Tomato 3.5/4 |
Adam (2009) |
"The film rides on Dancy's wonderfully authentic performance." |
Bruce Demara |
Tomato 3/4 |
Adoration (2009) |
"Egoyan draws strong performances from the entire cast, including a solid performance from Scott Speedman, sporting a heavy beard, as the uncle raising the orphaned Simon, a sort of everyman embodying Western liberalism who is flawed by his own insularity." |
Bruce Demara |
Tomato 3/4 |
Adrift in Tokyo (2009) |
"It takes a while to get to its destination, but the journey is a memorable one thanks to the film's charmingly odd sensibility and the affable rapport between our two travelers." |
Jason Anderson |
Tomato 3/4 |
Adventureland (2009) |
"Adventureland is what you might call stealth comedy. The laughs are few but they sneak up on you and really deliver." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Aliens in the Attic (2009) |
"A forgettable bit of fluff that will zip out of your orbit as soon as the credits roll." |
Linda Barnard |
Splat 2/4 |
Amelia (2009) |
"Courting Oscar with unseemly lust, while also promoting Earhart as an early feminist, the film strives too hard to be profound and not enough to be merely human." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 3/4 |
Amreeka (2009) |
"Amreeka makes its points with gentle humour and engaging performances -- especially Faour, who makes Muna so likeable it's impossible not to cross your fingers and hope her luck is about to change." |
Linda Barnard |
Tomato 4/4 |
An Education (2009) |
"The point here is not to judge past missteps by modern standards, but rather to point out how easy it is to allow dreams to overtake reality." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Angels & Demons (2009) |
"Like its predecessor, Angels & Demons manages the miraculous feat of seeming to plod while racing at breakneck speed, the tempo set by Hans Zimmer's blusterous score." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Antichrist (2009) |
"Antichrist ends up being more unnerving than it is terrifying, and a lot funnier than it's supposed to be." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 3/4 |
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009) |
"An alternately humorous and heartbreaking film." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Astro Boy (2009) |
"Lacklustre design and rudimentary storytelling sink Astro Boy below the level of the recent hits of Pixar and DreamWorks." |
Jason Anderson |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Away We Go (2009) |
"Away We Go is dead-end Quirkville, penned by real-life couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, successful authors taking an unfortunate wrong turn into movie writing." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 3/4 |
All Together Now (2008) |
"All Together Now enthrals. It also makes you want to fly to Las Vegas immediately and buy a ticket to LOVE." |
Susan Walker |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Amal (2008) |
"There is nothing obvious about the story, which moves carefully and unpredictably, taking us through the streets of Delhi with a view from the back of a rickshaw." |
Linda Barnard |
Splat 1/4 |
An American Carol (2008) |
"Utterly asinine, sophomoric, tasteless, the movie has much in common with Zucker's Airplane!, The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Scary Movie sequels, minus the laughs." |
Susan Walker |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
American Teen (2008) |
"A moving and engrossing slice-of-life documentary about teen life in small-town Warsaw, Ind." |
Bruce Demara |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Appaloosa (2008) |
"Harris follows his strong helming debut Pollock with a contribution to the western movie revival that looks and sounds like a classic." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Australia (2008) |
"At once sprawling and intimate, melodramatic and comic, magnificent and utterly bonkers, it bears entertaining witness to Luhrmann's love of old movies and his Down Under homeland." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Across the Universe (2007) |
"You'd have been better off sampling the brown acid at Woodstock than risking brain cells on Across the Universe, the bizarrely ornate nail Julie Taymor hammers into the Beatles' coffin." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
After The Wedding (2007) |
"Even when [Bier's] movie ventures in deepest contrivance it pulls you along like a willing puppy on a gently tugged leash." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Air Guitar Nation (2007) |
"As dumb as the idea of grown men dressing up and pretending to play guitar may be, there's no arguing that some of these grown men do so with a truly awesome degree of energy and flair." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Alice's House (2007) |
"Nothing much happens in Alice's House, and a turning point in the plot is terribly contrived, but as sociology and maybe even a pilot for a soap serial, the movie is worth a look." |
Susan Walker |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
All Hat (2007) |
"The plot is reasonably convincing, the pace tight, the laid-back score of jazz guitar and harmonica suitable to a film about country living, in which blood and gore are conspicuously absent." |
Philip Marchand |
Splat 2/4 |
Alpha Dog (2007) |
"Cassavetes starts to lose the plot at the precise moment he starts keeping exact track of it." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) |
"Me, I want a hula hoop." |
Susan Walker |
Splat 2/4 |
Amazing Grace (2007) |
"It is to be hoped that Amazing Grace is not the only, or the last, cinematic celebration of 200th anniversary of abolition, for there are more stories to tell, more imaginatively." |
Susan Walker |
Splat 1.5/4 |
American Gangster (2007) |
"Ridley Scott's listless Big Statement is a wheezy, hot air-inflated dud." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 2/4 |
American Venus (2007) |
"Never settling on a consistent tone or establishing a convincing context for its central character, the movie ultimately seems to grow bored even with itself." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 2.5/4 |
Angel-A (2007) |
"It seems Besson can be sentimental about Paris but he's still not ready to get too romantic with people." |
Peter Howell |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Arctic Tale (2007) |
"The point is made: life, as the wondrous animals of our very far north know it, is severely endangered. And that can only spell disaster for the inhabitants of lands farther south." |
Susan Walker |
Splat 1/4 |
Are We Done Yet? (2007) |
"Are We Done Yet? may be remarkable only for the fact that its star was ever once actually considered a threat to civic stability. If movies came any safer than this, they'd be given honourary police citations for keeping the peace." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 2/4 |
Arthur and the Invisibles (2007) |
"While technically polished and adequately executed Arthur, like most of Besson's movies, is a strangely soulless experience." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) |
"It's a western destined to outlive the pronouncements of its own death, because it knows that death is only the first stage in the life of legend." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
The Astronaut Farmer (2007) |
"You either roll with the hokum or you don't. If you do, the essential message of realizing your dreams flies as well as Jimmy Stewart's angel wings. If you don't, reality is as close as the nearest window." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Atonement (2007) |
"Atonement is not only too polite but maddeningly orderly, resulting in a prettily cast, professionally performed, impeccably mounted bore." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 1/4 |
August Rush (2007) |
"Exuberantly bad and strenuously preposterous." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Avenue Montaigne (2007) |
"A film that seeks to amble it way towards resolution and which offers a few insights and smiles along the way." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Awake (2007) |
"The plot has more holes in it than a tea bag and the film should come with a warning label: don't go see with anyone with even a modicum of medical knowledge, because they'll surely spend the film huffing and rolling their eyes skyward." |
Bruce Demara |
Tomato 3/4 |
Away From Her (2007) |
"As terrific as Christie's performance is, it's the superb Pinsent who's left to register most of the internal emotional turbulence as a reserved man who no longer shares a past with the woman he's spent his life with." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 2/4 |
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006) |
"You leave a viewing with a sense of utter defeat. I can envision a future DVD special edition that comes with a razor blade, to facilitate wrist slashing." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 3/4 |
A Scanner Darkly (2006) |
"As fascinating and intelligent as the movie is, A Scanner Darkly leaves you wishing it might have actually been less faithful in word, and more in spirit, to Philip K. Dick's universe of bugged-out paranoid weirdness." |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
A Stone's Throw (2006) |
"Strong performances across the board help smooth out the bumps. A Stone's Throw is a welcome sign that environmental concerns need not be consigned to the realm of documentary film." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Accepted (2006) |
"Here's the final mystery about Accepted: Why title a movie that so readily invites the headline Rejected as a critical riposte?" |
Peter Howell |
Splat 2/4 |
Akeelah and the Bee (2006) |
"The latest spelling bee movie is a Starbucks Entertainment product, and it has a made-to-order feel about it, kind of like a compilation album." |
Susan Walker |
Tomato 3/4 |
Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker (2006) |
"With all the charm of the early James Bond movies and all the heart-stopping chase scenes of the contemporary spy series ... Alex Rider heaves into view as a reluctant, but thrilling young spy." |
Susan Walker |
Splat 1.5/4 |
All The King's Men (2006) |
"All the King's Men was suspended in editing limbo for nearly a year, and the final result only makes the mind reel at what it could have been carved from." |
Geoff Pevere |
Splat 2.5/4 |
American Dreamz (2006) |
"Like a commander-in-chief who's too good-naturedly dumb to be dangerous, the writer-director is ultimately too forgiving to do much bruising. (Or maybe too calculating, which kind of blurs into the same thing.)" |
Geoff Pevere |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
American Hardcore (2006) |
"A reverential but knowledgeable documentary about an aggressive offshoot of punk that flourished on the Left Coast from 1980-86, with outposts in such far-flung locales as Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and Austin, Tex." |
Peter Howell |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Annapolis (2006) |
"The movie plays out with the same martial drumbeat inevitability of a parade march." |
Geoff Pevere |
IGN RSS Feeds
