Adam Nayman

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The A.V. Club, The Dissolve
For 30 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 10% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Adam Nayman's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 91 Dressed to Kill
Lowest review score: 30 Bad Johnson
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 30
  2. Mixed: 17 out of 30
  3. Negative: 1 out of 30
30 movie reviews
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    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Adam Nayman
    Skiptrace
    Knoxville isn’t as starry a Hollywood foil to his co-star’s iconic stoicism as either Chris Tucker or Owen Wilson, but playing a jackass is right in his wheelhouse and in one action set piece, he’s very funny as a kind of tightly bound human prop.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 75 Adam Nayman
    Manhattan Night
    Luckily, Brody is a resourceful enough actor to make Porter a credible protagonist despite the mechanical nature of both his motivation and the plot around him.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Adam Nayman
    Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    It’s the sort of film that’s destined to be the answer to a trivia question, and not much more.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Adam Nayman
    The Confirmation
    The Confirmation isn’t much to look at, and its rhythms are wobbly (the quest narrative starts to feel strained early on), but Nelson is a dogged enough dramatist that even the story’s resolutions—even the really pat and obvious ones—are satisfyingly earned.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Adam Nayman
    Eye in the Sky
    Like Brian De Palma’s underrated "Redacted," this is a film that doesn’t want to be easily pegged, either in terms of its politics or generic allegiances. Such ambiguity is a virtue, but for all his technical facility, Hood doesn’t really have the finesse of a great, fearless satirist.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 58 Adam Nayman
    Misunderstood
    The ostensible boldness of Misunderstood is undermined by the sense that it’s also pandering—that its view of childhood as a bourgeois horror-show is at least as salable on the art-house circuit as it is authentic to its creator’s experiences.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Adam Nayman
    Fort Tilden
    For all its exquisite theater-of-cruelty viciousness, Fort Tilden is finally a work of empathy about people whose own supplies are running on empty.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Adam Nayman
    Counting
    His film is vivid and yet elusive. He shoots first so that we might ask questions later.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Adam Nayman
    Mala Mala
    Amid all the images of celebration and joyful physical abandon—including a showcase solo dance performance that functions as a kind of climax—the most lingering images are the ones depicting daily routines.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Adam Nayman
    A Poem Is a Naked Person
    As a musical, the film is often thrilling.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Adam Nayman
    Level Five
    Level Five doesn’t achieve the poetic heights of Sans Soleil, but that might be because its project is more desultory; where the earlier work merely hints at the difficulty of looking at history without a filter, this sister film all but gives up the ghost.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Adam Nayman
    4 Minute Mile
    This film about the loneliness of the young middle-distance runner drops so many heavy obstacles in his way, with such grueling regularity, that it’s like he’s practicing to be a hurdler instead.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Adam Nayman
    The Amazing Catfish
    What keeps The Amazing Catfish from greatness despite the evident skill at every level of its production—the editing is sharp, and the actors are all excellent, especially the children—is the sense that Sainte-Luce is luxuriating in quirkiness for its own sake.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Adam Nayman
    Burning Blue
    Burning Blue expends most of its energies mitigating against potential flaws, with very little left over to push it over the top and into the realm of quality independent cinema.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Adam Nayman
    Grand Départ
    In the absence of narrative urgency or fresh storytelling devices, Grand Départ lives or dies with Marmaï’s performance, but like everything else around him, he’s merely adequate.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Adam Nayman
    Hanna Ranch
    What’s affecting about Hanna Ranch is its suggestion that Kirk Hanna was the real deal in every way possible, a man out of time, simultaneously inspired and fatally trapped by his past.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Adam Nayman
    Bad Johnson
    Instead of trying for something truly outrageous or surreal—qualities that should flow naturally from the script’s insane premise—writer Jeff Tetreault and director Huck Botko opt for rom-com blandness from beginning to end, leaning hard on generic conventions even as they pretend to satirize them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Adam Nayman
    The Girl and Death
    There’s a difference between elemental melodrama and superficial clichés, and gorgeous cinematography and period production design can only delay this recognizance for so long—and certainly not for two grueling hours.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Adam Nayman
    Bright Days Ahead
    Bright Days Ahead means to be a casual, charming movie about a woman taking charge of her life, but its lightness gets unbearable; the film is so featherweight that it eventually blows away.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Adam Nayman
    Stay
    Fatally, for a film about damaged people methodically working through their problems—with themselves and each other—it gets less interesting the more it reveals about its characters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Adam Nayman
    Rob the Mob
    While Rob The Mob doesn’t ultimately hold together, it isn’t for a lack of trying by the performers or the filmmakers—like Tommy and Rosie, it’s doing its damnedest.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Adam Nayman
    Patrick: Evil Awakens
    When veterans as talented as Dance and Griffiths decide to chew the scenery, they do so with their chompers bared.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Adam Nayman
    Angels in Stardust
    Competently shot and edited, and imbued with a gentle sense of affection for its setting, Angels In Stardust doesn’t ultimately insult its audience’s intelligence. But it doesn’t really engage it, either.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Adam Nayman
    Five Dances
    [An] occasionally awkward but finally light-footed movie.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Adam Nayman
    Dressed to Kill
    It’s easy to see why people hated a movie as arch, violent, and glib as Dressed To Kill, and equally clear that this is exactly what De Palma was going for with all the gusto he could muster.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 58 Adam Nayman
    Damien: Omen II
    The film could be subtitled A Portrait Of The Anti-Christ As A Young Man. The emphasis has been shifted from parental anxiety to the frustration of a boy struggling to identify—and then reconcile—his demonic birthright.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Adam Nayman
    Inside Moves
    As an attempt to cash in on the inspirational-underdog-sports-movie model popularized a few years earlier by Rocky, Inside Moves is rather transparent: Morse’s Jerry Maxwell is an even longer shot for stardom than the Italian Stallion. But what’s affecting here is the relationship between Jerry and Roary (John Savage), who is the film’s true protagonist.
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