question: One of the weakest entries in the J-horror remake sweepstakes, One Missed Call is undone by bland performances and shopworn shocks.

numbered reviews: 1. Supernatural horror doesn't have to make sense, but when it tries it shouldn't fail -- as it does in One Missed Call, spectacularly and in thuddingly dull fashion.
2. Drastically under-produced, One Missed Call is so tedious that Alexander Graham Bell would have difficulty staying awake. Those vigilant Verizon Wireless techies from the commercials would be fired for napping on the job.
3. Given all the hoopla over the Apple iPhone, it's a wonder that no one has yet complained over an essential missing feature: It doesn't ring you up to alert you that you are going to die.
4. The best part of the movie is the fact that, at a running time of an hour and a half, it's mercifully short.
5. The direction is uninspired, acting is lifeless, and the script borders on the inept. A PG-13 rating means that it's short on shocks, too.
6. Borrowing from this bottomless well, perhaps it's best to say that you should hang up, turn off your phone or even cancel your service should this film attempt to reach out and touch you.
7. What is Ed Burns up to?
8. ...just another English-language remake of yet another incomprehensible Japanese horror movie.
9. As Lead Belly might sing, to the tune of 'One Meat Ball': 'You get no thrills/ From One Missed Call...'
10. Do yourself a favor and go rent any Miike film other than this one. You've got somewhere in the vicinity of 75 from which to choose.


question: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead might not be the definitive doc National Lampoon fans are waiting for, but it's still almost as transgressively funny as the magazine in its heyday.

numbered reviews: 1. Worth watching if only for the wonderful clips from the various "Lampoon" stage shows, and an almost endless parade of covers and comic strips.
2. A generous and briskly entertaining look at the American humor magazine's legacy.
3. The funniest documentary since The Aristocrats.
4. Director Douglas Tirola and his many interview subjects make a strong case for the Lampoon itself as genuinely transformative.
5. Douglas Tirola's upbeat doc on National Lampoon already feels essential for celebrating a hard-fought moment of American comic subversion.
6. It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.
7. The laughs come from the vintage bits, and there's a little missing context. But any documentary that humanizes Chevy Chase is a movie making miracle.
8. Douglas Tirola's source material...is chock-a-block full of the magazine's oft controversial articles, art work and, most famously, the cover art
9. full of magic and promise
10. The doc is a bit more loony than the recent SNL film, but it's still just a bit too tame - i.e. lots of talking heads - to truly represent its subject.


question: This emotionally gripping examination of a marriage on the rocks isn't always easy to watch, but Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling give performances of unusual depth and power.

numbered reviews: 1. The film proceeds in what feels like real time, but with no obvious beginning or end. It's a latticework of moments happy and sad.
2. A movie that rumbles around inside you and appeals to those who believe in love as well as those who recognize its potential to fade.
3. Blue Valentine is so nervy, so "real," that it poses a dire threat. Dean and Cindy are such decent folks. How do we know what happens to them couldn't happen to us?
4. Blue Valentine is interestingly styled and shot. It features outstanding performances from Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams and an inventive screenplay and structure.
5. Cianfrance dives deeply into the happiness and heartache a damaged relationship can give you and has created a story that understands how real life romance actually works.
6. BLUE VALENTINE shows us the present will never be as fun as the past.
7. The ghost of John Cassavetes looms large over Blue Valentine. This movie destroyed me.
8. What we end up with here is 2/3 of a story that consequently feels incomplete. It obviously wanted to be something like "(500) Days of Summer" in terms of structure, but the writers just didn't know how to get up to that level.
9. [Director] Cianfrance is not interested in the Hollywood fairytale, he want to show that love can scar.
10. Unlike Bergman's searing Scenes from a Marriage, which sustains itself for every one of its 299 devastating minutes, Blue Valentine begins to falter somewhere during its 114.


question: Epic in length, thrilling to behold, and utterly absorbing, Winter Sleep demands -- and rewards -- viewers' patient attention.

numbered reviews:
1. Winter Sleep is without doubt a formidably achieved, intellectually substantial drama that deals variously with questions of conscience, responsibility and self-deception.
2. A work that rivals great literary masterpieces of years past, especially Chekhov's plays but with the added visual dimension of someone who has a painterly eye. Superlative filmmaking.
3. Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.
4. This patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.
5. [Haluk] Bilginer's [performance] alternates between brooding melancholy and sharp-tongued contemptuousness, failing to reach the tragic dimensions which the writers intended.
6. In a career trajectory that has continually taken him in the direction of more expansive, audacious cinema, this is the filmmaker's most daring and aesthetically ambitious project yet.
7. It's an epic tragedy about life in the Ivory Tower and the inability to understand-much less empathize with-other human beings.
8. "Winter Sleep" won't appeal to action lovers, but if you like endless verbal warfare, this is a joy.
9. While it is no hardship to gaze upon Gökhan Tiryaki's ravishing images of the landscape as its autumnal glow vanishes under an icy crust, there's not much to keep the intellect thrumming over the course of 196 minutes.
10. Winter Sleep has interior views (of Aydin's library, for example) that are so rich in detail that your eye lingers happily no matter how long the shot is held, and exterior views that unfold like a Chinese scroll, and watchful close-ups.