Dennis Lim

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Village Voice
For 287 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 69% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 16.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Dennis Lim's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 49
Highest review score: 100 The Intruder
Lowest review score: 0 Boat Trip
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 84 out of 287
  2. Mixed: 110 out of 287
  3. Negative: 93 out of 287
287 movie reviews
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    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Dennis Lim
    United 93
    Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    Antitrust
    It's a kick to see the Tim Robbins version of the man recently described by the Microsoft trial judge as "Napoleonic" installed in a disgustingly opulent Bond-villain HQ/pad, and the overwrought Boiler Room-meets-The Game scenario is not without its own schlocky pleasures.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    Journey to Western Xia Empire
    A reticent, primarily visual experience.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Dennis Lim
    The Trip
    Steals every trick in the gaysploitation book down to the Alexis Arquette glorified cameo, but the end result -- compulsively horrible and full of unintentional poignant hilarity -- is its own mutant creature.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Dennis Lim
    The Fluffer
    The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Dennis Lim
    The Sleepy Time Gal
    Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Dennis Lim
    Confusion of Genders
    The characters exist in single dimensions (trapped in a noxiously misogynist role, even the fearless Richard stands no chance), and in an effort to keep the plates spinning, the movie quickly devolves from risqué to risible.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    AKA
    Cumulatively, the echo-chamber syntax achieves a kind of atonal harmony, meshing with the themes of reinvention and self-presentation: The disjunction between the panels is tantamount to the gap between image and reality.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Dennis Lim
    Psycho Beach Party
    The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Dennis Lim
    The United States of Leland
    The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Dennis Lim
    Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Dennis Lim
    Charlotte Sometimes
    Using vagueness as a crutch, Charlotte Sometimes makes a fetish of opacity. Still, whether or not it's a pose, the film's poised reticence is refreshing in context -- a rebuke to the contemporary crop of blabbermouthed American indies.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Dennis Lim
    K-PAX
    K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    Chuen jik sat sau
    There's plenty to enjoy -- in no small part thanks to Lau.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    Unbreakable
    Soggy mysticism, nagging inconsistencies, and coarse horror-playbook jolts.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 10 Dennis Lim
    Clay Pigeons
    It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    Devils on the Doorstep
    By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    Hollywood Ending
    The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    I Remember Me
    Some of the testimonials are underedited, but as a work of passionate advocacy, I Remember Me can't be faulted.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Dennis Lim
    Bandits
    Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Dennis Lim
    The Other Sister
    Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Dennis Lim
    The 24th Day
    No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Dennis Lim
    Ju-on: The Grudge
    Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    Time to Leave
    Time to Leave amounts simply to a semi-thoughtful disease-of-the-week weepie, admirable in its restraint but shying from the terror of the situation.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Dennis Lim
    Gosford Park
    As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Dennis Lim
    The Matrix
    The cumulative effect is perversely deflationary: long before it's over, the film has flushed the paranoia from its system.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Dennis Lim
    Swimming Pool
    Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Dennis Lim
    The Mother
    By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Dennis Lim
    3 Dancing Slaves
    For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.
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