Critic consensus:While Christmas Vacation may not be the most disciplined comedy, it's got enough laughs and good cheer to make for a solid seasonal treat.

Numbered reviews:1. the last funny installment of the series
2. Haven't watched it in awhile, but I remember it well and I remember enjoying it. One of the better Vacation movies (Vegas Vacation is still the best, though).
3. Amusing Chase vehicle on its way to being a Xmas perennial.
4. The new film does little more than reintroduce these familiar characters (with new actors playing the children, who would otherwise be college age by now) and let them get on one another's nerves in earnest.
5. There never, ever should've been more than one of these movies.
6. The human frailty at the center of the story makes the jokes all the funnier. Holiday films are rarely as priceless.
7. As always the visual gags are more prevalent then the verbal ones, and are lit up in neon so you can't miss them.
8. One of the great unanswered questions in Hollywood is how Chevy Chase still gets work.
9. Many of those episodic moments, particularly in the film's first half, are hilarious. But as picture goes along there are far too many dry spells.
10. Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn't work.


Critic consensus:It verges on hagiography, but given the deeply compelling nature of its subject's story, The Punk Singer can be forgiven its lack of objectivity.

Numbered reviews:1. With energy and insight, this documentary races through the life of one of the most influential musicians of the 1990s, feminist punk artist Kathleen Hanna.
2. Anderson's film -- a scrappy, exuberant battler like its subject -- shows how Hanna has transmuted a hunger borne of body-image pressure into a hunger to change the world.
3. Kathleen Hanna, former lead singer of Bikini Kill, comes across as an inspirational figure in Sini Anderson's rousing documentary.
4. [A] terrifically watchable and impressively empowering documentary ...
5. This hagiographic ode to the quintessential 90s riot grrrl is by no means definitive, but there's a welcome rallying cry to all wannabe revolutionary rockers hidden within the bio-doc blather.
6. The Punk Singer works ... as an eye-witness account of an important movement in feminist art; it's a film as vibrant and as vital as [Hanna's] music.
7. This blast from the past is strangely timely.
8. ...perhaps there is an inherent contradiction in attempting to capture a democratizing movement through an individual figure, as rocktastic and badass as that figure might be.
9. [An] affectionate, bordering on hagiographic, film.
10. A fantastic introduction to original riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna and her groundbreaking work in music, feminism, and all-around kickass awesomeness.


Critic consensus:Chasing Amy explores gender roles, sexual mores, and the limits of friendship with a mixture of sensitivity, raw honesty, and director/screenwriter Kevin Smith's signature raunchy humor.

Numbered reviews:
1. Instead of cool twenty-something irony, Smith startles us with raw emotional honesty.
2. Funny, fearless... and profoundly moving. Never did I ever think I'd come away from a Smith film with a lump in my throat.
3. ...rivals a 1930s screwball comedy -- although the subject matter certainly does not.
4. tackles issues and explores situations that many other filmmakers have shied away from
5. Even when its young, uncertain characters appear to be in danger of talking (and whining) themselves to death, there's something genuine and charmingly naive about their attempts to make sense of their feelings.
6. Although [Smith's] dialogue is often witty, he still relies on blunt sexual humor to get his point across.
7. Work of such fierce intelligence and emotional honesty that it blows away the competition when it comes to contemporary romantic comedy.
8. With their matching hipster goatees and deadpan cynicism, Affleck and Lee evince the easy rapport of old buds.
9. Slowly, like a latent teen pulled against his will into adulthood, Kevin Smith is growing up. But he's not growing quietly.
10. There is a lot of frank conversation about the technical aspects of sex between women, but Holden and Banky are written more like sniggering eighth graders than inquisitive adults.