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Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Sun (2005) |
Hirohito's interest in marine biology provides Sokurov with a fruitful thematic and visual leitmotif: images of fish glide through the film, marking its most emotionally and politically significant moments. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 29, 2018
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Brideshead Revisited (2008) |
This Brideshead is less a dramatization than what you might call a melodramatization. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 29, 2018
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300 (2006) |
What's really striking about the film is that it doesn't even have the aesthetics of a comic book, to say nothing of a graphic novel-the best examples of which, at least, show considerable concern for subtle narrative rhythms. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 23, 2018
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Brokeback Mountain (2005) |
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 21, 2018
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Capote (2005) |
Capote is the only movie I know of that comes close to suggesting successfully what the complex process of creating a literary work actually looks like. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 21, 2018
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Troy (2004) |
The real problem with Petersen and Benioff's reductive ideological updating of the epic story they tell is organic, not pedantic: the "realism" they've opted for goes against the grain of the genre they're working in. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 20, 2018
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Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) |
Watching Tarantino's films-and none more than Kill Bill-is like being stuck in a room with someone who, like so many of this director's characters, can't stop talking about the really neat parts in the movies he's seen. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 20, 2018
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The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) |
Parker's film implicitly endorses the conventional morality that the play-a drama, let us not forget, by the author of "The Truth of Masks" and "The Decay of Lying"-so hilariously lampooned. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 20, 2018
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The Hours (2002) |
The Hours is a serious and moving film, one that achieves many of its goals; among other things, it will presumably have many, many more people reading Mrs. Dalloway than Woolf could ever have dreamed of. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 20, 2018
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Phoenix (2014) |
But as Petzold's film slinks toward this metaconclusion, all the artistry - the ingenious allusiveness and the Russian-doll plotting - finally upstages whatever larger point he wanted to make about history and identity, Germans and Jews. - Harper's Magazine
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| Posted Apr 17, 2018
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Labyrinth of Lies (2014) |
I couldn't help wishing for less earnestness and more artfulness... But Labyrinth of Lies is too eager to tell the truth and get to its foregone conclusion: the beginning of the trials, and the inevitable title cards that describe their results. - Harper's Magazine
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| Posted Apr 17, 2018
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Volver (2006) |
Almodóvar himself once again returning, with delicious self-consciousness, to an old plot. . . and reconfiguring it, as he does here even more radically than in his other recent films, in the subtle but provocative manner of his mature style. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 19, 2017
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Avatar (2009) |
Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, Avatar is very much a movie for our time. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 19, 2017
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Marie Antoinette (2006) |
And so Coppola's movie, which works so hard and with such imagination to include in its portrait much that has been ignored, ends up leaving out much that cannot be ignored. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 18, 2017
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United 93 (2006) |
All that United 93 can tell us. . .is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 18, 2017
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World Trade Center (2006) |
. . .after that big opening sequence, the sudden and disorienting shift in focus feels odd; the movie very quickly acquires the predictable feel of an episode of ER. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 18, 2017
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Alexander (2004) |
The reason it's exhausting, and ultimately boring, to sit through Alexander-and why the movie is already disappearing from theaters-is that. . .there's no dramatic arc, no shaping of the life into a good story. - The New York Review of Books
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| Posted Aug 18, 2017
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