instantwatcher.com

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

1. Black Snake Moan 2007 An engorged melodrama meant to evoke the dark passions of country blues, Black Snake Moan often comes off like Britney Spears singing Skip James. full review
2. Day Watch 2007 To the credit of [director] Timur Bekmambetov, it is possible to dive into the second chapter of the ambitious, visually dazzling Russian fantasy trilogy that began with 2004's Night Watch without feeling completely adrift. full review
3. Eagle vs. Shark 2007 So the only real argument I can make for Eagle vs. Shark, a stupid-absurdist comedy from New Zealand, is that I laughed a lot, often despite myself, and that while I might not be able to wholly justify it, I can mount a questionable defense. full review
4. Freedom Writers 2007 What is profoundly different about this based-on-fact film is that although we leave the theater wishing there were more teachers as devoted as the one depicted here. full review
5. Hot Rod 2007 Director Akiva Schaffer apparently thinks that by adding stupid stunts to the formula, Hot Rod also can attract the Jackass crowd. full review
6. The Hunting Party 2007 The Hunting Party has good aim, but just misses. full review
7. Mr. Bean's Holiday 2007 A throwback to silent movie clowns. full review
8. No End in Sight 2007 Ferguson's case is so confidently built that it seems unassailable... full review
9. Puccini for Beginners 2007 There is pleasure and even insight to be had in Puccini but it all feels second-hand, and therefore, of questionable provenance. full review
10. You Kill Me 2007 Who knew there was such a high burnout rate in hit men? And who knew they suffered from so many varieties of treatable neuroses? And who knew they were such amusing guys? full review
11. Brooklyn Rules 2006 ...Winter's coming-of-age-in-the-1980s saga is content to rewalk the same mean streets, never ducking into one alley or back room we haven't visited. full review
12. Bug 2006 It is certain to have an impact on anyone who experiences it, even if it's not the movie they expected. It does not just get under your skin; it bores its way into your head. full review
13. Failure to Launch 2006 Parker does occasionally make us forget that Failure to Launch is so bereft of comic ideas that it ultimately stoops to giving Terry Bradshaw a nude scene to milk a laugh. full review
14. Fay Grim 2006 The more complicated it gets the less interesting it becomes; the joke is just overloaded, and at almost two hours, too long. full review
15. Golden Door 2006 Turns an old story into something completely new. full review
16. An Inconvenient Truth 2006 Communicates the dangers of ignoring global warning with credible urgency in a way news coverage of conferences and TV news segments have never been able to do. full review
17. Keeping Up With The Steins 2006 We get the distinct feeling this film has been made by people who don't really want to offend their friends, who would rather spend a million dollars impressing others as opposed to throwing it away on hunger relief or American education. full review
18. Maxed Out 2006 Maxed Out exposes the credit card sham for what it is, and fingers the hustlers who perpetuate it. full review
19. Nacho Libre 2006 The irony is that just about any actual Mexican wrestling movie is funnier than this would-be parody, which never gets off the mat. full review
20. Severance 2006 It is wonderfully wry, and contains some great gags. full review
21. This Is England 2006 A hard-fisted punch of reality based on the filmmaker's experiences growing up in England's Midlands in 1983. full review
22. World Trade Center 2006 World Trade Center is beautifully acted down to the smallest role and exquisitely crafted -- it is all but impossible to tell the difference between the computer-generated imagery and live-action sequences shot in Manhattan. full review
23. Bad News Bears 2005 Even if we've seen it a million times, there's still fun to be had watching zeroes become heroes. full review
24. Brokeback Mountain 2005 Brokeback Mountain the power to break your heart -- and, perhaps more important, to open it. full review
25. Broken Flowers 2005 You can't take your eyes off [Murray], and you leave Broken Flowers hoping he's feeling better -- about life, love, everything.
26. Casanova 2005 Casanova finds [director] Hallstrom more inspired, or at least lively and engaged, than he has been in years, and he's in the company of the actor of the moment. full review
27. Coach Carter 2005 In this film, basketball is not a metaphor; it's a hard-played game that requires skill, conditioning, intelligence and effective teamwork. full review
28. The Constant Gardener 2005 A character-driven drama of actual import that delivers a message and dramatic punch, but with a visual edginess and narrative ingenuity that is in the service of the story, as opposed to the filmmaker's cleverness.
29. Elizabethtown 2005 Cameron Crowe's romantic comedy Elizabethtown is a mess, but it's such an amiable, bighearted mess that it manages to remain entertaining even as it's going hopelessly astray.
30. Factotum 2005 One of the few films that gets to the heart of what a writer does and how he does it, without the clichés of pages being torn from the typewriter, crumpled and tossed on the floor. full review
31. Four Brothers 2005 Add a script that teeters precariously between vengeance, poignancy and comedy, and Four Brothers starts to look like four movies.
32. Grizzly Man 2005 As unsettling as it is fascinating.
33. Jarhead 2005 In the end, Jarhead is more of a training exercise than a meaningful mission, one that hits some targets without drawing any blood.
34. Land of the Dead 2005 Land of the Dead is rich with political metaphors and social satire, none of which ever throws us out of the story or slows the breakneck pace. full review
35. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man 2005 A tribute concert with earnest but mostly average performances gussied up with fawning if passionate praise from admirers and occasional bits of self-deprecation from Cohen himself. full review
36. Lonesome Jim 2005 While Lonesome Jim may be clinically acute, it is by its very nature dramatically inert. full review
37. The Longest Yard 2005 The new version is not nearly as convincing or as credible as the old. full review
38. The Lost City 2005 The movie has too many stories to tell and tells none of them very well. full review
39. My Summer of Love 2005 While the movie's young lovers happen to be female, this is not a story of forbidden fervor, but one that effectively captures the first flush of teenage infatuation and passion that will resonate with anyone, of any sex. full review
40. Neil Young: Heart of Gold 2005 It does what the best movies of any genre do: turn the produced and scripted into something sincere and honest. full review
41. Nine Lives 2005 Composed of nine short films, each starring some of the best female actors working, though many of them aren't working enough.
42. The Producers 2005 There are bad movies, there are terrible, misguided mistakes and there are unbearable and embarrassing ordeals. The Producers: The Movie Musical is all of those. full review
43. Serenity 2005 Most of Serenity is talk, and thankfully, it is pretty great.
44. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 Frank and frightening. full review
45. Sweet Land 2005 A film of uncommon grace, one that transports you to an America that seems innately familiar even though you have never seen it depicted on-screen quite like this before. full review
46. This Film is Not Yet Rated 2005 Although a couple of the film's conclusions are as arbitrary and questionable as decisions by the board, This Film Is Not Yet Rated should be an eye-opener. full review
47. The World's Fastest Indian 2005 Without apology, Munro's story has been embellished and romanticized right to the edge of cornball, where it manages to make a hairpin turn and restore its balance. full review
48. After Innocence 2004 After Innocence is, without making it overly obvious, anti-death penalty on the grounds that a just society cannot afford to make any mistakes that we cannot attempt to rectify. full review
49. A Good Woman 2004 Rarely have so many regularly employed professionals created something so utterly undistinguished as A Good Woman. full review
50. Hotel Rwanda 2004 If Hotel Rwanda does nothing more than provoke the obvious questions of 'How did this happen?' and 'How can we prevent it from happening again?' it has, like the hotelier who refuses to consider himself a hero, done its job. full review
51. Me and You and Everyone We Know 2004 Easily the year's most imaginative movie.
52. The Passion of the Christ 2004 There are scenes in The Passion that will remain forever with those who see it. full review
53. Vanity Fair 2004 Even with a running time of more than 2 hours, this kind of condensation means we race through the story's second half in a time warp not aided by Nair's garish, out-of-nowhere and out-of-place Indian interludes. full review
54. Vera Drake 2004 Gripping and elegantly told. full review
55. 21 Grams 2003 One of the most riveting and moving experiences of the year, a movie of aching soulfulness and transforming power. full review
56. CSA: Confederate States of America 2003 Willmott's battlefield strategy is parody, not drama, and he makes his points with far more invention than finesse. full review
57. Daddy Day Care 2003 The humor is strictly potty-level, with its biggest laughs reserved for pee-pee gags and the inevitable gas-passing. full review
58. In the Cut 2003 More of a curiosity than a full-fledged movie. full review
59. The Machinist 2003 It is well worth enduring for the performance of Bale. full review
60. The Missing 2003 A first-rate psychological thriller that also happens to be a classic Western. full review
61. Mona Lisa Smile 2003 A classy, handsome and serviceable entertainment that may not change your life, but could help you appreciate how you came to have it. full review
62. Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 A fractured fairy tale for whom we happily suspend disbelief, right up to the best-not- believe-it 'The End.' full review
63. Primer 2003 Carruth challenges us to imagine the impossible, then asks us to consider the moral, ethical and spiritual implications of what we have witnessed, and put those considerations on equal footing with man's desire to go where no man has gone before. full review
64. S.W.A.T. 2003 One of those generic cop-slash-war movies of the Jerry Bruckheimer school -- where men are men and so are the women, where the hardware is fetishized. full review
65. Swimming Pool 2003 Clever and exceedingly well-acted. full review
66. Touching the Void 2003 An edge-of- the-seat, what-else- could-go- wrong thriller with the building momentum of fiction. full review
67. Bowling for Columbine 2002 Bowling for Columbine would never be mistaken for even-handed, but it is at least a sincere attempt to find the source of this country's inability to curb gun violence and murder. full review
68. Changing Lanes 2002 Changing Lanes explores human behavior with unsentimentalized and uncommon directness and honesty. full review
69. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys 2002 [An] engrossing and imaginative coming-of-age film.
70. Equilibrium 2002 If there was a solitary new idea or actual emotion in Equilibrium, the Prozium must have rendered me oblivious. full review
71. The Hours 2002 The performances are so beautifully synchronized -- for which Hare, Daldry and editor Peter Boyle also deserve credit -- that it is impossible to choose one as being better than another. full review
72. Irreversible 2002 Extremely difficult to endure, and if you choose to endure it, it could leave you feeling angry and upset. Nevertheless, this is serious filmmaking, and Noe is a gifted filmmaker. full review
73. The Pianist 2002 The brilliance of The Pianist, a film that stands with any of the great dramas about the Holocaust, is not that its story is so unbelievable, but that it is so relentlessly matter-of-fact. full review
74. Punch-Drunk Love 2002 Director Paul Thomas Anderson hasn't reinvented Sandler; he's just allowed those of us who tired very quickly of his innocent naif shtick to see how effectively it can be put in the service of something to care about. full review
75. The Rules of Attraction 2002 Rules is hard to watch and harder not to, and director Roger Avary gets whatever it is that makes Ellis' cruelly romanticized pop-culture portraiture as fascinating as it is repellent. full review
76. Sex Is Comedy 2002 If Breillat's aim is demystifying how passion and desire are simulated on-screen, then Sex Is Comedy is successful. full review
77. Star Trek - Nemesis 2002 May satisfy the faithful but can leave the casual moviegoer feeling as if he's walked into a bar where nobody knows his name. full review
78. Windtalkers 2002 The only time Windtalkers doesn't go by the book is when Woo feels compelled to remind in-the-know moviegoers that he's John Woo: birds artfully flapping their wings, grass swaying, blood spurting, Joe staring soulfully into his personal abyss. full review
79. XX/XY 2002 A movie that is not just humorless but pointless, or, to be generous, painfully obvious. full review
80. Black Hawk Down 2001 Except for the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the middle 45 of Pearl Harbor -- produced, like this film, by action overlord Jerry Bruckheimer -- no film has ever dropped us so convincingly into combat. full review
81. Along Came a Spider 2001 Wears the one-size-fits-all jumpsuit of a hundred forgettable crime capers.
82. The Animal 2001 Should you consider getting near it, understand that it doesn't smell so good.
83. Atlantis - The Lost Empire 2001 A fine Disney adventure about the legendary lost land.
84. Gosford Park 2001 The venerated American director's best film since Short Cuts. full review
85. Pootie Tang 2001 Funny as the joke may be, it's still only one joke. full review
86. Rat Race 2001 Hollywood Squares remake of Mad World. full review
87. The Safety of Objects 2001 Troche ... seems to be tuned into Homes' writing, but without really knowing how to translate it to a cinematic narrative.
88. Sexy Beast 2001 The most original and entertaining crime thriller since The Limey. full review
89. Wet Hot American Summer 2001 Have a good summer. full review
90. Billy Elliot 2000 It may be that the most fierce performance of the year comes from Jamie Bell.
91. Happy Accidents 2000 The charm of Happy Accidents is that, like Ruby, we half-believe Sam Deed. full review
92. Malena 2000 Any moral lesson the film pretends to hold is as muddled as it is misguided.
93. Meet the Parents 2000 You couldn't do much better than to pit De Niro at his most humorlessly imposing against Ben Stiller at his most anxiously eager to please.
94. Memento 2000 It will be an unadventurous or lazy filmgoer who doesn't want to play the movie's ingenious game.
95. The Taste of Others 2000 Confirms that France may be producing, per capita, more good films than any country on the globe.
96. Traffic 2000 Walk straight and steady into Steven Soderbergh's dizzying drug drama Traffic and minutes later you'll feel as woozy as if you had fallen into one of Wonderland's smokiest sinkholes.
97. Next Stop Wonderland 1998 Predictable!
98. The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993 This is the movie puts the "oooh" back in "boo." full review