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John Anderson, Variety

  1. Beneath The Darkness 2012 A malformed, would-be horror shocker with a deliriously deranged performance by Dennis Quaid, who unfortunately seems to be the only one onboard who thinks he's in a comedy. full review
  2. The Giant Mechanical Man 2012 Grinding its gears a bit in an attempt to achieve maximum quirkiness, "The Giant Mechanical Man" will meet most audiences' standards for "charming." full review
  3. Girl Model 2012 While Girl Model falls a bit short in the delivery of hard facts and incriminating evidence, it more than makes up for that with its knotty psychological profile of Arbaugh. full review
  4. Good for Nothing 2012 A droll New Zealand parody with a tone so deadpan it becomes laugh-out-loud funny. full review
  5. Head Games 2012 One of the more fascinating aspects of a thoroughly entertaining movie is how incomprehensible James' proposed changes are in a country where many would list their necessities as food, shelter and Monday Night Football. full review
  6. Hitler's Children 2012 The sins of the fathers have seldom weighed so heavy as in the odd, intriguing and ultimately moving Hitler's Children. full review
  7. Jesus Henry Christ 2012 Too deliberately eccentric to attain quite the level of wigginess it aspires to, Jesus Henry Christ does feature some standout perfs and a refreshingly unconventional approach to telling its slight story. full review
  8. Losing Control 2012 While Losing Control is a thoroughly likable, playful comedy, there's never a sense that writer-director Valerie Weiss is in total command of film's tone, pacing or comic content, which is considerable. full review
  9. The Magic of Belle Isle 2012 Shaggily sentimental and a few spells short of enchantment. full review
  10. Price Check 2012 [A] charming and slightly unhinged low-budget comedy. full review
  11. Somewhere Between 2012 full review
  12. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie 2012 Even fans of their Cartoon Network series or those simply familiar with the pair via YouTube will likely find the extended version of their pathos-and-pain-driven comedy hard to digest. full review
  13. We're Not Broke 2012 A well-researched, brightly presented and provocative argument that the U.S. isn't overtaxed and profligate, but rather a paradise for corporate tax cheats. full review
  14. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey 2011 Helmer Constance Marks gives us a gentle giant of a man, whose precocious interest in puppets and puppetry was inspired by the same show that made Elmo a cultural fixture, Sesame Street. full review
  15. Cat Run 2011 If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with genre baloney -- and enough shoplifted visual trickery to fill Quentin Tarantino's kitchen sink. full review
  16. Cost of a Soul 2011 Technically accomplished but dramatically unconvincing. full review
  17. Death of a Superhero 2011 Pic sidesteps cloying sentimentality and heavy-handedness with the help of a solid cast. full review
  18. Karate-Robo Zaborgar 2011 full review
  19. The Last Rites of Joe May 2011 Despite all this boilerplate gangster-with-a-heart-of-gold stuff, there's an emotional payoff to Joe May that feels solid and right. full review
  20. Magic Trip 2011 Fans of the subject matter, especially students of the Beat era, will find this revisionist reconstruction indispensible; others will share the same tedium claimed by some of the principals on the bus. full review
  21. Make Believe 2011 A charming, affectionate and often elegantly executed study of teenage magicians, their craft and the social shadows they step out of when they do their stuff. full review
  22. Spork 2011 full review
  23. Bhutto 2010 A worthy portrait of a phenomenal woman. full review
  24. The Big Uneasy 2010 Well-intended and informative, but also unfocused, unwieldy and a little smug. full review
  25. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer 2010 For all the information here, Gibney is unusual among investigative documentarians in that he never forgets he's making cinema. full review
  26. Countdown to Zero 2010 A politically urgent picture, it will also literally scare the breath out of what will certainly be a worldwide audience. full review
  27. Freakonomics 2010 dds up to a revelatory trip into complex, innovative ideas and altered perspectives on how people think. full review
  28. Knucklehead 2010 full review
  29. The Lottery 2010 Advocacy to the point of propaganda. full review
  30. Night Catches Us 2010 Acting, particularly by Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, is first-rate, but the story is as ramshackle as a South Philly tenement, with an equal number of structural violations. full review
  31. Waiting for Forever 2010 A movie that eludes the viewer's grasp, because it's arguing a position auds will find instinctively wrong. full review
  32. An American Affair 2009 The Cuban Missile Crisis is a year passed and the assassination is looming, and yet Adam's pubescent crises are given Wagnerian emphasis. full review
  33. The Eclipse 2009 Quinn, alternately charming and loathsome, is brilliant, as is Hinds, an actor who has elevated everything he's been in. full review
  34. The Joneses 2009 full review
  35. The Lodger 2009 What needed to be a taut, structurally sound psychothriller instead malfunctions from the start. full review
  36. Made for Each Other 2009 Made for Each Other is often wryly hilarious, completely overboard and unpredictable. full review
  37. The Nature of Existence 2009 While it will strike some as smug and others as sincere, pic certainly has a feel-good tone and playful attitude. full review
  38. Serious Moonlight 2009 Many women would probably like to duct-tape their unfaithful mates to a toilet bowl, but watching it happen isn't quite as funny as it sounds. full review
  39. At the Edge of the World 2008 full review
  40. Diminished Capacity 2008 A pleasant enough diversion, but DC will be bettered watched from the horizontal position of a couch, one to which the film seems all too eager to send you. full review
  41. A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy 2008 A worldly, knowing look at adult affairs. full review
  42. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 2008 How many thrillers could put the outcome in the title and still provide as many white-knuckle moments as Harvard Beats Yale 29-29? full review
  43. Incendiary 2008 Aspires to so much it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. full review
  44. New York, I Love You 2008 full review
  45. Closing Escrow 2007 A sometimes laugh-out-loud send-up of homebuyers' worst instincts, the extreme behavior of real-estate agents and what happens when the certifiably insane save enough for a down payment. full review
  46. Descent 2007 [Rosario Dawson] could have provided a 100-minute closeup and revealed more about human nature and anguish than all of Descent. full review
  47. The Order of Myths 2007 Order of Myths looks good, and its characters are memorable. full review
  48. Brooklyn Rules 2006 A sometimes funny, occasionally maudlin coming-of-age dramedy that wants to be Goodfellas but might have been called Mild in the Streets. full review
  49. The Fall of Fujimori 2006 As documaker Ellen Perry seems keenly aware, there is really no need to embellish the Fujimori story, which has enough unlikely melodrama for six Italian operas. full review
  50. The Ground Truth 2006 The substance of the movie is potent, and so powerfully presented by those who have fought and are still fighting a controversial war, that the message of Ground Truth cannot be dismissed. full review
  51. Saint of 9/11 2006 Saint of 9/11, an unabashed tribute to Judge's life, struggles and Christian mission, does a good job of communicating what made Judge an inspiring figure to many, while making his life's work accessible and understandable. full review
  52. End of the Spear 2005 Although overly earnest and often stilted, the film should find great favor principally among religious auds, and a long life on the home-vid shelves. full review
  53. Modify 2005 full review
  54. Neo Ned 2005 Neo Ned may be ludicrous on paper, but it has what fans of independent film are looking for -- atmosphere, humanity and just a dash of fantastic drama. full review
  55. The Outsider 2005 Jarecki certainly thinks his subject deserves such an accolade, and he's made a great-looking film to make his case, one that is edited gracefully and briskly -- and leaves the heady aftertaste of birthday cake. full review
  56. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price 2005 Whatever Greenwald lacks in style he makes up for with a deluge of facts and figures and a populist feel that make his movies, this one included, accessible even to the most politically naive. full review