instantwatcher.com

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

1. John Dies at the End 2013 "John Dies at the End" dies closer to the beginning, before writer-director Don Coscarelli's adaptation of the book of the same name has reached minute 20. full review
2. LUV 2013 "LUV" may not convince with Woody's aggressively telescoped transformation. But the actors compensate. full review
3. 2 Days in New York 2012 The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. full review
4. Bernie 2012 Linklater's a glider, not a pile-driver; he hangs back when other directors prefer to bore in. full review
5. Brooklyn Castle 2012 I don't know diddly about chess, and I still loved it. full review
6. Bully 2012 The best Hirsch's film can do, in the end, is remind us that bullying means more than we admit, and its effects aren't always immediately clear, even to loved ones. full review
7. Compliance 2012 Compliance is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on, getting worse and worse for the people on the other end of the line. full review
8. Dark Horse 2012 Abe may deserve all that comes to him, but the question of how he got this way sustains the picture, against all odds. full review
9. The Deep Blue Sea 2012 This is an extremely deft job of adaptation. full review
10. The Devil Inside 2012 The Devil Inside joins a long, woozy-camera parade of found-footage scare pictures, among them The Blair Witch Project, the Paranormal Activity films and certain wedding videos that won't go away. full review
11. Elena 2012 The script, by Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev, uses spare dialogue to quietly devastating effect. Performances are superb across the board, framed in elegant widescreen compositions that simmer with violence. full review
12. End of Watch 2012 Gyllenhaal and Pena are after a lived-in camaraderie and a street-level realism. Pena, especially, succeeds; you buy him every second. full review
13. Head Games 2012 It's solid and interesting work in the main, but Head Games can't help but feel like a come-down after The Interrupters. full review
14. Headhunters 2012 When we get the remake in a year or two, I hope it retains the edge and compact energy of director Morten Tyldum's movie. full review
15. Holy Motors 2012 Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, "Holy Motors" is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer. full review
16. The Innkeepers 2012 Each visit to the root cellar is an exercise in nerve-tightening; the first time we hear the overloud telephone at the front desk, it's both alarming and funny. full review
17. Jiro Dreams of Sushi 2012 I really wish Tokyo were closer. full review
18. Monsieur Lazhar 2012 It's all a bit neat. But whatever the film's limitations, it's certainly engaging to watch. full review
19. Red Hook Summer 2012 It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers. full review
20. Red Lights 2012 Cortes made "Buried," which means he has more good work to offer. Better luck next film. full review
21. Safety Not Guaranteed 2012 The film is modest but skillful and heartfelt, spiced just so by Plaza and company. full review
22. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap 2012 The interviews are often revealing and funny. And much of the music is tremendous. full review
23. Take This Waltz 2012 Polley wonders the same thing in nearly every scene, no matter who's in it. Is a comfortable marriage really marriage enough? full review
24. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie 2012 If the "Billion Dollar" idea was to attract new viewers, someone should get their money back. full review
25. The Adventures of Tintin 2011 I fear Spielberg and Jackson hitched their wagon to the wrong technological star here. full review
26. The Artist 2011 Is "The Artist" a screwball comedy? A sentimental melodrama? A spoof? Serious? What? Yes, yes, yes and yes. full review
27. Bellflower 2011 It's like the world's coolest iPhone camera app writ large, and while it'd be misleading to make too much of this picture, it'd be a shame to make too little of it, either. full review
28. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop 2011 The whole thing becomes a sort of "Song of Myself" for needy multimillionaire comics at work and play. full review
29. Coriolanus 2011 You buy the concept, from start to finish, because it feels strong and purposeful and in sync with Shakespeare's own vision of a malleable, fickle populace and a leader raised by the ultimate stage mother. full review
30. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy 2011 There's funny and then there's funny, and "A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy" is neither. full review
31. Into The Abyss 2011 Not since Errol Morris' masterwork of investigative documentary, "The Thin Blue Line," has a filmmaker had such an easy time of making the death penalty-crazed state of Texas look quite so casually venal. full review
32. The Kid with a Bike 2011 The Dardennes' latest is one of their best, a memorable cinematic portrait of troubled youth and soul-saving charity. full review
33. Like Crazy 2011 The reason to see it co-stars with Anton Yelchin, around whom the project got going. Her name is Felicity Jones. full review
34. Machine Gun Preacher 2011 "Machine Gun Preacher" gives blood-soaked missionary work a bad name. full review
35. Mysteries of Lisbon 2011 It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right. full review
36. Pina 2011 "Pina"is the best possible tribute to Bausch, and to adventurous image-making. full review
37. Snow Flower And The Secret Fan 2011 The film version of "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" proceeds as if willed into being by a particularly misguided "question for discussion," the kind you'd find at the tail end of a bestseller's paperback edition. full review
38. Stake Land 2011 Mickle has talent, and the end credits include a character known as "French Canadian Cannibal," which is worth a half-star right there. full review
39. Young Goethe In Love 2011 You needn't know a thing about Goethe or his works to enjoy the picture. full review
40. Biutiful 2010 Am I the only one who sensed trouble when the painfully methodical spacing and timing of the opening titles suggested the heaviest, most medicinal tragedy of this or any other year? full review
41. Blood Done Sign My Name 2010 Half cardboard and half flesh-and-blood, the film version of Tim Tyson's memoir Blood Done Sign My Name reminds us just how difficult it is to tell a story without that story turning into a storybook. full review
42. Blue Valentine 2010 The best of it plays like an acting exercise that serves the intimate, often bruising relationship at the core. Gosling seems to be pulling from an impressive bag of performance tricks, Williams from a deeper well, drawn from life. full review
43. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 2010 See this film. It takes you to a place you won't soon forget. full review
44. The Company Men 2010 Wells casts a wide but synthetic net. An aura of well-intentioned generica muffles the dramatic impact of "The Company Men"... full review
45. Countdown to Zero 2010 Some of the footage is astounding. full review
46. Exit Through The Gift Shop 2010 The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself. full review
47. The Extra Man 2010 Some actors are dinner. Kevin Kline is dessert, and his comic brio saves the film version of The Extra Man from its limitations. full review
48. Four Lions 2010 I think it's appalling in all the right ways. While its lingering aftertaste of ashes in the mouth is unmistakable, I'd argue that the subject warrants it. full review
49. Howl 2010 It's well-crafted, but I wish the film showed us an additional dimension or two of the central figure, who once said the great challenge in writing, any kind of writing, is "to write the same way you are." full review
50. I'm Still Here 2010 Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work. full review
51. Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work 2010 Stern and Sundberg made The Devil Came on Horseback (about the massacres in Darfur) and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (about a wrongful incarceration nightmare), and they have a fine eye for detail. full review
52. The King's Speech 2010 Although everything can go wrong with a film before it gets to the casting stage, and often does, a couple of marvelous performances can elevate solid, well-carpentered material and make it something special. full review
53. A Little Help 2010 "A Little Help" settles for familiar and modest payoffs. It's not much. Yet Fischer clearly relishes the chance to play someone who's a demurely reckless mess. full review
54. Monsters 2010 A sharp little low-fi monster movie operating from a tantalizing premise. full review
55. Night Catches Us 2010 Its rhythm forces audiences to pay attention to what its superb actors express non-verbally, and to measure the weight of the characters' past lives. full review
56. Rabbit Hole 2010 Conventionally made but extremely well-acted. It does what most stage-to-screen adaptations do not. It works. full review
57. Senna 2010 Plays like a narrative feature, juicy and alive, with enough kinetic excitement to hook the Formula One-ignorant (me, I knew next to nothing about the subject), let alone racing fans worldwide. full review
58. The Tempest 2010 A pretty frustrating adaptation of Shakespeare's play, one that dog-paddles around in ever-more-frenetic circles, searching for a way inside the material. full review
59. Tiny Furniture 2010 It's a find -- funny and rueful and verbally dexterous, leavening a quippy screenplay with just enough honesty to make it stick. full review
60. The Proposal 2009 The problem is not the acting. The problem is what these actors are required to say and do. full review
61. Antichrist 2009 I'm inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with Antichrist when it was simply unstable but couldn't go with it when it turned insane. It's a useful distinction. And yet the first hour...is pretty stunning. full review
62. Crossing Over 2009 The characters don't relate; they trade expedient expository nuggets, when they're not speechifying. A surfeit of coincidence spoils our empathy. And when a character%u2014any character%u2014says "You doubt the veracity of my heart," you have to doubt the full review
63. The Eclipse 2009 Hinds has been ready for a role of this size and shape for years; it was simply a matter of finding it, and its finding him. full review
64. Extract 2009 Mike Judge's Extract -- modest, no big deal but very savvy -- is the funniest American comedy of the summer. full review
65. Fish Tank 2009 A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive. full review
66. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest 2009 It's a rather wobbly blend of courtroom drama and loose ends tied, albeit rather leisurely. full review
67. The Good Heart 2009 As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script. full review
68. Harmony and Me 2009 In a flat, dry affect, the movie sings the breakup blues. full review
69. The House of the Devil 2009 Even the familiar tropes of The House of the Devil are familiar in the right way, like an old, bloodstained sweater. full review
70. Hunger 2009 It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject. full review
71. Inspector Bellamy 2009 It's a small work. Yet it's so pleasurably well-made, so obviously the work of major talents in a comfortable groove, why carp about the scale or ambition of the project? full review
72. The Joneses 2009 The cons should leave the audience a little breathless; instead, Borte goes for an indistinct tone and suburban-malaise vibe that was dated (as well as patronizing) when American Beauty came out. full review
73. Objectified 2009 It gets you thinking. full review
74. The Perfect Game 2009 The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming. full review
75. Soul Kitchen 2009 Soul Kitchen, which features a soundtrack laden with American soul and R&B standards, was a hit in Europe, and I suspect many American moviegoers will respond to it as well. full review
76. Tetro 2009 Unabashedly theatrical and richly cinematic, even when it's falling apart... full review
77. White Material 2009 Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer. full review
78. Bottle Shock 2008 The film is based on fact, but its texture is such that even the true bits feel trumped-up, and the fictional components add only the phoniest sort of conflict. full review
79. Defiance 2008 The script hokes up the tensions between the brothers played by Craig and Schreiber, and while they're both fascinating, simmering-kettle performers, they consistently outshine their material. full review
80. Diminished Capacity 2008 Striving for low-key character comedy, Diminished Capacity ends up diminishing its returns. full review
81. Elegy 2008 Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste. Spanish-born director Isabel Coixet's film, adapted by Nicholas Meyer, recasts into softer, more palatable material the...third in Philip Roth's stories driven by the sensual obsessions of Roth al full review
82. Happy-Go-Lucky 2008 The new Mike Leigh film, Happy-Go-Lucky, is a real pleasure, and besides being Leigh's most buoyantly comic feature it's a marvelous showcase for Sally Hawkins, who has worked twice before with the British writer-director. full review
83. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 2008 Simply by letting the onetime gridiron stars talk about the game they played and the era it was played in, the capsule cracks open and you're sucked inside and you cannot believe, even if you know the details, how that game turned out the way it did. full review
84. Let the Right One In 2008 I'm so sick of Swedish vampire movies, aren't you? ... If you can stomach just one more, however, "Let the Right One In" is the Swedish vampire movie to see. The film is terrific. full review
85. Management 2008 Padding disguised as a feature-length screenplay. full review
86. Momma's Man 2008 It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates. full review
87. New York, I Love You 2008 The film only feels like two or three different sort of approaches are represented. They don't really feel like widely different attacks on the material. full review
88. Religulous 2008 About half of the movie works in its snide, hit-and-run way. The other half throws more and more darts at the same balloon, long after it pops. full review
89. Shrink 2008 I'm not his manager, but I wonder if Kevin Spacey would profit from laying off the sardonic, disaffected, emotionally numb characters for a while. They're criminally easy for him at this point in his career. full review
90. The Square 2008 The string-along, bad-to-worse nature of The Square affords a distinct, if sour, sort of satisfaction. Yet its construction is a thing of considerable soundness. full review
91. The Tale of Despereaux 2008 I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation. full review
92. Were the World Mine 2008 A diverting Chicago-made export, director and co-writer Tom Gustafson's gay fantasia on Shakespearean themes is set in a socially stratified private school ruled by the rugby jocks but about to be sent into a tizzy thanks to the magic of Shakespeare. full review
93. The Yes Men Fix the World 2008 When a British Channel 4 interviewer upbraids Bichlbaum for providing massively false hopes to countless Bhopal residents, I found myself siding with the interviewer, not the prankster with the alleged higher moral purpose. full review
94. Broken English 2007 A promising first film with moments exceeding that promise. full review
95. Chop Shop 2007 It's a sharp mixture of neorealist grit and lyricism. full review
96. Civic Duty 2007 Not even Richard Schiff's droll underplaying as the drollest underplayer in the FBI can make dramatic sense of Civic Duty. full review
97. The Devil Came on Horseback 2007 With an estimated 400,000 dead since 2003, and 2.5 million Sudanese left homeless in the wake of the genocide, ignoring the story doesn't seem like a humane option. full review
98. Encounters at the End of the World 2007 Werner Herzog is a magnet for obsessives, and his lovely new film, Encounters at the End of the World, takes you places an ordinary filmmaker might've gone to yet missed completely. full review
99. Flawless 2007 For all its stodginess, however, Flawless is a reasonably good time, for one reason. The reason's name is Maurice Micklewhite, better known as Michael Caine. full review
100. Helvetica 2007 By rounding up a great group of eloquent obsessives eager to explain their feelings about a font, Hustwit has come up with 80 unexpectedly blissful minutes. full review
101. The Hunting Party 2007 If the director traffics in the realm of black comedy, any attempts to win us over or encourage sympathy or empathy with the rollicking hell-raisers on screen tend to give off a bad odor. full review
102. King Corn 2007 A breezy diary from a pair of first-time farmers, as well as a wry rebuke to a nation devoted to eating cheaply but not necessarily well, King Corn makes its points without much finger-wagging. full review
103. No End in Sight 2007 [No End in Sight] may be the best and saddest film of the year so far. full review
104. Paranoid Park 2007 Van Sant has made his best film in many years. I didn't realize it until a second viewing. These things sometimes happen, especially if the first encounter was in the middle of a film festival. full review
105. The Rape of Europa 2007 This one has focus trouble, canvassing too many countries, too many issues, and the filmmaking is on the ordinary side. full review
106. Curious George 2006 If these virtues sound passive, it's because the movie is passive, not to mention overplotted and misfocused. full review
107. Failure to Launch 2006 Cursed with an honest title, Failure to Launch waves a white flag in scene after scene, declaring surrender. full review
108. Severance 2006 Funny and scary in deftly equal measure. full review
109. Sherrybaby 2006 The film works. It doesn't go soft or inspirational in its later stages, when most films would. It doesn't pump up the redemption or the melodrama. full review
110. Sixty Six 2006 It's labeled a 'true-ish story', and the results are cheeky fun. full review
111. The Treatment 2006 Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person. full review
112. Unknown 2006 While Brand manages a couple of effectively brutal bits of violence, Matthew Waynee's gassy screenplay is all premise and no propulsion. full review
113. Brokeback Mountain 2005 A good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart. full review
114. Conversations With Other Women 2005 The gimmick has its poetic moments, but the actors can't do much to make screenwriter Gabrielle Zevin's strategems for characters seem like real people. full review
115. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man 2005 Entertaining, if lightly inquisitive, tribute concert film. full review
116. Neil Young: Heart of Gold 2005 Heart of Gold is the work of an egalitarian lover of music. Demme uses the camera as a divining rod, pointing at the man with the guitar. full review
117. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 As Sophie, Julia Jentsch is so good, so coolly passionate and unaffectedly moving in her pursuit of justice, the performance transcends the workmanlike trappings of the film itself. full review
118. This Film is Not Yet Rated 2005 It's fun for a while. Then you realize all this Michael Moore-ish folderol is weakening the movie's strongest arguments. full review
119. A Good Woman 2004 A Good Woman has the will to adapt Wilde to a fresh milieu, but not the way. full review
120. I Like Killing Flies 2003 The central figure in this exuberant documentary, a committed Freudian who probably would've tossed Freud himself out had he looked at him sideways, spouts one gem after another. full review