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
As he did in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", Wright immerses his heroes in pop culture's detritus and diversions, but doesn't drown them in it. You don't have to be dazzled or tickled by the movie, or get every joke, to be touched by it, too. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries. -
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Critic Score 90
Up to now, writer-director Neil Marshall has specialized in horror movies (Dog Soldiers, The Descent), but here, he imagines and communicates a remote world with terrific energy and a passion for detail. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.- Posted Oct 21, 2010
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
The pleasures of this gorgeous, clever, and visceral film are almost exclusively aesthetic. Those unmoved or alienated by the porn of pain may be left flopping as nervelessly as one of the movie's severed limbs.- Posted Oct 26, 2010
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
Nothing tops ILYPM's Jim Carrey ... in the most gloriously raunchy, unrepentant moment in the an(n)als of Hollywood A-listers doing gay-for-pay.- Posted Dec 6, 2010
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Critic Score 90
Seen as his final monologue, the film is both an invaluable portfolio of his talent, and a tribute rendered in the style of its subject.- Posted Dec 10, 2010
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.- Posted Dec 12, 2010
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.- Posted Dec 14, 2010
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
His gift-and the film's-is to transform the seemingly banal relationship between pet and owner into something singular, inimitable, sacred.- Posted Jan 15, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.- Posted Jan 18, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.- Posted Mar 1, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.Posted Mar 8, 2011 -
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Critic Score 90
Fukunaga has made his Jane Eyre an intimate, thoughtful epic, anchored by strong lead performances and the gorgeous, moody 100-shades-of-gray cinematography of Adriano Goldman.- Posted Mar 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.- Posted Mar 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 90
Road movies don't get any purer.- Posted Mar 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation.- Posted Apr 12, 2011
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.- Posted Jun 21, 2011
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Critic Score 90
Despite the passive-aggressive bickering, Beats, Rhymes & Life is not, thankfully, hip-hop's "Some Kind of Monster."- Posted Jul 5, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 90
The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June's "Trollhunter," Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it's neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy.- Posted Jul 26, 2011
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Critic Score 90
Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."- Posted Aug 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 90
Unadulterated labor is the focus of this blistering, beautifully modulated documentary from Mexican auteur Eugenio Polgovsky.- Posted Sep 6, 2011
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.- Posted Sep 6, 2011
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Critic Score 90
Leonard Retel Helmrich's third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways.- Posted Sep 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."- Posted Sep 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 90
It really happened, it's really corny, and it's really great.- Posted Sep 20, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.- Posted Sep 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder - a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."- Posted Sep 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.- Posted Oct 18, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Plenty of moments in Melancholia are painfully funny. Some moments are even painful to watch, but there was never a moment when I thought about the time or my next movie or did not care about the characters or had anything less than complete interest in what was happening on the screen.- Posted Oct 25, 2011
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 90
A rigorous, agile, scathingly funny reckoning with a city and society in the last stages of decline.- Posted Jan 10, 2012
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).- Posted Jan 31, 2012
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.- Posted Feb 11, 2012
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Critic Score 90
The Kid With a Bike seems to unfold in a different world than that of previous Dardenne joints, one with a wider range of spiritual and practical possibilities.- Posted Mar 13, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Nélisse, with her tough, Courtney Love puss, and Néron's portrayal of a boy's well-defended torment are extraordinary, as is the film's realization of the small, temporary world that surrounds them. Hitting upon that kind of specificity - of a moment and its emotion - makes for strong memories and a really great movie.- Posted Apr 10, 2012
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.- Posted Apr 17, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Shot on Super 16mm, the visible grain giving each image a wonderfully tactile depth and life, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is, in a lot of ways, the ur–Wes Anderson film.- Posted May 22, 2012
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Critic Score 90
[Fukasaku's] genius is finding the overlap between teenage dreams and nightmares, between the intensity of first love and the terror of extinction.- Posted May 22, 2012
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Reviewed by
Nick Schager 90
It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.- Posted Jul 17, 2012
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- Posted Jul 24, 2012
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Critic Score 90
With its naked but never self-indulgent depictions of sex and all manner of addiction, Keep the Lights On is disarmingly, at times exhilaratingly, human.- Posted Sep 4, 2012
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Critic Score 90
It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem.- Posted Sep 11, 2012
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."- Posted Sep 18, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Remember the shitty crime comedies every Hollywood brat tried to make after "Pulp Fiction"? It took an Irish playwright to get it right. See it with an audience.- Posted Oct 9, 2012
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Critic Score 90
A slow-motion-enhanced kiss scene, with Corinealdi in top I-don't-give-a-f--- strut, is a startling example of DuVernay's ability to conjure drama that at once takes place in a character's head and in a recognizable real world. It's beautifully nuanced and confidently ambiguous - and so is the movie.- Posted Oct 9, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.- Posted Oct 9, 2012
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Critic Score 90
In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.- Posted Oct 10, 2012
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Critic Score 90
A "gritty" historical drama overwhelmed by its love of Hollywood as an inventor of imaginary narratives with real consequences, a great generator of American bedtime stories whose magic works on suburban kids and foreign enemies alike.- Posted Oct 10, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Crewdson and others (including Russell Banks and Laurie Simmons) speak eloquently about his project, but it's the on-set agonies - to achieve the fleeting expression here, dark kiss of light there, and the peculiar relief they bring our maestro - that fascinate.- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Critic Score 90
This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.- Posted Nov 7, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Bill and Turner Ross - the directors, producers, camera operators, and troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas - could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in–New Orleans documentary for each of the world's great cities.- Posted Dec 10, 2012
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Critic Score 90
Like all of the best pop art, Tarantino's film is both seriously entertaining and seriously thoughtful, rattling the cage of race in America on-screen and off.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era "woman's picture," the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Critic Score 90
It's a small gem with a killer rock soundtrack, well worth seeking out amid all the awards-season Sturm und Drang.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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- Posted Jan 2, 2013
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Critic Score 90
It's fitting that this film of people making do with what they have should itself look somewhat humble, without lyricism, a work not of beauty but of work-which is the thing that makes it beautiful, no matter who directed it.- Posted Jan 22, 2013
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Reviewed by
Michelle Orange 90
The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.- Posted Jan 29, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
One marvel of the film is how it conveys so much information so quickly, and with such accessibility.- Posted Feb 26, 2013
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- Posted Feb 26, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 90
The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.- Posted Mar 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 90
It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.- Posted Mar 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alan Scherstuhl 90
The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.- Posted Mar 12, 2013
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."- Posted Mar 12, 2013
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Critic Score 90
The new film from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers may forget to notice that they can't hear the dialogue.- Posted Mar 26, 2013
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Critic Score 90
Even if the theories don't persuade you, the film fascinates. It's revelatory about the nature of spectatorship in an era when technology allows audiences to watch films frame by frame.- Posted Mar 26, 2013
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Critic Score 90
If Simon Killer's tragic drift is predictable, the seedy particulars still engross. And the storytelling is first-rate.- Posted Apr 2, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alan Scherstuhl 90
Here's a movie with magic.- Posted Apr 16, 2013
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Reviewed by
Zachary Wigon 90
In the House is a mystery, but it investigates a far tougher riddle than what makes Claude tick—it's trying to figure out why, exactly, voyeurism and mystery delight us so. In the process, it delights us.- Posted Apr 16, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
What saves the film—and grandly—is Nance’s wildly ambitious visual imagination. Teetering somewhere between film school precocity and impressively assured audaciousness...It’s almost hypnotic in its style and genre promiscuity.- Posted Apr 26, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alan Scherstuhl 90
With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.- Posted May 7, 2013
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- Posted May 7, 2013
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Reviewed by
Pete Vonder Haar 90
With striking visuals reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall and a refreshingly (for domestic animation audiences) grown-up storyline, The Painting is almost reminiscent of, well, a work of art.- Posted May 10, 2013
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Reviewed by
Stephanie Zacharek 90
Frances Ha is a patchwork of details that constitute a sort of dating manual—not one that tells you how to meet hot guys, but one that fortifies you against all the crap you have to deal with as a young person in love with a city that doesn't always love you back.- Posted May 14, 2013
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- Posted May 14, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 90
Old Dog has the look and feel of a documentary, which adds senses of urgency and immediacy to a tale that moves at a languid, but never boring, pace.- Posted May 14, 2013
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