Noah’s Barks pages relating to films, movies, etc. Most are imported reviews from Criticker, a site with a 500-word limit. Please keep that in mind. There are many reviews yet to be imported!
To avoid clutter, anime movie reviews are kept on the anime page.
Sci-fi stories about the futility of attempting to change the past are nothing fresh, but 12 Monkeys dresses its thought experiment up in a moebius strip story and a tech-noir thriller atmosphere. In spite of this, the diffident screenwriters view…
The subject of A Dangerous Method, the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, is too great and too interesting to compress under two hours, and it especially doesn’t deserve to have the Sabina Spielrein romance as the center-weight. The…
It’s surprising how they both run the same length, as Yojimbo fleshes out its setting and characters much more than A Fistful of Dollars does, perhaps due to Sergio Leone‘s slow, suspenseful pacing. Yojimbo is also funnier. Yojimbo this, Yojimbo…
A sort of Blue Velvet contemporary, which is of the highest compliment. A History of Violence features similar themes of violence invading the idyllic American dream, only this time around it’s resurfacing instead of being dug up. The darkness spreads…
After so many lackluster slasher “legends,” I expected A Nightmare on Elm Street to be a bore—but it’s damn good. It has the two things so many slashers lack: pacing and logic. The threat is established early and, instead of…
A Quiet Place Review I’d imagine the success of A Quiet Place for the viewer would depend on if they can accept it as a series of varying-quality scenes looking at an interesting premise in different perspectives with uneven results.…
A Short Film About Killing (ASFAK) has Kieslowski blossom into the ethereal directing style that would define his beautiful humanism. For the first time we see a distinct focus on color and music. ASFAK chooses bronze, as a dystopian, somber,…
A Short Film About Love contains much of Kieslowski’s human compassion and interest in fatalism. I find the story’s resolution to be disappointingly trite, as the display of a man driven mad by his inability to express his obsession is…
The cinematography is masterful with truly blooming colors, and you’ve got a top-tier performance from Klaus Kinski backed by an unforgettable theme composed by Popol Vuh, but all of my hang-ups with Aguirre, the Wrath of God are narrative focused.…
American Beauty, despite its satirical nature, is so overly blunt with its character development and saccharine at parts that it can make the ironic lens of the film unbelievable—but these are small problems in the face of what’s one of…
Some melodramatically emotional punches are thrown, but it’s necessary when trying to cover the slow, personal, lifetime-long induction of racism in only two hours. American History X (AHX) may not get into much past the surface, but it takes the…
It always pains me a bit when the cast of American Movie receive mockery as if they were just a freak show. No one’s wrong to laugh—they’re hilarious both intentionally and unintentionally—but their hearts deserve to be taken seriously. With…
American Psycho is clever and hilarious, one of the most shocking and original comedies out there. The social commentary is shallow and it’s a little awkward in the rare moments where the movie tries to be more than a comedy…
I was left confused by An American Werewolf in London‘s combination of comedy and horror because it’s more underwhelming than the concept promises. First of all, the horror element isn’t affecting at all. This is a movie that’s of the…
Antichrist is a good counterexample of what kind of horror works best on me. The atmosphere is there, the imagery and implications are all shocking, but I’m unmoved because I never establish a connection and empathize with the characters. It’s…
As remarkable as everything related to the production of Apocalypse Now is, I find its cynical themes overly nihilistic with an aura that suggests animalistic ruthlessness is the world’s only truth. This “angst,” if I can even dare to use…
AKA: Evil Dead III / Evil Dead 3 The best Evil Dead movie! While a great trilogy throughout, the movies (or rather Sam Raimi) are better at parody than they are at being creepy, so Army of Darkness benefits by…
It’s remarkable and deserving of more respect how modern Jean-Pierre Melville‘s films still look. Show Army of Shadows to your cousin and I can’t promise they won’t call it boring, but they certainly wouldn’t look immediately away. A palpably cold…
Easily comparable to Escape from New York (EfNY) in quality. Assault on Precinct 13 lacks EfNY‘s apocalyptic visions and set designs, but gains a better put together screenplay that only has ups and no downs. Unlike Halloween, the stuff preceding…
Atari: Game Over is a slight watch, recounting an abridged history of Atari intercut with an expedition to dig up the infamous “Atari E.T. landfill.” The former isn’t particularly detailed, and the resolution of the latter is a bit disappointing…
The fact that there are actually people who view this as “dark” or “badass” only goes to show how ridiculous the preceding Batman movies were. Michael Keaton possesses none of the stature required of Bruce Wayne or Batman, and Jack…
I continue to like the ideas of Luis Buñuel more than his actual films. His humiliation of the bourgeois continues in Belle de Jour, but there’s an additional element I’d not seen before: an actual sympathy towards sexual deviants as…
Anyone else sick of the nerd brigade wanting to believe a ridiculous action movie couldn’t be better crafted than any third-rate drama? Big Trouble in Little China is a riot; a stupid movie that’s brilliantly directed. Notice how the opening…
Black Swan is in desperate need of more subtlety, the film’s practically an allegory for the character herself, tempted into the American selling points of bombast and sex. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) also needed more justification for her dramatics. But,…
As much as I like Blade Runner—and I do, because I can overlook many things for a movie with great style and visual design (and boy, does Blade Runner have those in spades)—it definitely has its issues. Blade Runner‘s themes…
Blue Velvet is the purest distillation of David Lynch‘s talent as a director/writer. Everything he’s made, while often great, has his ideas clash. In Blue Velvet his oddities perfectly complement each other: the uncanny valley’s wandering dream world mirroring the…
This already needs critical reevaluation. Bone Tomahawk is a new, unique perspective on the classic journey into the heart of darkness that’s been adapted previously by works such as Aguirre and Apocalypse Now. The slow natural pacing is informed by…
The praise Bridge of Spies has been getting is inexplicable. It’s a Steven Spielberg movie with no powerful stills. It’s a Coen bros. script full of terribly misplaced awkward jokes in spite of the story’s drama and risk, and this…
A Mexploitation of exploitations? It has to be Sam Peckinpah, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia poster makes both facts obvious. Warren Oates might want to be cool, but he’s an aging, poor bartender who lives in squalor…
Camera Buff (AKA Ametor) is a semi-autobiographical drama made by a filmmaker for a filmmaker. I am not a filmmaker and have no interest in becoming one, but I was still thoroughly engaged despite not connecting to Camera Buff on…
The theme to take away from ‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’ is the opposite of what it likely aims for: some art is too distant to attempt to make your own.
A lot of people depicted in Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade are naturally “underwhelming” in their modern life achievements, but it’s more than a bit repulsive how the filmmakers aim to highlight these people as losers and objects to be…
The weakest thing about Chungking Express is that the first (much shorter) part of the movie is far superior to the second. Takeshi Kaneshiro has more charm and is much funnier than Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who is often expressionless.…
It’s the production that really makes ‘City of God’ what it is: a symphony of a city God has overlooked.
Polanski viewed the seminal Repulsion as a stepping stone to this forgotten, bizarre black comedy he intended to be a hit. For all its quirky and amusing antics and characters, Cul-de-sac bears the distinctive mark of a Polanski film in…
Dawn of the Dead is an almost unique horror movie. It’s the rare type that succeeds at being simultaneously tense and fun. The mall setting supplies a sort of “private clubhouse” wish fulfillment that makes it easy to root for…
This movie’s reputation is bullshit. No one could ever explain how Night of the Living Dead is supposedly better, and even Dawn of the Living Dead gets a run for its money. Day of the Dead contains everything in the…
Death and the Maiden shows its source medium of a play very clearly in positive ways with a gripping single-setting that has a curious mystery and high stakes. The combination works like a guarantee and it’s entertaining throughout. Weaver incredibly…
Death in the Garden is a fairly typical escape/wilderness survival story with the usual themes of psychological degradation. Something so standard is disappointing coming from Luis Buñuel, and while the characters all develop the direction doesn’t transcend the basic plot.…
Death Proof shows a tragic shame when the moment Quentin Tarantino decides to carry a film only with his usually reputable dialogue that his writing is at its absolute worst. The young girls’ sassy shtick gets annoying quickly, and it…
Let’s just forget about The French Connection and reevaluate Dirty Harry instead. What we have here isn’t just a film that broke boundaries in how much of the crime world media was allowed to show, but a blueprint for a…
‘Don’t Breathe’ is an exercise in how to earn your false resolutions, jump scares, and all the stock tricks in the horror book that we’ve been accustomed to groaning about.
Most of Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is still funny, but there are several long segments that are just incredibly boring, silly shit and the same run-on gags, like the…
Shockingly (or perhaps not), Toshirô Mifune delivers one of his best performances in his first Akira Kurosawa-directed film. Takashi Shimura is his equal here and seeing the two Kurosawa legends interact so closely at the top of their games is…
![Movie poster for "[REC] 2"](https://noahsbarks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/rec-2.jpg)
