ROTTEN TOMATOES: Nick Davis

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NICK DAVIS

Agrees with the Tomatometer 65% of the time.

Biography: Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University

Favorites: The Piano, Morvern Callar, Safe, When Harry Met Sally..., Persona, Pinocchio ('40), Singin' in the Rain, The Scarlet Empress, Laura, Meshes of the Afternoon, Aliens, Crash, Harlan County U.S.A., The Thin Red Line, Citizen Kane, Velvet Goldmine, Dancer in the Dark

Publications: Nick's Flick Picks

Critics' Group: Cinemarati

Total Reviews: 463
Total QuickRatings: 185

Location: Chicago, IL

LISTING OF ALL REVIEWS & ARTICLES

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Showing 1 - 50 of 463

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date (default)

Fresh B	Fresh 91%	Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009)	" Frequently plays as though Daniels conceived it as a mash-up of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Rob Marshall's Chicago... Finally and semi-subversively denies that 'everything is a gift of the universe.'" Posted Oct 18, 2009
Rotten C-	Rotten 20%	Give Me Your Hand (2009)	" It's almost hard to see the movie inside all the recycled beats and diaphanous construction, much less to feel its pulse." Posted Oct 14, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 92%	Mary and Max (2009)	" I'd be a sucker for most movies where a strategic slick of rooster s*** plays a decisive role in enabling an emotional communion, or where a young girl thinks to ask, "If a taxi goes backwards, does the driver owe you money?"" Posted Oct 12, 2009
Fresh B	N/A	Partners (2009)	" Partners has its fingers confidently on the pulse of what is heedlessly passionate and what is utterly desultory about late adolescence and extremely nascent "adulthood."" Posted Oct 11, 2009
Rotten D	N/A	Lovely, Still (2009)	" Lovely, Still made me feel sorry for its venerable stars, despite my fondness for their legacies and my gratitude for their committed best efforts through most of the film." Posted Oct 11, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 100%	My Neighbor, My Killer (2009)	" Few documentaries are quite as rigorous and artful in exposing the complex stakes behind pointing a camera and a microphone at scenes of profound social injury." Posted Oct 10, 2009
Rotten C-	N/A	Eclipse (2009)	" The Eclipse shoots willy-nilly for too many registers of fear, and it never emanates a confident sense of what we are learning about these men and women by watching them panic, shudder, and second-guess themselves." Posted Oct 8, 2009
Rotten C	Rotten 43%	Air Doll (2009)	" *Plays like a middling installment of some softballed international portmanteau like Paris, je t'aime, but maddeningly inflated to at least ten times the recommended scale.*" Posted Oct 7, 2009
Fresh B	Fresh 82%	Paranormal Activity (2009)	" Paranormal Activity has the universally craved but preciously rare knack among modern horror movies of seeping into the skin and the cerebellum." Posted Oct 5, 2009
Fresh A-	Fresh 77%	Georgia (1995)	" Might be my favorite example of a movie that compels you toward binaristic assumptions but keeps outwitting them, with its immersed conviction in the palpable, sonic, psychological, atmospheric world that it inhabits and constructs." Posted Aug 30, 2009
Fresh A-	Fresh 97%	Spirited Away (2002)	" Spirited Away exalts the young girl Chihiro's uncanny experiences into an adventure that is as thrillingly ambiguous as it is vividly soundtracked and illustrated." Posted Aug 25, 2009
Rotten C-	Fresh 77%	O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)	" The Coens are like party acquaintances who keep changing the subject and then staring at you quizzically when you can't follow the thread, or when you stop wanting to follow it, but who then block all your exit routes from their obnoxious conversation." Posted Jul 22, 2009
Rotten C	Fresh 88%	Two Family House (2000)	" Unfortunately, the look, pace, and structure of the film stop feeling elegantly restrained and pass into something like boilerplate mediocrity." Posted Jul 22, 2009
Rotten D+	Rotten 54%	Cheri (2009)	" *Lying on a mattress and staring out with inarticulate wistfulness is to this film what answering the phone and marveling at the odd stag were to Frears's The Queen.*" Posted Jul 15, 2009
Fresh B-	Rotten 24%	Mission to Mars (2000)	" Whatever's shoddy or limp about Mission to Mars, however conspicuous while the film unfolds, all becomes admirably pale as the full viewing experience recedes and the good stuff emerges in proud bas-relief." Posted Jul 14, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 70%	La Captive (2001)	" For the high-minded, literary, and formally invested viewers who are receptive to how she works and what she worries about, the film offers a starkly insinuating exercise in the contemplation of love." Posted Jul 7, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 82%	Wonder Boys (2000)	" If Douglas and Hanson have aimed to make Grady as simultaneously weary and jazzed...as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning theme song is, they have come enticingly close, with marvelous highs along the way (not just the narcotic kind), but they haven't fully got th" Posted Jul 1, 2009
Fresh B-	Fresh 69%	Adoration (2009)	" No one else would have made a film about these people, exploring these ideas and taking these kinds of mysterious risks... but it all amounts ambiguously to being either the best of Egoyan's weaker films or the shakiest of his good ones." Posted Jun 30, 2009
Fresh B+	N/A	The Battle of Midway (1942)	" As provocative as a new (and an old) way to contemplate Ford as it is seminal as a time-capsule for martial history and for wartime image-mongering and tribute-paying in the days before television." Posted Mar 19, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 100%	Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)	" Mr. Jordan has the right kind of love for itself: it isn't self-glorifying or self-fetishizing so much as it is contagiously warm toward its characters and besotted with its tenderly ambitious script" Posted Mar 13, 2009
Fresh B+	Fresh 86%	The Wolf Man (1941)	" The Wolf Man's tantamount pleasures are its economy and speed, its silvery manipulations of light and shadow, and the panache with which the lighting, the story, and the rich cast navigate [its] tone." Posted Mar 10, 2009
Rotten C-	Fresh 61%	Changeling (2008)	" Writer J. Michael Straczynski and director Clint Eastwood keep abducting their own movie and flagrantly replacing it with a different one." Posted Nov 12, 2008
Rotten D+	Fresh 90%	I've Loved You So Long (2008)	" If this movie is as patient, delicate, and introspective as it pretends, what to make of all the bludgeoning, obvious tactics that keep serving to remind us of its impeccable tact?" Posted Nov 11, 2008
Fresh A	Fresh 67%	Synecdoche, New York (2008)	" *Brazen and witty and starkly serious...Synecdoche stands in relation to Kaufman's best previous screenplays in the same way that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE* stood in relation to Mulholland Drive.**" Posted Nov 11, 2008
Fresh B	Fresh 64%	Quantum of Solace (2008)	" Lively with color but dotted with chic black-on-white motifs, splashed with escapist enticements without losing its grip on James's curdled spirit, suggestive of interesting fragilities in the time-honored MI6 chain of command." Posted Oct 28, 2008
Rotten C+	Rotten 57%	Delta (2008)	" Delta, quite easy to laugh at, and deserving, at least, of impatience if not contempt, has a keen eye and a flexibility of expression as well as subtle intimations of depth that are worth sounding out." Posted Oct 26, 2008
Rotten C+	N/A	Let It Rain (2008)	" It's one of those right-down-the-middle affairs that puts its script front and center, selling punchlines and double-takes under a thin gloss of continental sophistication." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 83%	Two Lovers (2009)	" An early suicide attempt, complete with potent sound design, confers a life-and-death gravity on the picture that its story about a faltering manchild with a frustrated crush doesn't fully earn." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Fresh B+	Fresh 88%	Ballast (2008)	" A doleful movie that often has a lump in its throat, but it's also a poetic and illuminating movie that earns its attitudes and effects, including the lumps." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 77%	Genova (2008)	" [Winterbottom] can't quite decide which well-trodden path to walk, either of domestic drama or of supernatural riddle, which should have been a sign that he hasn't really committed to this project." Posted Oct 22, 2008
Fresh A-	Fresh 72%	Julia (2008)	" The film has the focused derangement of a suicide bomber...but I for one am elated to see such brazenness, such mystery, and such crazy, highwire ambition back in the movie theater." Posted Oct 19, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 61%	The Duchess (2008)	" Dibb conceived of the right, poignant atmosphere for a glimpse at rarefied 18th-century life but barely read the Cliff's Notes for whose life he was staging, or why he was doing it." Posted Oct 14, 2008
Rotten D+	Rotten 53%	Mamma Mia! (2008)	" A chintzy valentine to the world-shaking ebullience of one's own flimsily "empowered" friendships and one's most offhanded and tarted-up whims." Posted Sep 15, 2008
Rotten D	Fresh 82%	Tropic Thunder (2008)	" Tropic Thunder, full of punchlines about Milli Vanilli and Being There, stitches the tired cultural references of one generation to the utterly debased expectations of their heirs." Posted Sep 15, 2008
Fresh A	Fresh 100%	The Third Man (1949)	" *If The Third Man* is a tragedy, it isn't just the tragedy of a hobbled city, scribbled with ruins and parsed into zones of occupation that can't communicate and don't cooperate.**" Posted Sep 13, 2008
Fresh B+	Fresh 85%	Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)	" Beware of a Holy Whore is the film you would make if you spent the previous ten years on a steady diet of Godard and Warhol, with occasional afternoons cleared for Antonioni and every night reserved for hard drinking." Posted Aug 23, 2008
Rotten C	Fresh 82%	Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)	" Long ago, Allen became interested in "the artist" only as a theme and rhetorical figure. The actual making of art, whether as his subject or as embodied by his own films, no longer grips him. It may actually bore him." Posted Aug 22, 2008
Fresh C+	Rotten 49%	Smart People (2008)	" Smart People aims [at] enlisting Quaid's intelligence and self-awareness without denying him the wit and the grins that keep him so likable on screen. He handles the role well, but you couldn't say he owns it or thrives with it." Posted Apr 27, 2008
Fresh B-	Fresh 67%	Turn the River (2008)	" Turn the River, sometimes like Kailey herself and sometimes not, has a laudable habit of pulling back at the right moments and proving its mettle in unexpected ways." Posted Apr 26, 2008
Fresh B	Rotten 44%	Fay Grim (2007)	" *The nicest surprise of the movie is how long and how well Fay Grim* works as a contemporary screwball comedy, a genre from which Hartley's diffuse yet severe sense of irony would seem to disbar him.**" Posted Jan 3, 2008
Fresh B	Fresh 77%	Crazy Love (2007)	" Crazy Love...sidles up to us, thrills and surprises us, seduces us with the pop flavor of its mid-century paperback aesthetic and its titillating tabloid tale. Crazy Love is chummy." Posted Nov 15, 2007
Rotten C-	Rotten 31%	Making Love (1982)	" *On its own baby-step terms, and despite its moneyed vanilla-himbo vision of gay masculinity and desire, Making Love* plays now as a bemusing anachronism but not an insulting or self-inflating one.**" Posted Nov 13, 2007
Fresh B-	N/A	The Joy of Life (2005)	" The Joy of Life offers a truncated and incomplete but a nonetheless promising start to that looming and hopefully brilliant career." Posted Nov 12, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 96%	Groundhog Day (1993)	" The movie deserves its fans, earns our respect, delivers richly on its initial promises if not always on its greater ones, and rewards multiple viewings, even as it carries a built-in joke about the typical shelf-life of repeated experience." Posted Nov 12, 2007
Fresh B+	Fresh 100%	The Search (1948)	" Both a well-modulated immersion in the experience of stunned and stranded children and a time-capsule of the scarred land and crumbled cityscapes of Germany after the war." Posted Oct 18, 2007
Rotten D+	Rotten 34%	Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)	" Elizabeth: Full Throttle. Elizabeth: The Heretic. Elizabeth: Book of Shadows. Despite all the peacock kerfluffery Kapur can conjure, this remains an inscrutable film, in intent as well as execution." Posted Oct 16, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 90%	Michael Clayton (2007)	" The multiplex needs more movies where life, work, morality, and debt comprise the constellation of adult experience, unimpinged upon by concessions to youth audiences and unameliorated by any whiff of romance." Posted Oct 16, 2007
Rotten C	Fresh 73%	Stuck (2007)	" Assumes the stance of a transfixed but inarticulate bystander to its own premise, rather than using that premise as an aperture into revelation of character, accumulation of suspense, or persuasive ethical reflection." Posted Oct 13, 2007
Fresh B	Fresh 72%	Mister Foe (2008)	" Hallam Foe cannot be accused of concealing its investment in the dramatic heightening of sensation, the privileging of psychic logic and hormonal pulls over safer and more quotidian forms of "realistic" storytelling." Posted Oct 10, 2007
Fresh B-	Fresh 87%	Control (2007)	" Parades so many smart, savvy strategies for avoiding the typical music-bio pablum that it's particularly dispiriting when the middle and end of the film so dully and incorrigibly embrace those very clichés." Posted Oct 8, 2007

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A+	Modern TimesOffsite
A	Maria Full of GraceOffsite
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A	Synecdoche, New YorkOffsite
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A	Boyz N the HoodOffsite
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NICK DAVIS

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