instantwatcher.com

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

1. 30 Beats 2012 It is absolutely terrible. full review
2. 360 2012 There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty. full review
3. Alps 2012 A comedy of pained laughter, Alps confirms the certitude of our darkest hours: The dead are the lucky ones. full review
4. The Awakening 2012 Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering. full review
5. The Beat Hotel 2012 [Scales] new heights of inessentiality... full review
6. Crazy Eyes 2012 The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it. full review
7. Dangerous Liaisons 2012 The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash ... full review
8. Elena 2012 The cautious, controlling, abstemious bourgeoisie are overtaken by the heedlessly fertile lower orders, the temporary inheritors of a terribly weary earth. full review
9. For Greater Glory 2012 It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition. full review
10. God Bless America 2012 When the monotonous squib-popping subsides, the movie is often static and talky, lapsing into criticism-hedging qualifications and anti-everything speechifying. full review
11. Good for Nothing 2012 Good for Nothing has a nice comic sense of the brushfire eruptions of Western violence... full review
12. House at the End of the Street 2012 Tonderai steers the story cleanly around its queasy hairpin turns, perversely toying with one of pop cinema's most cherished cliches: the audience's inculcated desire to side with the underdog. full review
13. In Another Country 2012 The cumulative impression is of figures being lightly traced in the sand only to be inevitably washed away, intentionally ephemeral and quite charming for it. full review
14. A Little Bit Of Heaven 2012 A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them... full review
15. Lovely Molly 2012 Has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester. full review
16. Madea's Witness Protection 2012 An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here. full review
17. Mansome 2012 While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance. full review
18. Mirror Mirror 2012 Here, the familiar tale is retold with concessions to feminist self-determination and camp humor, bending the Grimm Brothers' tale without infringing on its basic beauty. full review
19. Orchestra Of Exiles 2012 Although the movie is overreliant on chintzy-looking and rather corny historical reenactments, these are counterbalanced by anecdote-rich interviews ... full review
20. Seeking Justice 2012 Working with a pip of a premise, Seeking Justice is the kind of effective middle-range pulp thriller that has lately become an endangered species. full review
21. Teddy Bear 2012 A good tale, simply told. full review
22. The Turin Horse 2012 Tarr, who is only 56, claims The Turin Horse as his last film, and it's hard to imagine a follow-up. full review
23. The Viral Factor 2012 It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive... full review
24. The Woman Who Wasn't There 2012 The Woman Who Wasn't There plays like a by-the-numbers cable true-crime documentary -- which in fact it is. full review
25. Angels Crest 2011 Parental sorrow is a fine big theme; all that's missing here is the detail-work to humanize it. full review
26. Ironclad 2011 While Ironclad captures the casual cruelty and flesh-and-bone violence of the 13th century, it fails to do the same in the more intimate material set in the downtime between assaults. full review
27. Khodorkovsky 2011 Though the PR bit is right on, Khodorkovsky goes some way toward questioning the guilt. full review
28. The Last Rites of Joe May 2011 Farina is un-self-conscious and true enough to alchemize cliche. full review
29. Septien 2011 Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still. full review
30. The Ward 2011 Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege. full review
31. 3 Backyards 2010 A story in which poor real folks are granted perspective only by brushing up against starlets, accidents, and villains of the tabloid press. full review
32. All Good Things 2010 The case-history script is ever on-message, but Jarecki ignores the little details that create a credible social reality. full review
33. Elena Undone 2010 full review
34. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen 2010 Anyone who's seen a martial-arts picture expects a certain amount of thumb-twiddling between the big numbers, but director Andrew Lau's handling of exposition is markedly poor. full review
35. The Romantics 2010 [It plays] as an elementary game of who-gets-who musical chairs, involving nasty behavior among pretty and thoroughly unconvincing aesthetes. full review
36. The Eclipse 2009 The Eclipse is a curious Irish ghost story that fiddles with the recipe just enough to produce interesting results. full review
37. Great Directors 2009 Received ideas, creative-class cheerleading, and outright schmoozing bore, but the yacht party after the Cannes screening sounds awesome! full review
38. The House of the Devil 2009 Gravely gorgeous in the style of a storybook Snow White, Donahue gives eloquent reaction shots and nails West's piece de resistance -- a bounding, Walkman-soundtracked, Jazzercise dance through the house. full review
39. The Missing Person 2009 All of which is well and artsy, but doesn't diminish the sense, once the mystery has untangled, that the film has been gesturing toward a profundity that isn't there. full review
40. Splinterheads 2009 It's another tale of an overgrown kid accepted for his sweet, stammering self and nurtured out of his cocoon. full review
41. Survival of the Dead 2009 At best, Survival's ending, with a riff on "beating a dead horse," may be taken for evidence of self-awareness. full review
42. Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen 2009 Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection. full review
43. Diminished Capacity 2008 It's the kind of lite movie you go and see with your mom, and she'll say she liked it -- but then a year later, you're both trying to remember what it was even about. full review
44. Forever Strong 2008 Though director Ryan Little puts together a clean, professional package, at bottom this is a nearly-two-hour scrum of therapeutic direct encounters. full review
45. We Live in Public 2008 What is disturbing is not Harris's self-absorbed insistence that his own emotional hobbling somehow reflects an overarching social-technological pattern, but, instead, Timoner's uncritical cinematic collusion. full review
46. Arranged 2007 Lamentable scenes include that comic relief stand-by, the Bad Date Montage, but the movie comes off better than it should by virtue of Benhamou and (especially) Lister-Jones, appealing and modest young actors who create a plausible central relationship, full review
47. The Girl Next Door 2007 Beneath the 1950's seemingly placid exterior of Ozzie and Harriet normalcy, there were -- brace yourself! -- sinister undercurrents at work. full review
48. Psycho 1998 full review
49. Daylight 1996 full review
50. Rolling Thunder 1977 Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era. full review
51. David Holzman's Diary 1967 Holzman's a classic character, a sympathetic-if-pathetic study in generational solipsism, delivering imported French lyricism in clunky flatlands American -- miscast by himself in his own life. full review
52. His Girl Friday 1940 The movie bears reviewing because there's always something new in the confetti of one-liners, while its depiction of the Fourth Estate remains relevant. full review