instantwatcher.com

David Edelstein, New York Magazine

1. Bachelorette 2012 Lovely women doing genuinely ugly things makes for a potent combination. full review
2. Brooklyn Castle 2012 It's not To Sir, With Love: It's fierce ambition, the channeling of emotion, and hours of drilling. full review
3. Girl In Progress 2012 The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel. full review
4. The Grey 2012 The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant. full review
5. The Hunger Games 2012 Watching The Hunger Games, I was struck both by how slickly Ross hit his marks and how many opportunities he was missing to take the film to the next level -- to make it more shocking, lyrical, crazy, daring. full review
6. I Wish 2012 You can contemplate the wonder in these glowing young faces without feeling as if you're on an intravenous drip of corn syrup. full review
7. Kill List 2012 The final twist is both baffling and repulsive, but as an evocation of the triumph of evil, it's peerless. full review
8. First Position 2011 This is yet another competition doc in the unending legacy of Spellbound, but Kargman is light on her feet, and she has chosen to follow a fascinating group of kids preparing for the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix. full review
9. Goodbye First Love 2011 There's nothing like a film about wayward passions to remind you how differently people feel things. full review
10. Hobo With a Shotgun 2011 There's something appealing about the movie's unpretentious carnival of carnage, although I could have done without the flamethrower assault on a school bus to raise the stakes. full review
11. Hugo 2011 For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film... full review
12. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 2011 I find him such a bland, pious, profoundly unthreatening little Furby of a pop idol, but little girls' celebrity crushes are not to be trifled with. And this sensationally engineered promo film makes Justin Bieber look like a true force of nature. full review
13. Keep the Lights On 2011 Sachs depicts a once-transient culture stumbling toward a design for rooted living. full review
14. Mysteries of Lisbon 2011 You can study it, like a painting, and then realize, with a gasp, that it has got hold of you like a fever. full review
15. No Strings Attached 2011 No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps. full review
16. Warrior 2011 It's too corny to live. But the picture is a slam dunk. I mean a ground-and-pound double-leg takedown. It's really gripping. full review
17. 3 Backyards 2010 The movie has none of the smugness of American Beauty: You could dream of living in a world like this. full review
18. Casino Jack And The United States Of Money 2010 Casino Jack is audience-friendly without turning into a Michael Moore-ish clown show. full review
19. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer 2010 It's probably easier for an ex-prosecutor known for macho threats to say he got caught screwing than for him to say he got screwed. But folks, he was reamed. full review
20. I'm Still Here 2010 There's a thrilling madness to Phoenix's Method. full review
21. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen 2010 There's too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial-arts set pieces. This isn't another disposable B movie, though. full review
22. Morning Glory 2010 Morning Glory isn't terrible. It has a lot of craft, a lot of star power, and a fair number of laughs. What irks me is that the filmmakers settle for so little. full review
23. Rabbit Hole 2010 The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation. full review
24. The Tempest 2010 Although it falls off precipitously, it's better to have Julie Taymor's The Tempest than not: The first half-hour is nearly as unfettered as Shakespeare's language. full review
25. 44 Inch Chest 2009 The effect is to clobber you with lines that were already clobbersome and needed no extra emphasis. It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors' workshop. full review
26. An American Affair 2009 The reason to see An American Affair is Gretchen Mol. full review
27. Antichrist 2009 Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn't even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-'em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives. full review
28. The Art Of The Steal 2009 Calculated to enrage and pulling it off like gangbusters... full review
29. Cairo Time 2009 Patricia Clarkson is usually so "on" that it's a surprise to see her play a melancholy, passive woman -- and play her with such airy, elegiac grace. full review
30. Crude 2009 Berlinger doesn't counter Chevron's counter charges with facts and figures. With footage of petrochemical-sludge swamps and babies covered with flaming sores, he doesn't especially need to. full review
31. Hunger 2009 It's rigorous, evocative, and, in spite of its grisly imagery, elegant. It's a triumph -- of masochistic literal-mindedness. full review
32. The Limits of Control 2009 It's unfair to call Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control the emptiest movie ever made, but I wrote that in my notebook as I struggled to stay awake. full review
33. Survival of the Dead 2009 Survival of the Dead almost never snaps into focus. Even its oxymoronic title doesn't work. It feels marginal, like an extended footnote. full review
34. Vincere 2009 The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema. full review
35. Wonderful World 2009 The movie is unfailingly likable and finally impressive. Goldin doesn't settle for easy answers, and he makes you think that no one should. full review
36. American Violet 2008 You can laugh at American Violet, but most defendants are scared into pleading guilty and need all the poster girls they can get. full review
37. Passing Strange 2008 The cutting is hyperkinetic, yet Lee is always in synch with the cast's phenomenal energy. He's in their thrall -- and so are we. full review
38. Religulous 2008 Religulous has an unholy fervor that should start many bonfires. full review
39. Theater of War 2008 As a onetime dramaturg and Brechtian, I enjoyed the chin-wags and the glimpses of Streep in rehearsal -- especially her quivering admission that she can't bear the thought of anyone seeing her process. full review
40. The Yellow Handkerchief 2008 The first half of The Yellow Handkerchief is the half-movie of the year, and the rest isna(TM)t bad -- just more sentimental, more ordinary. full review
41. The Yes Men Fix the World 2008 This movie is glorious testimony to the moral power of satire. full review
42. Beaufort 2007 Pro-war audiences on both sides will find Joseph Cedar's vision irresponsible. I think Beaufort captures a higher irresponsibility. full review
43. Before the Rains 2007 Rahul Bose has a winning presence -- eager with a touch of wariness or wary with a touch of eagerness, and never entirely at home. He keeps the movie from seeming too comfy -- a good thing. full review
44. Boarding Gate 2007 [Director] Assayas is out of his element here, and the encounters have no snap: It's like one of those two-character plays in which the frequent pauses are filled with the audience's coughing spasms. full review
45. Chop Shop 2007 Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop is a low-budget verite triumph. full review
46. Chris & Don: A Love Story 2007 Primed as we are by a culture rich in both homophobia and dirty old men, we can be forgiven for anticipating a sordid cautionary tale. It's a shock -- a happy shock -- when Chris & Don recounts a love that approaches the transcendental. full review
47. The Go-Getter 2007 Martin Hynes's first film, The Go-Getter, is an especially wonderful addition to the [road movie] genre, with the right -- flickering -- mixture of loneliness and enchantment, and with jokes that come at you from just around the bend. full review
48. Lars and the Real Girl 2007 Often howlingly funny, and the actors are a treat. full review
49. The Order of Myths 2007 Entertaining, mind-opening docs open every month, but none has broken through to a wide audience. Now comes the latest winner, Margaret Brown's penetrating The Order of Myths. full review
50. Paranoid Park 2007 Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant's current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson's finely tuned first-person 'young adult' novel. full review
51. Sangre De Mi Sangre 2007 In Sangre de mi Sangre, Christopher Zalla serves up an old-fashioned, sentimental weeper with a sucker punch of urban-immigrant horror. full review
52. Shooter 2007 This is the first big-studio action picture (the director is Antoine Fuqua) with some of the disgusted, bloody nihilism of the post-Vietnam era. full review
53. Shotgun Stories 2007 Shotgun Stories has a flawless cast, but it's the peculiarity of Michael Shannon that keeps it from becoming too obvious. full review
54. Brooklyn Rules 2006 The mix of autobiographical texture and authentic mobster minutiae puts it over and then some. full review
55. Golden Door 2006 The rhythms of the movie are slow and daydreamy, but [director] Crialese delights in breaking up the realism with his protagonist's mystical -- almost madcap -- visions of the New World's abbondanza. full review
56. Maxed Out 2006 Oh, the stories Scurlock tells. full review
57. Mission: Impossible III 2006 There are no flourishes to savor. Instead, there are big-deal stunts. full review
58. Nacho Libre 2006 The movie is semi-infantile camp but often riotous. full review
59. The Wind That Shakes the Barley 2006 The acting is solid all around -- so convincing that the rough Irish accents are appropriately indecipherable at times, and the story itself is as tragic and complicated as that moment in history. full review
60. Brick 2005 It's great to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin) in the juicy role of a high-school gumshoe on the trail of his estranged girlfriend's killers. full review
61. Cavite 2005 A microbudget exercise in sensory overload that leaves you sick on all sorts of levels. full review
62. Neil Young: Heart of Gold 2005 The best moments in the film are when Ellen Kuras's camera just sits there taking in the whole stage, the whole gorgeous ecosystem. full review
63. The Outsider 2005 [A] delicious cult-of-personality documentary... full review
64. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 full review
65. Stagedoor 2005 ... unimaginative but diverting ... full review