| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
Stephen Holden,
The New York Times |
The Nines |
"Mr. Reynolds is Gabriel, a video-game designer hiking in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Mary (Ms. McCarthy), and their mute young daughter (Elle Fanning).
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There are lots of nice turns of phrase and nice verbal footwork in this review. But Stephen Holden misses the real story. Only a throw-away parenthesis hints at it: Dakota Fanning has a younger sister. God save us all.
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Stephanie Zacharek,
Salon.com |
Exiled |
"In Exiled, when bullets hit flesh, they instigate not spurts of blood but sprays of reddish powder, almost like smoke. The effect is probably meant to represent arterial spray, but the effect is poetic, almost ethereal, in the way it suggests the spirit being ejected from the body." |
Definitely. Nothing says poetry like a nice arterial spray. Finally, Stephanie Zacharek reveals her Peckinpah and chop sockey side.
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J Hoberman,
The Village Voice |
Exiled |
"Over the course of a 20-year career, To has been a genre handyman. But his reputation, at least outside of Hong Kong, derives from his action films, purposely deranged — through stylization, naturalism, or both — beyond the formulae developed by John Woo and Tsui Hark. (To's 1999 The Mission, which Exiled most obviously references, mixed prolonged scenes of gangsters hanging out with episodes of their controlled — rather than delirious — shoot-outs.)" |
You'd think that this was enough dry background information for one review, but somehow, there is more.
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Armond White,
New York Press |
The Nines |
"Too bad The Nines, with its numerological red herrings, opens so soon after the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman — great filmmakers who devoted their art to pondering faith; their styles penetrated the modern world's confusion. Antonioni's questioning in The Red Desert was fecund; The Nines is arid." |
Never miss an opportunity to sneak Bergman and Antonioni into a review, no matter how tangential the reference. |
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Stephen Hunter,
The Washington Post |
Ball of Fury |
"Some see the glass as nine-tenths empty; I see it as one-tenth full. So I will begin with some nice things concerning the Ping-Pong comedy Balls of Fury. The nicest thing is the Asian American actress known as Maggie Q. [...] Nice thing No. 2 appears, and that would be the great Christopher Walken." |
That's the spirit.
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