A Knight's Tale (2001) All Critics (155) | Top Critics (39) | Fresh (85) | Rotten (61) | DVD (37) Whipping along at speed, with elaborate camera movements and rousing speeches, this knows how to engage a crowd.
It's corny, of course, but a guilty pleasure: romantic, diverting, with mildly amusing modern gags. Instead of pulling young audiences imaginatively back into the past, A Knight's Tale cheapens the process by demonstrating that there's no essential difference between then and now. The movie promises to rock you, and much of the time it does. The result is half Python, half Ivanhoe -- and not as much fun as either. You might find yourself smiling and laughing all the way through it. Essentially, it's a screenful of pseudo-medieval popcorn that hits a high enough level of goofy fun to transcend a pretty blatant marketing strategy aimed at the MTV demographic. May 14, 2001 Slightly edgy medieval tale with rock music.
Heath Ledger. Public Enemies. All Critics (263) | Top Critics (47) | Fresh (178) | Rotten (85) | DVD (9) I do think this is a film worth seeing, so obviously, I say see it.
Some strong performances, but I expected more from this great director and stellar cast. If John Dillinger had not existed... Michael Mann would have had to invent him. It's a fascinating moment in history, and Mann captures the cars, the guns and the buildings with painstaking, immersive authenticity. It tills the old ground, albeit with new-style star power and Mann's signature cinematic flourishes. Our connections with Public Enemies remain abstract. A quiet, thoughful, almost dreamy meditation on violence, on work, on love and on death. On a sweltering July day in 1934, John Dillinger went to the movies and ended up dead. It's looking more and more like Michael Mann will never be able to recapture that Heat hotness. Instead of glamorizing the early 20th century thug life, it humanizes it a little too much. Christian Bale. Johnny Depp. Braveheart (1995) All Critics (64) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (50) | Rotten (14) | DVD (41) As the star of the new, epic-scaled Braveheart, Gibson celebrates yet another man of selfless valor.
And as its director, he displays some daring of his own. A lavish, entertaining spectacle full of manly men, dastardly villains, rousing battles and women who easily see Mel's hero potential through all that messy hair. In addition to staging battle scenes well, Gibson also manages to recreate the filth and mood of 700 years ago. Mel Gibson throws his whole heart into a role. Braveheart has a gut-wrenching, bone-breaking, sword-thwacking verve. Many movies deal with battlefield heroics. The screenplay says repeatedly that thinking is more important than fighting, yet problems are always met with muscle-power in the movie, which wallows in violence and vengeance every chance it gets. Braveheart is a stouthearted, old-fashioned hero movie in which honorable Scottish underdogs fight nasty British nobles.
Sophie Marceau. Mel Gibson. Brendan Gleeson. The Hurt Locker (2008) All Critics (225) | Top Critics (45) | Fresh (219) | Rotten (6) | DVD (17) Bigelow's film combines an expert management of tension with a sensitive and journalistic attention to detail: she has one eye on the truth and the other on the multiplex.
One of the best movies of the year, with a star-making performance from Jeremy Renner. Like every war before it, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has generated its share of movies. But The Hurt Locker is the first of them that can properly be called a masterpiece. The question isn't how do you live with the buzz of looming death; it's how do you live without it? Like her protagonist, Bigelow is both a meticulous technician and a ballsy showoff. The Hurt Locker is at once an unforgettable war film and a brilliant character study.
If you have a chance to see it, you shouldn't hesitate to do so. Not only the best film made so far about the war in Iraq, but also one of the best thrillers of the year. The Hurt Locker is horrifying. Jeremy Renner. The Town (2010) All Critics (213) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (200) | Rotten (13) | DVD (2) Affleck, often underrated as an actor, fits effortlessly into this milieu.
Feels all but indistinguishable from the thousands of similar films that have blazed a trail before it. As a director, Affleck now has two home runs in two at-bats. This is one of the best movies of the year. An autopsy for The Town would list multiple causes of death. Jeremy Renner. Ben Affleck. The Dark Knight (2008) All Critics (288) | Top Critics (51) | Fresh (270) | Rotten (18) | DVD (28) An exceptionally smart, brooding picture with some terrific performances.
The Dark Knight is a film that's fantastic on the action front, seeds its acrobatics in its own reality, and always feels relevant even when its ideas are drowned out by clatter. Christopher Nolan is much, much smarter than your average filmmaker. The symbiosis of good and evil is the film's philosophical core, and images of duality and cloaked identity are strewn through it like shards from a fun house mirror. Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note. The film is so relentlessly bleak that, paradoxically, its blackness is not given its full due. Were films judged entirely by the emotive impact of their opening and closing images, The Dark Knight would be a masterpiece.
Heath Ledger. Christian Bale. The Imaginarium (2009) All Critics (190) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (121) | Rotten (68) | DVD (4) The Imaginarium of Dr.
Parnassus is one of those movies that, despite spectacular elements, doesn't add up to a spectacular film. Terry Gilliam, the veteran film director who cut his teeth as the animation wizard of television's legendary Monty Python's Flying Circus, has flirted with genius throughout his career, and bedded her from time to time. In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnas Parnassus is fun to watch a good deal of the time, and Gilliam is almost always visually surprising, but Ledger could have used a more momentous send-off. It teases with magnificently tantalizing moments that don't quite add up to one grand insight. When it's all done we're left with another recent Gilliam trademark: the highly imaginative mess. The film is flawed, but you don't expect narrative drive or coherence; you go for the director's flights of fantasy. One of the greatest motion pictures ever.
Heath Ledger.