Nationwide Releases
The Simpsons Movie
Directed: David Silverman
Starring: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner
Trailer: Quicktime
Homer sings a song about spider pig and some other funny non-related stuff happens.
RT Score: 88%
RT Consensus: The Simpsons Movie contains the hearty laughs, biting satire, and honest portrayal of an American family that makes the show so popular.
Homer addresses the audience at the beginning and calls us all suckers. Funny ’cause it’s true.
- Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star
Turns out what they’ve done is make everything bigger, longer, and uncut, but let Homer be Homer, an average American screwup in a recognizable, screwed-up world of hypocrisy and lardy foodstuffs.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
Manages to feel like a pretty good extended episode from somewhere around the show’s golden era … I’m not booing, I’m saying Boo-urns.
- Andrew Wright
The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
This one feels incomplete, an underachiever still searching for a real reason to exist beyond enriching a fat franchise.
- Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
The movie occasionally drags, even at a modest 86 minutes, and after 400 episodes it’s hard to recapture the early seasons’ startling bite. But the throwaway gags fans live for are there.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
No Reservations
Directed: Scott Hicks
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Catherine Zeta-Jones
Trailer: Quicktime
Kate is a chef that has her life turned upside down when her sister dies and leaves Kate her daughter to raise. She takes some time off to get used to the new situation, and comes back to work to find a sous chef has been covering for her in her absence, which does not sit well with her.
RT Score: 41%
RT Consensus: This romantic comedy may look good on paper, but it’s too predictable and melancholy for the genre.
A remake not only of Mostly Martha, but of every romantic comedy featuring an uptight woman who learns to cut loose and enjoy life with a freewheeling new beau.
- Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star
A familiar dish doesn’t have to be a bland one, but No Reservations doesn’t allow for the slightest grain of salt.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
Such undercooking accounts for a lot of the film’s forgettable flavor and is the main reason you’ll feel hungry again an hour after leaving the theater.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
There are moments that work, but on the whole, this production just doesn’t flow well, doesn’t drive, doesn’t build to climax. One other hindrance: the heavy-handed score.
- Ross Anthony
Hollywood Report Card
Based on the popular German comedy Mostly Martha, it doesn’t leave a bad taste. It doesn’t leave much taste at all, save perhaps for the cloying echoes of Velveeta cheese.
- John Anderson
Newsday
I Know Who Killed Me
Directed: Chris Sivertson
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond
Trailer: Quicktime
A girl is found after gone missing for two weeks, except she says she isn’t the missing girl, but someone else. No one believes her.
RT Score: 8%
RT Consensus: Distasteful and ludicrously plotted, I Know Who Killed Me is a career nadir for all involved.
Simultaneously nasty and painfully dull.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
even my old stand by of, “At least, it started on time,” doesn’t apply here. After a 20 minute delay in starting the movie, I had to assume the projector was taking an ethical stand and refusing to be party to the heinous act of showing this movie
- Willie Waffle
WaffleMovies.com
No review could really do justice to the monumental trashiness of this mess; it really has to be seen to be believed.
- Elizabeth Weitzman
New York Daily News
Much like the career of its star, I Know Who Killed Me opens promisingly, starts to stumble in the middle and has gotten so laughably ridiculous by the final act that you can’t take it seriously at all.
- Brian Tallerico
UGO
Having broken free of the Disney machine that molded her, Lohan now seems intent on destroying her career and credibility on her own terms.
- Nathan Rabin
Onion AV Club
Who’s Your Caddy?
Directed: Don Michael Paul
Starring: Lil Wayne, Antwan Andre “Big Boi” Patton
Trailer: Quicktime
For people who found Caddyshack too sophisticated.
RT Score: 13%
The latest entry in the storied ‘white people are like this, black people are like that’ comedy subgenre.
- Steven Hyden
Onion AV Club
It’s staggering how little ambition the formerly aim-high Outkast crew showed with this limp Caddyshack knock-off.
- Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel
If this demeaning movie had been made by mainstream Hollywood, it would be courting charges of racism.
- Colin Covert
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The snooty country club is one of the easiest institutions to lampoon. So why does Who’s Your Caddy? make us feel almost sorry for the power elite?
- John Monaghan
Detroit Free Press
The movie decides, after 30 minutes of black people clowning like it’s 1939, to be a melodrama about injustice and, sigh, redemption.
- Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
Limited Releases
This is England
Directed: Shane Meadows
Starring: Stephen Graham, Joe Gilgun
Trailer: Quicktime
In 1983 in Northern England, a lonely 12-year-old boy gets picked on until he’s befriended by an older group of misfits. He’s then dragged into a skinhead group that uses his rage to their advantage.
RT Score: 90%
RT Consensus: A moving coming-of-age tale that captures the despair among England’s working-class youth in the 1980s.
Even if the story is misty in its didacticism: No matter how tough the times, just say no to racism and hatred.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
Shaun’s dark journey into an English heartland where ultra-right, National Front thugs successfully tap into the growing alienation of working-class youth is a frighteningly accurate depiction of the seductive power of hate.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Meadows has a fighters’ way with his camera, but an increasingly mature way with story.
- Chris Barsanti
Film Journal International
Starts out as well-acted and superbly designed mid-eighties time-capsule but degenerates to a formulaic conclusion that cheapens everything that went before.
- Jurgen Fauth
About.com
A modest, near-flawless gem, This Is England is a humbly, if insistently political, autobiographical homage to a lost world of youth.
- Manohla Dargis
New York Times
Arctic Tale
Directed: Adam Ravetch
Starring: Queen Latifah
Trailer: Quicktime
Follows baby polar bears and walruses as they grow up in the Arctic.
RT Score: 55%
RT Consensus: Arctic Tale features breathtaking nature cinematography, but is undone by its over-cutesy narration.
It’s a respectable attempt to get kids who like cuddly animals thinking about death and destruction on a global scale.
- Gregory Kirschling
Entertainment Weekly
…directors/cinematographers Sarah Robertson and Adam Ravetch capture the struggle of life in this frozen wilderness with effective poignancy.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Just the sort of simplistic preaching that alienates adults and insults the intelligence of their offspring.
- Stephen Garrett
Time Out
An overly cutesy, ludicrously anthropomorphic critter feature, even if it is in a good cause.
- Frank Swietek
One Guy’s Opinion
But the script, narrated by Queen Latifah, is so embarrassingly dorky (it was co-written by Kristin Gore) that it’s like Fred Rogers gone hip-hop.
- Kyle Smith
New York Post
Punk’s Not Dead
Directed: Susan Dynner
Trailer: Flash, Quicktime
Documentary about punk starting, the mainstream reaction to it and where it still resides today.
RT Score: 92%
Whether you’re a kid with a fresh coat of shellac on your Mohawk or an aging hipster still clinging to the Johnny Rotten school of snot, it’s a film that enlightens the debate and demonstrates without a doubt that when punk disappears, it never truly dies
- Brian Orndorf
FilmJerk.com
This film has an absolutely stellar cast of interviewees, so if you like punk music you’ll be in hog heaven watching it, I guarantee you.
- Graham Rae
Film Threat
The movie covers a lot of time and territory, and some of its questions are great ones. (The biggest, for true punks: Is getting a big record deal a sign of ultimate success, or final defeat?)
- Stephen Whitty
Newark Star-Ledger
About as in-your-face and raggedy as its subject, Dynner’s film is really less of a history than a psychological profile, rooting around for the meat of what makes punk so resilient, cross-generational and communal.
- Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times
Punk’s Not Dead serves as a diehard’s scrapbook of three decades of living punk, not a eulogy for an extinct underground retrofitted as a fashion trend.
- Bill Stamets
Chicago Sun-Times
No End in Sight
Directed: Charles Ferguson
Starring: Richard Armitage, Campbell Scott
Trailer: Quicktime
Documentary about the U.S. invasion into Iraq to “bring about Democracy” told from those that were there, including former Deputy Secretary of State, ambassadors, colonels, generals and Chief of Staff to Colin Powell.
RT Score: 90%
RT Consensus: Charles Ferguson’s documentary provides a good summary of the decisions that led to the mess in post-war Iraq.
The anger that fuels Ferguson’s film is felt in nearly every frame.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
The film is methodically edited, interspersing tales from the ground with policy wonks, decisions with consequences, until it paints the administration into a corner.
- Kim Voynar
Cinematical
The larger picture presented here will likely be old news, although it will jab the memory and still will shock.
- Kent Turner
Film-Forward.com
A damning critique conducted with surgical precision, Ferguson’s Sundance Festival prize-winning film is arguably one of the most comprehensive and rigorous docus about the failures of the Bush administration vis-a-vis the Iraq War.
- Emanuel Levy
EmanuelLevy.Com
Want to kick start a drinking problem? Just give No End in Sight a look, and you’re assured a cold, dark night ingesting anything nearby that will sooth the post-viewing depression.
- Brian Orndorf
eFilmCritic.com
The Devil Came on Horseback
Directed: Laurent Tirard
Trailer: Quicktime, Flash
A photographer was sent to Sudan in 2003 to photograph a cease fire after a 20-year civil war, yet what he found was genocide taking place in Darfur.
RT Score: 95%
RT Consensus: The Devil Came on Horseback is both a strong primer on the complexities of the situation in Darfur and a harrowing first-person doc.
If you don’t already have a handle on the complicated conflict at the heart of Darfur’s ongoing genocide, you probably won’t come away from this harrowing documentary with any comprehensive understanding.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Sincere and purposeful, Devil has the potential to do for the situation in Darfur what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming, which is to say, get people talking about it.
- Eric Kohn
New York Press
A decent primer on the situation, but by no means definitive.
- Edward Douglas
ComingSoon.net
One of the most searing and emotionally shattering documentaries ever made about the indifference of the world to genocide.
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Spirituality and Practice
A sickeningly effective call to action that asks how we in the most powerful nation on the planet can, even in the presence of a smoking gun, remain so loath to effect change.
- Scott Foundas
L.A. Weekly
Moliere
Directed: Laurent Tirard
Starring: Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini
Trailer: Quicktime
Biopic of failed actor and famous French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also known as Moliere, when he is hired for a secret job after his theater troupe has gone bankrupt and he hides from creditors.
RT Score: 79%
RT Consensus: Moliere is a sophisticated, witty biopic of the great satirist.
A well-played but ultimately superfluous assortment of your favorite Moliere scenes strung together by a thread-thin plot that emulates, but in no way replaces, the still-sparkling originals.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
When the French do period drama well, they tend to do it very, very well.
- Tom Cox
Daily Mail [UK]
Moliere is an exceptionally likeable period comedy, powered by impeccable performances from Luchini and the wonderful Laura Morante.
- Matt Bochenski
Little White Lies
The Shakespeare in Love song remains the same, only the lyrics have changed.
- Fernando F. Croce
Slant Magazine
While this film is rather talky and a long, it’s also a wonderfully complex blend of wit and cheekiness, underscored by a surprisingly serious romance and a steely view of the battle of the sexes.
- Rich Cline
Shadows on the Wall
The Sugar Curtain
Directed: Camila Guzman Urzua
Trailer: Flash
Director returns to Havana, Cuba where she grew up after being gone for over a decade.
RT Score: 88%
Urzua’s unsentimental story of shattered idealism is specific to Cuba, but anyone whose path to adulthood was paved with disillusionment — whether they were betrayed by faith, family or institutions — will understand her melancholy nostalgia.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
In its poignant depiction of a Cuban generation convinced that their roles as creators of a brighter tomorrow can only be fulfilled elsewhere, the director’s personal investigation into her past forcefully conveys a sense of national betrayal.
- Nick Schager
Slant Magazine
The even-handed film is sympathetic to the Cuban revolution in its initial stages, then slowly swings around to reveal the ‘skeleton of a dream’ that the society has become.
- Deborah Young
Variety
Although the film fails to reveal anything new about the country’s current crisis or the Cuban diaspora, it’s a bittersweet tribute to what could have been.
- Raven Snook
Time Out
For those who’ve never seen Cuba up close, The Sugar Curtain offers an astonishing glimpse of the culture, one that’s devoid of both the glamor and the manipulations of mainstream media.
- Jerry Portwood
New York Press
The Camden 28
Directed: Anthony Giacchino
Trailer: Quicktime
Documentary about 28 people in 1971 that broke into a Camden, NJ government office to steal and burn draft records to protest the Vietnam War.
RT Score: 86%
Times have changed, but many of the questions remain the same: How far would you go to stop a war you felt was unjust? Would you break the law if you felt that law to be by nature unlawful?
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
A vivid and impassioned chronicle of unwavering moral courage under extreme duress.
- Timothy Knight
Reel.com
Superlative documentary about 28 members of the Catholic left who defied the war machine in 1971–with plenty of relevance to the contemporary struggle to end the war in Iraq.
- Louis Proyect
rec.arts.movies.reviews
In revisiting the oppressive measures employed by the FBI during that era, the viewer is treated to a welcome message about the right, if not the duty, to challenge authority, especially in the face of corruption, intransigence and utter arrogance.
- Kam Williams
WBAI Web Radio
[Giacchino's] sympathy for his subjects, their cause and the tradition of Christian pacifism is evident yet doesn’t cloud the storytelling as he defies viewers not to stand in admiration and ask tough questions of themselves.
- John P. McCarthy
Boxoffice Magazine
Laura Smiles
Directed: Jason Ruscio
Starring: Petra Wright, Mark Derwin
Trailer: Windows Media, Real Player
A suburban housewife that has the seemingly perfect life, but is truly bored and unhappy.
RT Score: 57%
Unlike many filmmakers who try to stake out the gray area between mundane reality and sleazy surreality, Ruscio maintains a successful balance throughout and gracefully brings the two together in a delicately ambiguous final scene.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
The movie’s muddy, overexposed look is tough on the eyes, but its unrelentingly bleak take on the land of supermarkets and car dealerships is not without its share of dark humor, and it thankfully eschews easy answers.
- Joshua Land
Time Out
Part domestic drama, part thriller, Laura Smiles is so ambitious that its ultimate failure is more depressing than anything in its dark script.
- Matt Zoller Seitz
New York Times
Sharp dialogue, idiosyncratic characters and a wickedly brilliant structure that subtly derails expectation make Laura Smiles a rarity among mellers.
- Ronnie Scheib
Variety
It’s an interesting profile in self-destruction until the script becomes unhinged itself and has Laura doing things that are not so much outrageous as hilariously stupid.
- Jami Bernard
New York Daily News
Fat Girls
Directed: Ash Christian
Starring: Jonathan Caouette, Ash Christian
Trailer: Windows Media, Quicktime
A teenage boy feels that he is a fat girl trapped in a boy’s body.
RT Score: 100%
Plays with the conventions of the teen genre while making the most of its low-budget indie roots
- Rich Cline
Shadows on the Wall
Jokes are hit-and-miss, but they splat target often enough to make this a guilty pleasure that homophile fans of both Napoleon Dynamite and American Pie might enjoy.
- Dennis Harvey
Variety
