Joseph Jon Lanthier

Select another critic »
Slant Magazine
For 83 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Joseph Jon Lanthier's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Black Narcissus
Lowest review score: 25 How to Start a Revolution
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 59 out of 83
  2. Mixed: 17 out of 83
  3. Negative: 7 out of 83
83 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Samson and Delilah
    By examining the relationship between Samson and Delilah through the wrong end of the telescope, Thorton soaks in the arid, unaccommodating surroundings with occasionally oxymoronic lucidity.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Dog Pound
    The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Unspeakable Act
    Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Nana
    Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    On the Road
    The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Wagner & Me
    Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    My Brothers
    An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Central Park Five
    Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Comedy
    Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    This Must Be the Place
    The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Orchestra of Exiles
    Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Flat
    Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Photographic Memory
    Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Wuthering Heights
    In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Tales of the Night
    Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    About Cherry
    The lack of plausible conflict mars the movie's highly commendable depiction of San Francisco as a the new porn capital.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    I'm Carolyn Parker
    What keeps the documentary from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Breathing
    Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism?
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Little White Lies
    The specific narrative handicaps throughout are mostly too banal to warrant exegesis, though the choice of vintage pop tunes for dramatic underscoring is particularly grating.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    True Wolf
    The documentary veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Meet the Fokkens
    Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Abendland
    The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    It's the Earth Not the Moon
    After 30 minutes or so, Gonçalo Tocha's anthropological proposition slides into dubiousness.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Patagonia Rising
    Director Brian Lilla alternates between talking heads and animated graphics to elucidate first how dams work and, obligatorily, to put a human face on those who would be affected.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    A Cat in Paris
    An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Intouchables
    A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 100 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Color Wheel
    Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Downtown Express
    The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    How to Grow a Band
    The movie is unsurprisingly devoted to peddling up-and-comer Chris Thiele as something daring, something new.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Beat Hotel
    Following the faux-opiate flecked suit of docs like One Fast Move or I'm Gone, The Beat Hotel can't quite rise above its obvious desire to appeal to the former demographic in spite of their apparently limited patience for historical exegesis.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Dissolution
    The camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    How to Start a Revolution
    Much of this content, which involves complex social movements in Burma, Iran, and elsewhere, is necessarily abridged, but it's often done so to the point of incoherence, making Gene Sharp's connection to what we're seeing seem contrived.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    Oh, the things that money can buy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Windfall
    Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Addiction Incorporated
    The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Under Control
    Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa's inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    Structurally lopsided, the narrative jumps directly into the success of their first molded-plywood chair, and meanders from there into the numerous short films the Eames Studio made for government agencies and IT companies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Pianomania
    Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    American Teacher
    The movie is a curious blend of teacher-appreciation mandate and recruitment video, though it's not always clear at whom the narration's gravely spoken factoids are directed.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Jane's Journey
    Despite the fact that Goodall narrates the bulk of the material, there are scant details about her concrete contributions to animal and life science save for her observing of chimp-made tools.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Echotone
    Director Nathan Christ dithers between fashioning the film as a glossing study of metropolitan personality and a virtual advertisement for the groups included.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Burke and Hare
    Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    The testimony we hear from suspects' neighbors and similarly curious media underlings feels muted, like a halfhearted repetition.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Iron Crows
    A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Summer Pasture
    The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Protektor
    Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Sleep Furiously
    An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Myth of the American Sleepover
    Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Impolex
    It lulls us into its reckless passivity to the point that even the comedic duds possess a languid hint of funny.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    What's most disappointing about Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is how it fails to deliver on the hybridizing NYC gimmickry of its title.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Farmageddon
    Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    General Orders No. 9
    Under the modern mannerisms lies a rather clumsily Romantic -- one might say Wordsworthian -- rant that juxtaposes urbanity against a nebulous, fictitious past.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    One Lucky Elephant
    A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Angel Heart
    It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Heaven's Gate
    To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Down by Law
    Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Magician
    This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Chaser
    The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    8½
    8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    The Seduction of Mimi
    The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Betty Blue
    If only Beineix could have imagined an existence for his star-crossed protagonists beyond the source material (the question of whether successful maternity would have sobered Betty yelps for an impossible sequel), he may have managed a sultry masterpiece.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    A Man Called Horse
    Touted at the time of its release as a comparatively enlightened western, A Man Called Horse now looks like well-researched sensationalism—and is, admittedly, all the better for it.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Lookin' to Get Out
    Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    My Dinner with Andre
    The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 63 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Force of Evil
    Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Mystery Train
    Mystery Train is a singularly enthusiastic American anthem that trenchantly interprets the cult of audiophilia as filthy gas stoves roasting marshmallows, raspy radio DJs hawking fried calamari, and ill-equipped racial armies ignorantly clashing by night.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Homicide
    The Pulitzer-winning playwright’s movies are often a few steps ahead of their audiences, but Homicide seems to have intuitively anticipated its now-exemplary status.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Joseph Jon Lanthier
    Eating Raoul
    A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »