instantwatcher.com

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times

1. What Just Happened? 2008 The movie is brilliant at portraying the incredibly high stakes of the seemingly inconsequential and the tremendous amounts of money spent on it. full review
2. Broken English 2007 The always-riveting and criminally underused Posey gives a beautifully calibrated performance, possibly her most realized and multidimensional to date. full review
3. Charlie Bartlett 2007 [Director] Poll never picks a tone to stick with, so the movie is neither quite naturalistic nor stylized enough, and Charlie's character vacillates between charming-soulful and creepy-weird. full review
4. Civic Duty 2007 With nowhere for any of the characters to go, literally, the story becomes a tendentious exercise in belaboring a point. full review
5. Eagle vs. Shark 2007 The film's absurdist dialogue is consistently funny. full review
6. Evening 2007 Evening, despite its fine source material and roster of formidable talent, lurches clumsily across two very long, disconnected hours, reducing Minot's, sprawling, ethereal story to a pop psych nugget about embracing life as it comes. full review
7. Girl 27 2007 Writer David Stenn stumbled across the shocking story of Patricia Douglas and MGM around the time he was finishing his biography of Jean Harlow, and he immediately sprang into action. full review
8. The Go-Getter 2007 There are moments of beauty here, but not enough to make up for the mannered dialogue and hamstrung performances. full review
9. The Hunting Party 2007 The biggest problem with the movie is the tone, which is by turns preachy, silly, mawkish and dark. full review
10. Paranoid Park 2007 Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films. full review
11. The Ten 2007 Despite many giddy moments, the conceit becomes gradually more exhausting, until somewhere around the seventh commandment you're ready to choose God's wrath over any more overproduced, A-list-acted throwaway TV sketches. full review
12. Bug 2006 Bug's relentless unpleasantness, which [director] Friedkin bogs us down in instead of crystallizing it into what might have been a stylish head trip, can get to be a chore. full review
13. Copying Beethoven, (Klang der Stille) 2006 It reduces Beethoven to a moldy cliche. full review
14. Curious George 2006 As simple, friendly, kid-appropriate and nontoxic as any major motion picmerchtainment franchise could ever hope to be. full review
15. The Fall of Fujimori 2006 A confoundingly mercurial figure, Fujimori is a fascinating subject. But in her focus on the man, Perry fails to paint a broader picture of a racially diverse and extremely complex country marked by sharp class and socioeconomic contrasts. full review
16. Golden Door 2006 [A] beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey. full review
17. Heading South 2006 The women are meant to level the emotional playing field and add depth to what is, at heart, a story about the exploitation of poor nations by rich and powerful ones. But they wind up being too bitter and unstable to elicit much sympathy. full review
18. Sherrybaby 2006 ... there's something nihilistic about having to watch Sherry regress to her not-so-happy childhood the moment she gets home, and something alienating about the way in which her compulsions completely overshadow her personality. full review
19. Conversations With Other Women 2005 An intimate movie in every sense, Conversations With Other Women sets out to explore well-trammeled yet at the same time uncharted territory without grinding any axes. full review
20. Cowboy Del Amor 2005 It gently sheds light on the ways in which people seek new terrain in love when their familiar surroundings let them down. full review
21. The Devil's Miner 2005 This is social documentary at its best. full review
22. Old Joy 2005 Captures the weary mood of a generation that's crested its peak along with an era, quietly making a case for how well suited film can be to capturing the finer points of human interaction while preserving their mystery. full review
23. After Innocence 2004 Even-handed but quietly devastating. full review
24. The Forgotten 2004 Such unabashed ludicrousness can be fun, in a brainless sort of way, especially when it's coupled with lots of sudden defibrillator jolts underscored by crashing cymbals. full review
25. Somersault 2004 A frank and visceral film that at the same time exudes an unexpected innocence. full review
26. Vera Drake 2004 The film is more of a portrait than a story, and as such it is finely wrought and compelling, but the airbrush is overkill. full review
27. Primer 2003 Incredibly confusing but oddly compelling. full review
28. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 2002 The transformation of the Little Seamstress is ambiguous and bittersweet and leaves you with the feeling that, like a character out of Balzac, her story will be one of loss of innocence. full review
29. Sex Is Comedy 2002 Breillat's first foray into comedy is playful, whip-smart and far breezier in both tone and look than the stylized gender polemics she's known for. full review