instantwatcher.com

Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

1. 30 Beats 2012 Despite the presence of such actors as Lee Pace, Jennifer Tilly, Justin Kirk, Thomas Sadoski and Paz de la Huerta, there is no character insight allowed by the bumper-car storytelling. full review
2. 96 Minutes 2012 The feature debut of writer-director Aimee Lagos, the film feels overstuffed and overcooked, as if the filmmaker were trying to get too much out all in one go. full review
3. Alps 2012 The film takes some deciphering, but once a viewer cracks its code "Alps" opens up into something expansive and rich. full review
4. The Babymakers 2012 When a movie resorts to scenes of a grown man rolling around on a floor slick with spilled semen samples, something plainly has gone wrong. full review
5. Bad Ass 2012 It's often difficult to tell what's bad on purpose or just badly handled. The cargo shorts and fanny pack? Purposely funny. The slack pacing? Probably not. full review
6. Beneath The Darkness 2012 At times it seems the simple ineptitude of "Beneath the Darkness" surely must mask some undercurrent of deeper sophistication and intention on behalf of the filmmakers. Alas, as it turns out, such things never surface. full review
7. Bestiaire 2012 Whether one is an animal lover or not, the chance to in essence sit with these animals as if up close and in their pens is remarkable and engaging. full review
8. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story 2012 "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" is in equal measure a look at two families, the ongoing legacy of America's recent past and an essay on one man's moment of transformative courage. full review
9. Cheerful Weather For The Wedding 2012 Rice does a fine job of juggling so many characters and moving smoothly among flashbacks without losing sight of the main story. full review
10. China Heavyweight 2012 Perhaps by focusing on something that is so much an individual sport, Chang creates a deep sense of tension between singular people and the bigger concerns of history, the team or country. full review
11. Citadel 2012 "Citadel" attempts to transform mundane anxieties into the stuff of a horror film. But the initial tension of the premise dissipates like a slow leak. full review
12. Dangerous Ishhq 2012 The idea of the past's effect on the present is handled in such a direct "ah-ha!" manner - scars that unmask character identity, spells that span time - as to feel ham-fisted rather than mystical. full review
13. The Devil Inside 2012 People of the world: If you find some footage, leave it be. You will likely be doing the rest of us a huge favor. full review
14. Elles 2012 As an essay on women's roles in society and cross-generational female desire, the film provides many questions with no easy answers. full review
15. Fat Kid Rules the World 2012 Endearingly uneven. full review
16. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 2012 Miike brings a formal, elegant restraint to his usual flair for wild theatrics. full review
17. Hick 2012 Mostly plays like some creepy-perv fantasia looking for mileage from the mature-beyond-her-years presence of young star Chloe Grace Moretz. full review
18. Hold Your Breath 2012 Everything about "#HoldYourBreath" is aggressively mediocre, shoddy and undistinguished... full review
19. The Hole 2012 No one understands that giddy rush of sugar buzz cinema better than director Joe Dante. full review
20. Home Run Showdown 2012 A pleasant if somewhat by-the-numbers family film that lacks any real crack-of-the-bat energy. full review
21. House at the End of the Street 2012 What could be so bad about a new Jennifer Lawrence movie that its distributor opts to keep it away from critics and release it with minimal ad support? Please, allow "House at the End of the Street" to answer that question. full review
22. Jesus Henry Christ 2012 Pleasant without being revelatory, underwhelming but not obnoxiously so, the film explores how we become who we are, whether by genetics or environment or some combination of the two. full review
23. Like Water 2012 "Like Water"feels wildly incomplete, a let-down for fans and initiates to the sport alike. full review
24. Losing Control 2012 Perhaps investigating something new would have better served Weiss than simply looking to her own experiences, exploring rather than settling. full review
25. Lovely Molly 2012 Common sense and basic logic are left are the door; there's a brief creature effect that is laughably, outlandishly awful. full review
26. The Magic of Belle Isle 2012 It has some heartfelt performances and a nice, nondescript vibe, but it's largely unmemorable. full review
27. Nature Calls 2012 It almost seems like harder work somehow to get this many comedians together and then turn out a movie that is only so fitfully funny. full review
28. The Pact 2012 The explanations for what has been going on are weird, fantastical and sort of reasonable, within the context of the story, maintaining the film's sense of grounded directness up to the very end. full review
29. Red Lights 2012 It's not so much the narrative sleight-of-hand that is irksome, as the implication that there may have been a better movie lurking in there the whole time. full review
30. Side by Side 2012 "Side by Side" is a handy overview of recent seismic changes occurring within the industry and unexpectedly essential viewing. full review
31. Silent House 2012 Sometimes you don't want to know what is lurking in the dark because the answer is just too obvious and dumb. full review
32. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning 2012 The movie creates something of the sensation of huffing industrial solvents - in a good way! - a waking-sleep zombification that can't exactly be described as pleasurable but definitely has an odd, distinct power. full review
33. Waiting For Lightning 2012 Little more than an extended piece of lifestyle merchandising, a long montage for monitors in sporting-goods shops. full review
34. Cat Run 2011 It's easy to feel sucked into some kind of time warp back to the heyday of late-'90s post-Tarantino crime thrillers, cut-rate knockoffs filled with casually cartoonish violence, quippy patter, overtly flash filmmaking and incongruous pop tunes. full review
35. Don 2 2011 Director Farhan Akhtar shoots and cuts the action awkwardly, not quite knowing where to place the camera, so the film never gets the slam-bang momentum it might want. full review
36. Guns, Girls and Gambling 2011 A movie first and foremost about other movies, a derivative of derivatives, "Guns, Girls and Gambling" is like a losing hand at cards: It could have been a winner, but just isn't. full review
37. Magic Trip 2011 Gibney and Ellwood struggle to create context for or make much sense of the vibrant hodge-podge of material that they excavated from the archives of Kesey, who died in 2001. full review
38. Paranormal Activity 3 2011 Far and away the sharpest, most wildly aware film in the series. full review
39. True Legend 2011 A hodgepodge of styles, "True Legend" works best as a freewheeling showcase for Yuen's dazzling fight sequences above any sort of cogent storytelling. full review
40. Wrecked 2011 Asked to convey a wide spectrum of emotional tones like confusion, shock, sadness, anger and oh, look out for the mountain lion, Brody does all he can to hold the screen. full review
41. Dead Awake 2010 Though the performers gamely try to make the most of what little they have to work with, the film is murky to look at and unfocused in its storytelling. "Dead Awake" is a deadly snore. full review
42. I Saw the Devil 2010 Even at its most chaotic, the film never loses sight of the human toll of the increasingly over-the-top events it portrays. full review
43. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen 2010 Although "Legend of the Fist" is slick, stylish and assured, it is also bloated and hollow, and seemingly without much sense of what actually is working. full review
44. The Yellow Sea 2010 A breakneck mix of bone-crunching freneticism and bloody close-quarters knife-fighting with a strand of romantic melancholy. full review
45. Harmony and Me 2009 Represents much of what is wonderful and fresh about the recent wave of ultra-low-budget American independent filmmaking. full review
46. The Perfect Game 2009 The heart of both the story and its telling do help in smoothing over other deficiencies, sweet and disarming in its belief that something like a baseball game can make a bigger difference. full review
47. Wonderful World 2009 The story never fully blends the idea of Singer's rediscovery of his artistic voice -- and even something as simple as why he was a children's performer in the first place is never addressed -- with his personal renewal. full review
48. Gardens of the Night 2008 Do these heartbreaking stories exist in the real world? Yes, yes, they do. Does dramatizing these stories with nothing to add except a certain cruel wallowing in the existence of unspeakable human depravity serve any real purpose? No, no, it does not. full review
49. A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy 2008 A Good Day certainly shows Dortch as a talent to watch. Whether he does anything more with that talent will be up to him. full review
50. The Babysitters 2007 The film remains engaging in no small part because of the beguiling and enigmatic performance of [Katherine] Waterston, daughter of Law & Order star Sam Waterston. full review
51. Encounters at the End of the World 2007 The images captured by Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger are dazzling all on their own, finding the disorienting psychedelia that is nature at its weirdest. full review
52. Meet Bill 2007 The story of a man (Aaron Eckhart) grappling with middle-age ennui at work and at home feels done to death, as does the distracting addition of a spunky rich-kid high schooler. full review
53. Postal 2007 Postal is largely just a byproduct of Boll's self-promotion, rendering the film itself, in essence, beside the point. full review
54. Neo Ned 2005 It's a little rough around the edges, to be sure, but with such strong lead performances there is something irresistible in the film's audaciously straight-faced portrayal of such an unlikely relationship. full review
55. Mouth to Mouth 2004 Murray becomes less and less sure of where things are heading or what it is she is trying to get at, such that the last few reels feel perfunctory and unengaged. full review