Movie Grid, Good to Bad
Coming Soon
Movie Our Take Other Takes
Twilight
Trailer . IMDB
Director Catherine Hardwicke sees the humor in the portrayal, and her whiffs of wit carry a long, slow setup. But someday a filmmaker will figure out how to shoot intelligence as seductively as a good smoldering look between pretty teens. Until then, we remain at the cusp of darkness.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
Edward has the ability to move as swiftly as Superman. Like him he can stop a runaway pickup with one arm. He rescues Bella twice that I remember, maybe because he truly loves her, maybe because he's saving her for later. She has questions. "How did you appear out of nowhere and stop that truck?" Well might she ask. When he finally explains that he is a vampire, he goes up from 8 to 10 on her Erotometer. Why do girls always prefer the distant, aloof, handsome, dangerous dudes instead of cheerful chaps like me?
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
Adding:
Twilight will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this.
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
In essence, what we have here is a laughable, sex-free gothic tweener variation of those dime-store page-turners featuring Fabio on their cover. "Your mood swings are giving me whiplash," Bella tells Edward in response to his mixed signals, hokum to which Edward, whose supposed hunkiness is amplified by his torment over wanting to eat the one he loves, counters with the noble platitude, "If you were smart, you'd stay away from me." Prospective non-teen female viewers should heed this warning with extreme prejudice, lest they be subjected to a story of hysterical nonsensicality.
Nick Schager
Slant Magazine
This brand of fervid romance packed 'em in for the first 60 years of feature films, then went nearly extinct, replaced by the young-male fetishes of space toys and body-function humor.
Richard Corliss
Time
New Releases
Movie Our Take Other Takes
JCVD
Trailer . IMDB
Unfortunately, JCVD is at its core an action movie, even though it uses Jean-Claude Van Damme's persona — from his movies and from what we imagine to be his real life — to layer a melancholy, humanizing, but eventually sidelined satire on top of it.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
While the filmmakers — and the star himself — gamely make fun of this legacy of mediocrity, they cannot quite escape it. This may well be the most memorable Jean-Claude Van Damme movie ever, but I’m afraid that’s not saying much.
A.O. Scott
New York Times
That dynamite opening sequence, and the two or three scenes that follow, promise something like Van Damme's 8 1/2, a freeform journey into the star's cult of personality and the inevitable bleed between his screen persona and his real life. But the excitement gradually diminishes when the robbery, which initially seems like a pit-stop, instead becomes a permanent stall-out.
Scott Tobias
Onion AV Club
Let's noodle
on this:
[W]here JCVD scores, transcends itself (and himself) and becomes something fairly sui generis, is in Van Damme's fourth-wall-breaking monologue. Suddenly levitating out of the diegetic heist, over the top of the set and into the light, Van Damme looks into the camera and delivers what can only be described as a confession, if not a last testament.
Michael Sicinski
The Academic Hack
But now some
probabilities
about a man's
inner banality:
What's more, anything that's really inside this man, when stripped of all accoutrements of fiction, will [most] likely be so laughably banal that we'd be embarrassed to share that moment.
Michael Sicinski
The Academic Hack
[I]t's really just a mediocre hostage drama with a few wan "meta" musings clumsily grafted on. Kickass opening shot is everything you've heard, but I nearly nodded off during Van Damme's allegedly mindblowing direct-to-camera monologue, which merely confirms him as a terrible actor.
Mike D'Angelo
The Man Who Viewed Too Much
It’s the most amazing piece of acting I’ve ever seen by a martial artist.
David Edelstein
New York Magazine
Slumdog Millionaire
Trailer . IMDB
Slumdog feels like a Westerner’s superficial version of India, as the ludicrous script trots out cliche after cliche. The Taj Mahal? Check. Gritty slum teeming with street children on huge trash heaps? Check.
J. Robert Parks
Daily Plastic
A goofy picaresque to rival Forrest Gump, Slumdog Millionaire has a similar power to please, shell-gaming the audience into emotionally investing in and celebrating its protagonist's dumb romanticism.
Eric Hynes
Reverse Shot
A gaudy, gorgeous rush of color, sound and motion, Slumdog Millionaire, the latest from the British shape-shifter Danny Boyle, doesn’t travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next.
Manohla Dargis
New York Times
And you'd
think that...
By all rights the texture of Jamal’s life should have been brutally coarsened by tragedy and poverty by the time he makes a grab for the television jackpot. But because Slumdog Millionaire is self-consciously (perhaps commercially) framed as a contemporary fairy tale cum love story, or because Mr. Boyle leans toward the sanguine, this proves to be one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable.
Manohla Dargis
New York Times
I'm being generous here and wondering if it was so jarring to me because I'm a Bombay native. The linguistic inconsistency was biting because nine year-old slum kids do not speak English.
Anindita Ghose
aninditaghose.blogspot.com
Frankly, I don’t trust Boyle; I feel the need to defend myself against a director for whom brutality and slickness are so inextricable. But he’s brilliant at what he does, at the kind of hyperkinetic, every-shot-a-grabber filmmaking that many attempt and few bring off.
David Edelstein
The Projectionist
... an almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction — and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.
Scott Foundas
Village Voice
Quantum of Solace
Trailer . IMDB
Quantum of Solace is a slog. It's not Daniel Craig's fault nor Mathieu Amalric's, one of the more intriguing Bond villains. But a handful of overwrought action sequences served up like minced celluloid can't fly this damp canvas of a plot.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
[I]f Casino Royale marked a return to greatness for the Bond franchise, Quantum of Solace represents a return to adequacy.
James Rocchi
Cinematical
But whereas Royale took Bond seriously, Solace perhaps takes Bond too seriously.... With the way the movie refuses to give its hero even a moment of comfort or relief (also known as — that's right! — solace), it's almost like Forster is punishing Bond (and maybe audiences who enjoy Bond films) for all those years of frivolous spy work.
Craig D. Lindsey
News & Observer
Interestingly enough the 2nd unit director (who is Dan Bradley who did the Bourne movies) if anything, is the auteur of this film.... [Marc Forster] can't bring together the character and the action so what the film keeps doing is flipping back into explosive action because it can't do anything else.
Mark Kermode
BBC 5 Live
Most fans
don't go
quite this
far:
Forget all the lukewarm reviews you've already read and the British press' collective whining over the fact that this Bond's got too much action, because Quantum of Solace is the finest installment in the storied franchise's 22-film history.... In fact, it's the perfect Bond film.
James Jung
Premiere
A string
of great
observations:
How fascinating is it that 2008’s two most inconsolable, borderline psychotic movie heroes are Batman and James Bond?
Sean Burns
Philadelphia Weekly
+
Jeffrey Wright returns as CIA sidekick Felix Leiter, but it’s also a canny reprisal of his Colin Powell performance in Oliver Stone’s W., choking back bile at U.S. policies he can barely stomach.
Sean Burns
Philadelphia Weekly
+
Quantum doesn’t always feel very much like a Bond picture, sacrificing the series’ typical alpha-male fantasies for something a bit grittier and more unhinged. (One vicious homage to Goldfinger aside, most of the allusions are to Mike Hodges’ nasty 1971 noir, Get Carter.)
Sean Burns
Philadelphia Weekly
+
Casino Royale (2006) is widely credited with bringing the Bond franchise back to basics, which is only partially true. Directed by Martin Campbell, the film slyly offered all the conventional pleasures of a James Bond adventure — exotic locations, hot babes, high fashion, luxury toys and outrageous action — but with an emphasis on emotion and character development... Quantum of Solace is more ambitious and less successful
Sean Burns
Philadelphia Weekly
Role Models
Trailer . IMDB
Despite a likable cast, Role Models follows an increasingly stale formula of sweet raunch. One performer who consistently generates laughs is Jane Lynch whose cliché-ridden boasts reach a form of pop-psych poetry; they'd be funny even if they weren't punctuated by Rudd's reactions.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
School of
Mock:
In Role Models, [writer-director David] Wain buys into the sturdy commercial formulas he's spent his career mocking, but the results are so winning that they threaten to give selling out a good name.
Nathan Rabin
Onion AV Club
... Role Models mocks what it is and is what it mocks — you're laughing at the way the movie flips all the traditional moments in pseudo-parental comedic dramas like About a Boy and Big Daddy, but it also manages, in its specific, skewed way, to deliver those moments, too. Role Models is foul-mouthed, warm-hearted, brilliantly stupid ... and the best comedy of the year.
James Rocchi
Redblog
Paul Rudd
as Keaton?
Consistently hilarious, right down to the dorkiest third act ever, Role Models serves as the best vehicle yet for Rudd’s considerable comedic chops. Lording miserably over the procession of idiots and freaks with a mix of toxic derision and existential dread, he does more with a blank stare than almost anyone since Buster Keaton...
Matt Prigge
Philadelphia Weekly
[T]he best parts of the movie are the ones in which the actors aren't working at all to be outrageous. Rudd, in particular, is lots of fun when he puts his almost mystically deadpan line delivery to work.
Stephanie Zacharek
Salon.com
Gayle, who won’t shut up about her addiction and recovery, inspires a zany performance from [Jane] Lynch that transcends her turn as Mr. Rudd’s ever-lustful boss in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. With the ferocity of a drill instructor and the boundless confidence of a self-help guru who combines psychobabble clichés with embarrassingly explicit confessions, Ms. Lynch’s Gayle redeems the movie from utter banality.
Stephen Holden
New York Times
In Theaters
Movie Our Take Other Takes
Rachel Getting Married
Trailer . IMDB
The magic belongs in part to Demme's bold structure and in part to Anne Hathaway's fierce and quivering performance. When her face draws tight with tears, I sink an inch into my seat.
Robert Davis
Paste Magazine
Bringing together an African-American musician family and a white professional household, the film is perhaps a little too meticulous about making sure every race is represented ... but the genuine good feelings that flow between the guests seem mostly unforced and, serving as a corrective to the affected miserabilism promised by the film's opening sequences, are never unwelcome.
Andrew Schenker
Slant Magazine
Showing depths she's never come close to suggesting before, Anne Hathaway plays an addict newly sprung from rehab and headed to suburban Connecticut for sister Rosemarie DeWitt's wedding weekend.... Based on that description, Rachel Getting Married sounds like a joyless dirge, but it's actually far from it, and a lot of that is owed to the way Demme harnesses the genuine love and good feeling that buoys the occasion.
Scott Tobias
Onion AV Club
Demme is a genial filmmaker, light on his feet, forever taken aback — even embarrassed — by the way in which his stories drift toward pain.... [I]t’s there in the mood swings of Rachel Getting Married — a minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.
Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
The rules say that critics don't discuss movies after screenings. After I saw Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married for the second time, however, a friend asked: "Wouldn't you love to attend a wedding like that?" In a way, I felt I had. Yes, I began to feel absorbed in the experience. A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
Dissents?
... fatuous.... Constantly teetering on the brink of hysteria and frequently tipping over into it...
Scott Foundas
Village Voice
Anne Hathaway's complicated performance buys Rachel Getting Married a lot of indulgence. Her normally pristine look is roughed up, and her voice — low and flat — becomes a distinct vehicle for conveying cynicism, disappointment and self-disgust. At 25, Hathaway's apprenticeship is over and soon she'll be making much better movies than this one.
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
Is it a
critique
of bobos?
[T]o make the argument that the film’s melting pot was somehow inauthentic, and/or tacked on by Demme to reflect his own sensibilities rather than those of his characters, was to fundamentally misunderstand the film.
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog
Even if it were no good as a family-relationship drama, though it is, it REALLY is … Rachel Getting Married works as a completely-unintentional parody of Connecticut Upper-Crust Secular Multicultural Awareness.
Victor Morton
Rightwing Film Geek
Ballast
Trailer . IMDB
There's great pleasure in watching characters solve their problems by standing on them like ballast, and there's great pleasure in discovering a new filmmaker who's more interested in watching the rise than the fall.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
The camera’s discretion renders its work almost invisible.... That neither Smith, Riggs, nor Ross had ever before been in front of a camera suggests that Hammer, whose first feature film this is, has an immense talent for casting and directing actors.... Ballast is a highly sophisticated film, but moment by moment it is such an organic expression of the Delta and the people who live there that it feels made up on the spot.
Amy Taubin
Artforum
But these particulars aren’t quite so important as the film’s mood and its vast collection of stolen moments... This gives Ballast the feeling of having been composed with the camera, not the pen.... [However] once Ballast has gotten its fill of wallowing in the barren, unforgiving landscape and the misery of its characters, things take a turn for the slightly more conventional.
Matt Prigge
Philadelphia Weekly
Opens
with arty
longueurs?
It's strong, and quietly moving material. My colleague Howard believes that what I call the arty longueurs of the first half to be essential, that the process of the film finding its own voice is an essential part of what it's about. I'm not so sure.
Glenn Kenny
In the Company of Glenn
Hammer has a nice eye, and his premise develops engagingly in the final half hour, as he raises provocative questions about whether one man can truly step in for another. But it takes the poignancy of the final scenes to redeem what comes before.
Noel Murray
Onion AV Club
Momma's Man
Trailer . IMDB
After a summer full of movies that celebrate the arrested development of their male characters, that titter and wink while grown men behave like teenagers, Momma's Man is a welcome palette cleanser.
Robert Davis
Paste Magazine
Momma's Man, directed by Azazel Jacobs from his own screenplay, is one of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.
J. Hoberman
Village Voice
Disclosure:
Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, "Mr. Baby," I've known his parents for nearly 40 years, going back to my undergraduate days at the State University of Binghamton, where Ken Jacobs impressed me as possibly the most brilliant film teacher in the world.
J. Hoberman
Village Voice
Thomas Wolfe's immortal words about the impossibility of homecomings loom large over Momma's Man, writer-director Azazel Jacobs' wryly comic, sometimes heartbreaking and altogether original film...
Scott Foundas
Variety
Good Lord! Didn't Randy know you can't go home again?
Thomas Wolfe
You Can't Go
Home Again
If nothing else, Jacobs has the set of a lifetime in his folks' cluttered apartment, a cavernous space subdivided into a labyrinth of shelves, mirrors, and tchotchkes. Depending on where Jacobs places the camera, the apartment looks like an entirely different place.
Noel Murray
Onion AV Club
[B]uried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth.
Michael Koresky
Reverse Shot
There may be an autobiographical slant to this dynamic, but to harp on the similarities between the man calling the shots behind the camera and the melancholic trying to break free in front of it would miss the point. Like any artist, Mr. Jacobs has shaken down life for what it can give him. That life includes his parents, who belong to a generation of Manhattan artists who have become as exotic as the last of the Mohicans.
Manohla Dargis
New York Times
W.
Trailer . IMDB
Stone gives us key moments of hazing and failure, trial by fire and trial by father, and in the end arrives at a tremendous void. Maybe that's his point, but such a conclusion works better as a sendup of biopics than a dissection of the thought processes that led to a lengthy and expensive war.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
It is a questionable prospect to largely attribute the motivations of a president’s career, and especially the complex series of events leading to the Iraq war, to a man’s lifelong rivalry with his father, as Stone dares to do in W. Nonetheless, this thesis is consistent with Stone’s career-long obsession with the psychological traumas inflicted by fathers and other patriarchal figures (the military, the government) on their children.
Kevin B. Lee
Moving Image Source
Despite superficial ties to past work, however, his latest barely deserves mention in the same breath as JFK and Nixon, two monumental narrative and aesthetic achievements whose intricately constructed psychoanalytic investigations of Americans and America are here replaced by caricatures and Oedipal issues even more facile than those proffered by Alexander.
Nick Schager
Slant Magazine
Is W. a serious drama, or a nightmare comedy of power, privilege and parental friction played out on the global stage? I lean towards the latter, even if Stone plays his cards relatively close to the vest.... What started as parody and comedy builds to a haunting final moment thanks to Stone, Weiser and Brolin, and in W.'s final seconds it is not just George W. Bush who's waiting for the ball to drop, it is all of us.
James Rocchi
Cinematical
Oliver Stone’s sincere, willfully myopic portrait of our sitting president is a maddening experience that for many will be akin, on the what’s-the-point scale, to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake.
Nicolas Rapold
The L Magazine
Other than an overwrought Oedipal relationship between George W. Bush and his father, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser don't have a strong, coherent take on the man.... Always a "big picture" kind of guy, Stone paddles down the giant river of Bush's life without exploring any of the tributaries; he passes by two or three dozen better movies along the way.
Scott Tobias
Onion AV Club
I've Loved You So Long
Trailer . IMDB
Kristen Scott Thomas gives a fine performance as a woman just out of prison, but the entire movie is a long, slow reveal [that] hardly feels worth the elongated, angst-anchored trip.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
This kind of narrative is familiar enough, and so are the risks of sentimental talk-show piety associated with it. Luckily, Ms. Scott Thomas’s furious honesty rules out easy, unearned redemption, as does the film’s tough-minded resistance to the temptations of melodrama.... A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are.
A.O. Scott
New York Times
Uncompromising and full of necessary enigma, Thomas’ performance makes us feel what it might be like to live out the rest of your life after you have killed your own child. So it’s a pity that, before too long, the movie starts paying out broad hints to prepare us for the warming trend and special pleading that will let both its antiheroine and its audience off the hook.
Ella Taylor
L.A. Weekly
Two from
the U.K.
... there is too much inert time in which to anticipate the plot’s engineering. Did [French novelist Philippe] Claudel mislay his debut director’s starting manual? Isolated actions, without the life-support of a novelist’s prose, must be given a new form of life for the screen. You cannot just label characters and send them into battle. We need less indicating and more innigkeit.
Nigel Andrews
Financial Times
Scott Thomas's performance, easily the best of her career, countermands any such qualms: the centre of a deeply involving, beautifully acted and expertly constructed human drama by and for grown-ups.
Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Trailer . IMDB
The scenes with just the title characters are pretty wonderful, as they slowly come to realize they like each other. The problem is the movie keeps tearing us away from our protagonists and focusing on exes or other friends who can't match Nick and Norah in the personality department.
J. Robert Parks
Daily Plastic
As thin as an iPod Nano, as full of adolescent self-display as a Facebook page, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist strives to capture, in meticulous detail, what it's like to be young right now.
A.O. Scott
New York Times
Imagining
younger:
The sort of date movie I would've liked when I was 16 or 17, if only because the beanpole-geek-so-uncool-he's-cool protagonist, played by the deceptively skillful Michael Cera, secures for himself a dream of a romantic partner, played by the equally disarming Kat Dennings.
Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune
And older:
Nick and Norah plays like something crafted in a lab by 54-year-old hucksters trying to sell shit to the kids under the cheerless guise of "alternative." The only thing it's an alternative to? Good.
Robert Wilonsky
Village Voice
Nick and Norah engage in a very different kind of banter, and in fact if there's a single reason to see the film, it's Cera and Dennings' chemistry, which stems less from verbal play than from the counterpoint of her sulky, Cleopatra-eyed scowl to his bemused, wide-eyed smirk.
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog
Religulous
Trailer . IMDB
The ironic thing is that Maher sets himself up as an intellectual investigating the claims of religion. But he's just mimicking the kind of manipulation and obfuscation that TV preachers have been utilizing for decades.
J. Robert Parks
Daily Plastic
Comedian Bill Maher brings his disarmingly direct humor to the topic of religion in Religulous. The results are often as surprising as they are funny.
Michael Sragow
Baltimore Sun
No. Neither,
actually.
About half of the movie works in its snide, hit-and-run way. The other half throws more and more darts at the same balloon, long after it pops.
Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune
Getting
warmer.
There's probably a better movie in the raw footage of these conversations than in the flatteringly edited final product, which also commits the unpardonable sin of not being especially funny. That Maher often seems as self-righteous as his foils and director Larry Charles (Borat) gooses the gags with lame sound effects doesn't help.
Keith Phipps
Onion AV Club
Bingo.
Any serious theologian from the mainstream Christian or Jewish traditions would have eaten his lunch for him, and that's why we don't see anybody like that in this film for more than a second or two.
Andrew O'Hehir
Salon.com
Changeling
Trailer . IMDB
 
Jolie doesn't perform in Changeling; she resolutely presents herself to the audience for admiration. The main attraction in Eastwood's two-fisted snake-pit weepie is the spectacle of Jolie's steely self-possessed suffering.
J. Hoberman
Village Voice
[Her son] is lit to resemble the Antichrist Damien in The Omen.... The way Eastwood shoves Jolie’s suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: “And the Oscar will go to …?”
David Edelstein
New York Magazine
Single mom Angelina Jolie is a switchboard supervisor who glides around the telephone company on rollerskates. It’s adorable, but her signature smoky eyes and blood red lips mean she’s probably moonlighting as either a tramp or a clown.
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog
Rules
of the
game:
We drink every time Angelina hysterically proclaims, “He’s not my son!” We get very drunk, and this may be why we can’t figure out why Clint Eastwood made a cheap-looking Lifetime movie.... Just when the drinking game is starting to get really out of control, there’s a twist so shocking that it’s punctuated by two inches of ash falling off a policeman’s cigarette … in slow motion.
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog
Changeling maintains Eastwood's creative streak. It might not be as exalted as Million Dollar Baby, but there are things about it that set it apart and make it one of the most enjoyable of his recent films.... There's just something satisfying about seeing a movie so well made.
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
... the main thing wrong with Clint Eastwood’s view of evil in this movie is how childish it seems. I don’t care if he’s 78 and apparently has some fixation about innocent boys abducted by sex maniacs; even if the plot periodically suggests a remake of Mystic River, the cackling villains belong in a Hopalong Cassidy western ...
Jonathan Rosenbaum
JonathanRosenbaum.com
Miracle at St. Anna
Trailer . IMDB
There's a lot that doesn't make sense in Miracle at St. Anna, but there's a lot to appreciate, too.... With all the film's flaws (the poorly constructed battle sequences are another), I would've grudgingly admired Lee's latest if not for a risible frame story.
J. Robert Parks
Daily Plastic
The scenes I complain about are evidence of Lee's stature as an artist. In a time of studios and many filmmakers who play it safe and right down the middle, Lee has a vision and sticks to it. When you see one of his films, you're seeing one of his films. Miracle at St. Anna contains richness, anger, history, sentiment, fantasy, reality, violence and life. Maybe too much. Better than too little.
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
His heart is really in defacing American iconography, as when the black soldiers recall a Norman Rockwell-style diner back home and the owner's refusing to serve them — even though a table was occupied by German prisoners. When the flashback ends, the men stare balefully into the camera. The seconds crawl: What are they glaring at? Us? It turns out to be some racist posters, but I can't help thinking we've also been accused.
David Edelstein
New York Magazine
The impulse here is to say something about the nobility of this movie's intent or to note that Spike Lee is one of our best filmmakers. But the first and most honest thing to say about Miracle at St. Anna is that it's an awful mess.
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Trailer . IMDB
Smith's sweetness surprises critics who are busy mistaking his crassness for wit or subversion.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
Sweetly
raunchy.
Again.
Smith’s reliance on the same old reference-heavy raunch is a classic case of overcompensating; he’s a Jersey loser-jock embarrassed by his sentimental streak. He might crash cars into churches but, beneath that superficial veneer of adolescent bawdiness, he’s a sappy, conservative filmmaker in a juvenile state of denial.
Henry Stewart
The L Magazine
Mr. Smith has been tinkering with the dirty-mind/soft-heart combination for quite some time, forming a link of sorts between the humanist sexual anarchy of John Waters and the smutty Victorianism of Judd Apatow.
A.O. Scott
New York Times
The Film
Within /
Without
[Smith] appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.
Michael Sragow
Baltimore Sun
It's really dumb, even though it seems to consider itself quite bright.... [It's] a fine idea for the right filmmaker, and so is the pairing of Rogen and Banks. Still, Kevin Smith slathers his patented slob aesthetic indiscriminately. Star Whores, the porn movie within the movie is predictably crude and nonsensical, but so is the movie that surrounds it.
Joe Morgenstern
Wall Street Journal
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a prime example of what happens when a filmmaker creates a movie based solely on a premise without thinking about plot or plausibility or personality.... For better examples of the kind of raunchy comedy Smith's trying to make here, older teens will hopefully understand how both the craft and the comedy are superior in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
James Rocchi
Common Sense
but
... it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up.
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog
Kevin Smith’s career is one of the mysteries of American film culture. He’s eight movies into his career — eight! — and he has shown zero progress.... Unabashedly riding the Judd Apatow wave, Smith’s latest is this month’s high-concept raunchfest-with-a-heart-of-gold — a genre that’s had a good run but like a limping thoroughbred now needs to be put out of its misery.
Elbert Ventura
Reverse Shot
Still Playing