Harper's Magazine - Rotten Tomatoes

Harper's Magazine

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018)

Giles Harvey

Cold War recalls the visual aesthetic of the Polish Film School, the cinematic movement, inspired in part by Italian neorealism, that flourished in the period of mild liberalization that began in 1956, three years after Stalin's death.
Posted Aug 26, 2021
2
Hot Millions (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

[A] wonderfully funny movie.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
3
Finian's Rainbow (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

[Finian's Rainbow] looks as though it has been rehearsed for, say, two months, then photographed in a week's time.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
4
Star! (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

While Star! betrays everything in its course, it betrays no one more than its own star, Julie Andrews.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
5
Dear John (Käre John) (1964)

Robert Kotlowitz

Much has been made about the erotic nature of the movie, and that is a good thing... for it is very sweet eroticism.
Posted Aug 11, 2020
6
The Lion in Winter (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

Mr. Goldman's script cannot resist undercutting the subject by trivializing it.
Posted Aug 10, 2020
7
The Fixer (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

In the face of Frankenheimer's beautiful intentions it is really awful to have to say that The Fixer is a high-minded, monotonous drone.
Posted Aug 10, 2020
8
Ice Station Zebra (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

Buy some popcorn and see the movie.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
9
The Brotherhood (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

If this story of the Mafia seems near bankruptcy, it's because nearly everything in it is in debt to something else that was done better at another time.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
10
Candy (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

The joke, if it ever really existed, has gone out of Candy in her film embodiment. In its place is a long, dreary vaudeville, six or seven acts' worth.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
11
The Night They Raided Minsky's (The Night They Invented Striptease) (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

It seems a shame, for the director William Friedkin apparently wanted something more...but in the end the crassness of the story does him in.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
12
Ulysses (1967)

Robert Kotlowitz

Mr. Strick directed Ulysses and shared the screenplay with Fred Haines. I congratulate them both.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
13
La Guerre Est Finie (The War is Over) (1966)

Robert Kotlowitz

In La Guerre Est Finie, Resnais has caught the wholly bitter taste of life-in-exile and the obsessive quality that often accompanies the pursuit of hopeless causes.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
14
Persona (1966)

Robert Kotlowitz

This original and individual work acts upon us in its own way; what is finally impossible to escape are the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, agonized objects of Bergman's worship.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
15
Accident (1967)

Robert Kotlowitz

In the end, for all the fairly sensational things that have been brought to pass, it is the audience that is left forlorn and lonely, excluded from the often boring private visions of Harold Pinter's characters.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
16
The Last Tycoon (1976)

Stephen Koch

The Last Tycoon is a beautiful and interesting failure precisely because it lacks confidence and energy, because it substitutes the uncertain beauties of nostalgia and style for whatever inventiveness was required to fulfill its promise.
Posted Aug 4, 2020
17
Ostre Sledované Vlaky (Closely Watched Trains) (1966)

Robert Kotlowitz

One of the most appealing movies of the year.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
18
Far From the Madding Crowd (1967)

Robert Kotlowitz

There is so little authentic feeling in Far From the Madding Crowd.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
19
Camelot (1967)

Robert Kotlowitz

This Camelot could be moved into Disneyland, intact.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
20
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Robert Kotlowitz

Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is another of his Euclidean problems in human geometry, worked relentlessly through step-by-step to the last tear and the neat solution, both of which are designed to provide full satisfaction.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
21
War and Peace (Voyna i Mir) (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

The Tolstoyan directness comes through the film, the attempt stated and restated -- to resolve the dilemma of how to live. And while the movie sometimes hammers its moral points home with something less than grace, its epic quality never fails.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
22
Interlude (2005)

Robert Kotlowitz

Their story, of course, has been told several times before, under different names, but never, in my memory, at such excruciating length. The film, which might have been satisfactory at an hour and a quarter, goes on for nearly two.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
23
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort) (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

This follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the French at their least charming, being a nearly unbearably coy Gallic imitation of an MGM musical dating from the heyday of Gene Kelly.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
24
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

The movie, it seems to me, is a kind of galactic deep freeze, empty inside, both extraordinarily tedious and fancy at the same time.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
25
La Chinoise (1968)

Robert Kotlowitz

Its pace, for all the talk, is exhilarating, its use of primary colors hard and beautiful, its shifts of mood and action are both intricate and dazzling; while its feeling for its characters is always serious and affectionate, even when Godard is mocking.
Posted Aug 3, 2020
26
Bacurau (Nighthawk) (2020)

Ela Bittencourt

Mendonça and Dornelles's film is... an attempt to grapple with unspeakable, horrifying evil -- but an evil that must be understood in social and historical rather than biblical terms.
Posted May 1, 2020
27
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

J. Hoberman

Sure to be wildly overpraised and cursorily dismissed, The Other Side of the Wind is often awful and frequently great, occasionally at the same time. The main thing is that it gives Welles the last word.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
28
Phoenix (2015)

Daniel Mendelsohn

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.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
29
Labyrinth Of Lies (2015)

Daniel Mendelsohn

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.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
30
Alexander (2004)

Daniel Mendelsohn

The film that resulted from this obsessive desire for historical accuracy is a dud: a baggy, incoherent, bloviating mess in which any sense of the thrilling and impressive arc of Alexander's career sinks beneath the weight of period detail.
Posted Apr 17, 2018
31
Paddington (2015)

Rivka Galchen

Silly and smart and witty and pretty and just feel-good enough that you don't have to feel too bad about feeling good.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
32
The Boy And The Beast (Bakemono No Ko) (2016)

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

The family dynamics in The Boy and the Beast are more astute and involved than they are in any of Hosoda's other features.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
33
When Marnie Was There (2015)

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

Unlike American animated films, which only gesture at moral seriousness, Marnie and other films like it are centrally, sincerely concerned with the complex trials of adolescence.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
34
Beasts of No Nation (2015)

Nat Segnit

The result is a film that is at once diligently dramatic and oddly becalmed, a film about unutterable horror that isn't particularly horrifying.
Posted Mar 22, 2018
35
Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (2015)

Rivka Galchen

Instead we have heroes like Hunt, who fight against transparency and accountability. It's no surprise that the government ends up embracing him all over again.
Posted Mar 22, 2018
36
Hail, Caesar! (2016)

A.S. Hamrah

The Coens' Hollywood is an empire, where fraud is cheerful, natural, invisible - where people can live as they want to, so long as they don't trouble the system that keeps them employed. Everything goes fine there until the Commies show up.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
37
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

A.S. Hamrah

The film's political resonances are as mutable - and as muddled - as those of its predecessors.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
38
No (2013)

J. Hoberman

Given the charnel-house atmosphere of Tony Manero and Post Mortem, it's striking that Larraín concludes his Pinochet trilogy on a note of near-giddy optimism.
Posted Mar 4, 2018
39
12 Years a Slave (2013)

J. Hoberman

12 Years a Slave is, like The Trial, a trapdoor over the abyss. Although less abrupt than Kafka's novel, the movie wastes little time before plunging its viewer into a nightmare of dehumanization.
Posted Mar 4, 2018