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16 Blocks (2006) |
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"It's like those cartoon chase sequences where the scrolling background is on a loop. Here, the characters are on a loop, and the backgrounds change." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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A Scanner Darkly (2006) |
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"As the drugs keep cranking the gears of suspicion, seducing them down syllogistic corridors of absurd reasoning, you can feel them out-thinking their own paranoia to the brink of insanity." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Akeelah and the Bee (2006) |
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"It had the potential... to be great had it avoided running lockstep with the structure of lesser films." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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American Dreamz (2006) |
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"It figures... that Universal Pictures would see fit to inject multiple jabs at the world of television while unable to re-examine its own hubris." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Brick (2006) |
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" I felt like I was watching a bad film school rehash of Godard in the most contrived manner. But somewhere along the way, this flagrantly self-affected and at times dementedly jocular piece of art-house trash earned my respect." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Cars (2006) |
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"...scenes involving the colorful townspeople, capitalizing largely on Paul Newman's skill at playing wise yet ostensibly cantankerous old men, are repeatedly interrupted by long stretches of boring homages to the world of celebrity..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Clerks II (2006) |
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"The turning point is Dante's serious conversation with Becky about his future plans. From there, the movie finds its narrative center and becomes a real story about real people and, suddenly, you find you even care about Randal." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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CSA: The Confederate States of America (2006) |
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"Here, technique interferes with the film's argument because it's attempting to satirize a history that didn't occur." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Da Vinci Code (2006) |
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"...the real secret to "The Da Vinci Code" is that there is no secret." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2006) |
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"Because Chappelle's really digging into who people are... he has the capacity to adeptly grasp such perennial wellsprings of humor as class conflict to a degree unparalleled by modern entertainers..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Devil Wears Prada (2006) |
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"...a story that makes studio executives proud, in which the end lesson is that Stockholm Syndrome is a healthy outlook on life for a career gal." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Failure to Launch (2006) |
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"...logic be damned if this film needs an artificial catharsis to keep audiences from falling asleep." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Find Me Guilty (2006) |
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"We could have done just as well to watch the proceedings on Court TV -- free, as it were, to flip channels or get up for a snack and skip the parts that disinterest us, rather than be held hostage by 125 minutes of drive-by clichés." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Hard Candy (2005) |
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"If Slade's intent is so clever, then why is the film so stupid as to hamfist a two-hour anti-pedophilia PSA down the throats of an entire culture that, by and large, already agrees with the premise...?" | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Hills Have Eyes (2006) |
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"To describe this film as "pornographically violent" is an affront to pornography." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) |
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"...the film doesn't try to be too clever and hip for the kids, as have many animated movies of late in the endless attempt to sell attitude to credit-card wielding adults at the box office." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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An Inconvenient Truth (2006) |
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"...the fundamental obstacle to making the average human aware and concerned about the ecology is a matter of comprehending scale--a problem which the formerly robotic Democrat tackles rather elegantly." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Inside Man (2006) |
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"This isn't the kind of story that can really occupy the full length of a feature film, unless of course you're fooled into believing something more actually happened." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Just My Luck (2006) |
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"Lohan reads more like oak than Marilyn Monroe on her most inebriated day." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Keeping Up With The Steins (2006) |
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"...the director treats this movie much in the same way he treats the religion--an endless series of blindly-adhered liturgies, the deeper history and meaning of which is never fully contemplated." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Lake House (2006) |
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"It's odd, but now I can say I've seen a movie which makes the timing of character interaction in the "Star Wars" prequels look fantastic." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Libertine (2005) |
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"Stumble away from this film as quickly as possible." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Mission: Impossible III (2006) |
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"The movie leaves you no sense of reward for having paid attention and everything might as well have been one large dream sequence." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Neil Young - Heart of Gold (2006) |
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"While his lyrics aren't complicated, both the words and the delivery reflect years of pain and anguish, particularly in seeing time pass, friends come and go." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Over the Hedge (2006) |
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"Where it lacks ingenuity and cohesive storytelling, it satiates with manic energy, oddball observation and witty humor..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) |
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"It's as if seven Vice Presidents of Production sat in a boardroom for three days straight, without food or water, and finally their collective genius, poring over reams of test screening data, resoundingly declared with one voice, "WE NEED MORE RUM JOKES" | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Poseidon (2006) |
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"It's a ship. It sinks. People die. Sound familiar?" | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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A Prairie Home Companion (2006) |
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"...the film is so busy coddling itself in colloquial humor and Keillor's conjured up diatribes that, from one Minnesotan to you, isn't funny in it's own right. The humor depends largely on whether or not you've been a fan of the original show." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Promise (2005) |
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"While the visuals are often quite beautiful, the film is structurally identical to most other popular Chinese epics which, in my mind, have become the East Asian equivalent of Bollywood Cinema -- trash that looks like art to the average viewer." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Running Scared (2006) |
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"There's something films like this reflect in our nature... that we seem to delight in propped up monsters that give the protagonist an excuse to behave like one." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Scary Movie 4 (2006) |
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"The film quickly abandons biting sarcasm in favor of gumming you to a sloppy, slow death." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Sentinel (2006) |
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"Michael Douglas, now 61, needs to push whatever sex appeal it is his booking agents (and the public) think he possesses. I don't care, and neither should you." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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The Shaggy Dog (2006) |
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"It's an underestimation of the intelligence of your average eight year old to believe his or her rapt attention can be held for long by a film like this." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) |
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"...to shorten the discussions between Mohr and Scholl would have been to miss the point. She makes her lasting impression on Mohr, and us, not by violence, or cacophony, but by the persistence, patience and persuasiveness of her intellectual discourse..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Stick It (2006) |
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"The film attempts, and fails, to move in directions dramatically that are just beyond the reach of the director, Jessica Bendinger, who wrote the nearly identical "Bring It On."" | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Superman Returns (2006) |
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"Routh isn't given much else to do except act as a Flying Plot Device... Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane is a study in the art of still life." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Take the Lead (2006) |
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"...it goes through it's checklist, epitomized in 80's inspirational student-triumphs-over-socioeconomic-pseudoreality films like "Lean on Me" and its lesser-known predecessor "Stand and Deliver"..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Thank You For Smoking (2006) |
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"It's not quite as dark a satire as "Lord of War," and its protagonist's jolly attitude, resembling (frighteningly) a more rational sort of Timothy Treadwell, does distract one... But... the movie is never in danger of being crushed by it's own weight." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006) |
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"...we see around and behind and underneath the stage, so to speak -- peering into the intertwined lives of the people who are caught up in the maelstrom of an untenable subject for film adaptation." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Tsotsi (2006) |
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"Without cheap deceptions, clever editing, plot conveniences or overt exposition, the film pulls you in and keeps you there on the merit of the story's substance." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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United 93 (2006) |
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"it's a respectable extrapolation that doesn't paint the terrorists as villains or the passengers as heroes. The movie doesn't need to." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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V For Vendetta (2005) |
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"They're working within a style that depends on exaggeration, sure -- I get that. However, aside from lacking the granularity that would make V a more intriguing and complex figure, he is by even his own admission little more than a reaction." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Water (2006) |
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"...you're an observer to a real dialogue and not merely a viewer in an audience watching a scripted drama and plot unfold." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Water (2006) |
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"What's interesting is the difference between what's in your traditions versus what's in your conscience. Between the Bhagavad-Gita and the Laws of Manu (the traditional basis for the practice of widows becoming Sanyasis), a thousand years have passed. It" | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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Wordplay (2006) |
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"So many aspects of our lives are mundane that just having some sort of passion... means that people are taking time to engage themselves in more than merely subsistence. That demonstrates that there is culture left in the world..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) |
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"This isn't so much a movie as it is a solicitation to lower one's expectations..." | |
Rubin Safaya | |
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