Chris Packham

Chris Packham
Chris Packham's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s): Village Voice
Publications: Village Voice

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
94% Big Sonia (2017) A visual reminder of time's arrow and other, more important losses. - L.A. Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2018
40% Arizona (2018) A well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy... - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 21, 2018
85% Sollers Point (2018) The loose, seemingly improvisational performances bolster the film's unstudied realism and surface the hope and despair of the characters. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted May 16, 2018
93% Love & Bananas: An Elephant Story (2018) Even small efforts to rectify human misdeeds cause suffering to animals, and Bell seems aware of this balance of consequences. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2018
71% 44 Pages (2018) It's likely all the easy jokes that might occur to you about the magazine racks in the lobbies of dentists' offices will evaporate and you'll wonder if they might be hiring. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2018
88% Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero (2018) An education-focused and age-appropriate true story of the official mascot of the 102nd infantry regiment, who participated in seventeen battles on the Western Front during World War I, returning home as a hero. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2018
93% Journey's End (2018) Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they're about to die. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 14, 2018
75% Chasing Great (2018) It's clear where all of this is going, but McCaw surprises with his mental rigor (he excelled academically) and total commitment to his sport (he plays with a stress fracture in his foot). - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 27, 2018
85% Big Time (2017) [An] elegant documentary ... - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 1, 2017
94% Big Sonia (2017) The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia's children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents' trauma. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 16, 2017
63% The Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume One (2017) A series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though "interesting developments" killed director Shane Abbess' dog. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2017
91% Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) Zahler's screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2017
11% Against the Night (2017) The film vacillates between two explanations for the hauntings - one supernatural, one boring - strobing back and forth until the film's final, exasperating twist. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2017
85% Dave Made a Maze (2017) Cardboard is cheap, and by marshalling a tiny budget toward craft-store set design, Watterson builds a movie that's genuinely bigger on the inside. - L.A. Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2017
No Score Yet The Layover (2017) To accept these characters, you have to suspend your disbelief and any knowledge about real-life women. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2017
75% Unleashed (2017) An inoffensive Hallmark card of an indie comedy, as indifferently intended by the sender as it is regarded by the recipient. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2017
47% Brave New Jersey (2017) Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon-ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren't particularly weird. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2017
10% Kill Switch (2017) An ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 14, 2017
26% Camera Obscura (2017) The implied conditional logic governing the camera's curse doesn't extend to the film's amateurish discontinuities ... - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2017
85% Afterimage (Powidoki) (2017) Director and co-writer Andrzej Wajda's story is a vise that inexorably tightens on the artist as he loses his job, his gallery, and the professional credentials required for artists to work. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2017
50% Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (2017) Though visually expansive ... the film feels emotionally intimate. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2017
86% Tomorrow Ever After (2017) All of this might be profoundly silly if it weren't built around Thier's dignity and gentle humor. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2017
No Score Yet Rackstraw Downes: a painter (2014) Glacial and mesmerizing, the documentary equivalent of droning Tibetan singing bowls, a work crafted to induce its audience into the same contemplative state as its subject at work. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2017
83% Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back (2017) In this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work, and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2017
32% Salt and Fire (2017) Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty ... - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2017
34% The Assignment (2017) Rodriguez absolutely tears it up as a stomping, cussing nuclear core of male swagger, both before and after the surgery. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2017
25% Atomica (Deep Burial) (2017) Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 15, 2017
100% Love & Taxes (2017) As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2017
89% Dying Laughing (2017) The film compiles their anecdotes and observations to create a kind of universal stand-up monomyth that flows seamlessly through chapters. - L.A. Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 24, 2017
35% A Dog's Purpose (2017) A dog's purpose, it turns out, is to be reincarnated into a different sappy mini-Hallmark movie after every death. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2017
100% Saving Banksy (2017) Inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2017
67% Rainbow Time (2016) Lynskey is a luminous counterpoint to Phillips's energetic earthiness, but they can't lift a story with so much killjoy ballast. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 2, 2016
74% Danny Says (2016) Its principal figure has an interesting past and a gift for storytelling. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2016
64% Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children isn't a passion project for Burton -- it's another adaptation, based on the young-adult novels by Ransom Riggs, but it's perfectly aligned with the director's theory of outsider exceptionalism. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 25, 2016
71% Generation Startup (2016) It's not very interesting! - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 22, 2016
95% Command and Control (2016) Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 19, 2016
No Score Yet Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? (2016) Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? gets all its tropes, beats, and characters from ghastly sitcoms of the 1990s - long-running trash like Full House, Home Improvement, Family Matters, and The Nanny. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2016
57% Brother Nature (2016) There's nothing new in the friction between these characters, but it's fun to watch a couple of pros showboating on the field, even when the stakes aren't high. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2016
61% War Dogs (2016) Hill ... heaves War Dogs onto his back the way those terrifying, osteomuscular World's Strongest Man competitors carry refrigerators and absolutely tears past everyone else on the field ... - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 16, 2016
33% Operation Chromite (2016) South Korean reverence for MacArthur and the U.S. military is evident here in the same way that "Our Warmest Congratulations on Your Graduation" is evident in a Hallmark card. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2016
No Score Yet Amateur Night (2016) The gross-out scenes and raunchy banter between the film's sex workers are funny, but its world is pretty small and unsurprising. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2016
55% Can We Take a Joke? (2016) It's not the state that has turned against them; it's audiences. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 28, 2016
94% Blood Simple (1984) Though the film has a few exposed seams, it's tightly composed and beautifully shot in a way that easily rivals more expensive features. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2016
60% Roseanne for President! (2016) Hakeem is amazing, always energized and totally committed. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2016
91% Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made (2016) There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2016
17% Careful What You Wish For (2016) Jonas is incapable of making simple facial expressions, let alone evincing existential dread. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 9, 2016
54% Dough (2016) A mirthful, edgeless dramedy. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 27, 2016
No Score Yet The Dog Wedding (2016) The film never reconciles the incongruities of its constituent parts, which hang together like toothpaste and orange juice. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2016
85% Boom Bust Boom (2016) Jones presents a stark picture of a bifurcated economic system: the real one, in which ordinary citizens struggle; and the financial economy, in which the livelihoods of citizens are leveraged by the wealthy for speculative bets. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2016
No Score Yet Courting Des Moines (2016) It's shot and performed with the earnestness of Christian improv comedy and the artlessness of the training videos at fast-food restaurants. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 25, 2016