Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Chicago Reader
For 1,935 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Breathless
Lowest review score: 0 Bad Boys
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 961 out of 1935
  2. Mixed: 744 out of 1935
  3. Negative: 230 out of 1935
1935 movie reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Chicago
    I seem to be in a distinct minority in finding the satire toothless, obvious, and insufferably glib -- Still, I found genuine pleasure in watching Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, and John C. Reilly try their hands at singing and dancing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    That's Entertainment! III
    In all, the most pleasure-filled Hollywood movie of 1994.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Love and Death on Long Island
    A witty, canny meditation on the power of pop culture in general and the rationalizations of cinephilia and film criticism in particular.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The World
    The title of Jia Zhang-ke's 2004 masterpiece, The World -- a film that's hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian -- is an ironic pun and a metaphor.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Buena Vista Social Club
    The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Last Temptation of Christ
    The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Black God, White Devil
    Strongly recommended.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Hours
    The result is somewhat better than a Masterpiece Theatre gloss job, but it's far from the essence of Woolf.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Café Lumière
    Hou's best film since "The Puppetmaster" (1993). It's also his most minimalist effort to date, slow to reveal its depths and beauties, and it marks a rejuvenation of his art.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The New Guy
    It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Million Dollar Baby
    Haggis's dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Prince of the City
    This movie swims freely in the moral ambiguities Lumet seems to thrive on.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Central Station
    This 1998 film held my interest for two hours, even taking on an epic feel when it turns into a road movie. It's not bad by any means, but it also happens to resemble a lot of other movies.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Superior in every respect to the PBS documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Color of Paradise
    Reputed to be sentimental crowd pleaser, for better and for worse.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    A Fish Called Wanda
    Crichton keeps the laughs coming with infectious energy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Cinema Paradiso
    Originally a two-part film running about three hours, this treacle has been reduced by almost a third, though it still seems to run on forever -- a bit like life but much less interesting.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Saraband
    The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here -- self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    In the Company of Men
    It's virtually guaranteed to make us squirm.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    A Bronx Tale
    Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Bugsy
    A melancholy character study of romantic delirium and Napoleonic ambition with a nice sense of nuance, this is much more coherent than the general run of blockbusters.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Cabaret
    It's entertaining and stylish, though maybe not quite as serious as it wants to be.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Blair Witch Project
    A pretty impressive horror film.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Rabbit-Proof Fence
    The story is so black-and-white that one feels like hissing the villain (Kenneth Branagh) and cheering the heroines at every stage, but it's so amazing that the simplicity of the telling seems warranted.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Larger Than Life
    Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Set Me Free
    Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Almost Famous
    This has much of the warmth and feeling for adolescence that Crowe displayed in his first feature ("Say Anything"), though the slick showboating of "Jerry Maguire" isn't entirely absent either.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Lady Chatterley
    A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.
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