Seanax.com

Seanax.com is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Sean Axmaker
Rating Title/Year Author
Our Man in Havana (1960) Sean Axmaker ... a lampoon of international espionage games and the gullible officers running Britain's MI6 like an old boy's club. Everyone on their honor and all that. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Ghost in the Shell (1996) Sean Axmaker ... Oshii's dazzling science fiction work mixes adventure, mystery, and metaphysics in a future where humans are routinely augmented with bionics and electronic implants, and then follows it into the next evolutionary step. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Lovers on the Pont-Neuf (1991) Sean Axmaker ... a lush cinematic painting of love, passion, and madness expressed in a romantic surrealist style and images charges with color and magic. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Killer Elite (1975) Sean Axmaker It's right in tune with the cinema of paranoia and conspiracy that bloomed in the seventies while also jumping on the martial arts craze with Caan taking on ninja warriors ... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Sean Axmaker It plays like a pulp noir thriller by way of a road movie of the damned, marinated in mescal and left to rot in the desert sun. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) Sean Axmaker Garner is a master playing the easy-going straight man with a mix of wit and practicality... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) Sean Axmaker Peter Cushing is perfectly cast as the great detective, the very embodiment of science and reason (which also made him such a great Van Helsing in the Dracula series)... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Summer Lovers (1982) Sean Axmaker ... not your usual eighties sex romp.... takes an adult look at love, sex, and modern romance in the uninhibited world of the Greek islands. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Holy Motors (2012) Sean Axmaker From its enigmatic opening scenes, which sends the viewers into a mysterious voyage a la Alice through the looking glass that ends up in a movie theater, Holy Motors (2012) is a celebration of the magic, imagination, and primal power of the movies. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Marketa Lazarová (1968) Sean Axmaker ... a film of primal imagery, poetic filmmaking, and ephemeral storytelling that looks hewn out of the stone and wood and the very earth of the ground beneath it. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The American Friend (1977) Sean Axmaker The cool, cunning sociopath of Highsmith's novel becomes a restless international hustler, selling art forgeries and brokering deals (some of which may actually be legal) while travelling back and forth through Germany, France, and the United States. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Thieves (2012) Sean Axmaker ... Asia's answer to the Ocean's films, a sleek, snappy heist movie with plenty of working parts, eccentric personalities, and convoluted plotlines ... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
What Have They Done to Solange? (1972) Sean Axmaker ... one of the masterpieces of giallo, the distinctive Italian take on horror that combines a poetic, haunting beauty with Grand Guignol gore and a bent of sexual perversity. It's also one of the most disturbing entries in the genre... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) Sean Axmaker ... hasn't the credentials of Dog Day Afternoon or The French Connection but this ingenious crime caper / hostage drama is one of the great New York crime films of the 1970s. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Free Enterprise (1998) Sean Axmaker William Shatner plays William Shatner as a vulnerable, vainglorious ham, a sad clown who gets along with everybody but strikes out in romance, drinks to excess and spins his fantasy projects with hope against hopelessness... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
A Simple Plan (1998) Sean Axmaker Sam Raimi, best known for wowing audiences with stylistic gymnastics and manic mayhem, directs this quietly desperate thriller with chilly restraint... EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
The Connection (1961) Sean Axmaker Experimental theater meets cinéma verité with a self-aware sensibility: drama in documentary form. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Maryland (2015) Sean Axmaker The disorder of the title isn't limited to Vincent's PTSD and alienation. His entire world is wired into violence and instability. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Neruda (2016) Sean Axmaker Call it Larraín's Citizen Kane, the story of a man's life as understood through the stories surround him and the power that such stories and perceptions have. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2017
Deluge (1933) Sean Axmaker Deluge is pre-code and made outside the studio system (distributed by RKO), which gives the creators a little more freedom to imagine life after the fall in terms a studio would resist. EDIT
Posted Mar 16, 2017
Mildred Pierce (1945) Sean Axmaker You don't think of Michael Curtiz, the great house director of Warner Bros. spectacles and prestige pictures, as one of the great noir directors but the opening twenty minutes or so is a master class in film noir directing... EDIT
Posted Mar 16, 2017
Million Dollar Baby (2004) Sean Axmaker Always one of America's most undervalued directors, Clint Eastwood is proving himself the American cinema's national treasure in the third act of his career. EDIT
Posted Mar 16, 2017
45 Years (2015) Sean Axmaker Rampling is a master at playing calculating, cold figures, hard, emotionless women who let nothing through their hard stare and locked expression. In 45 Years she lets the vulnerability show... EDIT
Posted Mar 16, 2017
Something Wild (1961) Sean Axmaker ... a character drama about two damaged people unable to articulate or communicate their feelings to others, which puts the focus on the physical performance: gestures, expressions, body language, the unexpected reaction to situations. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
The Front Page (1931) Sean Axmaker Is this the stuff of comedy? It is in the hands of Hecht and MacArthur, former newspapermen with plenty to say about the cutthroat tactics of journalists. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
The Swindle (1997) Sean Axmaker It takes too long to get started and the playful coda is far too precious, but Chabrol builds to a vice-grip tension as small timers face the terror of big time killers... EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
L'Enfer (1994) Sean Axmaker [Claude] Chabrol injects [Henri-George] Clouzot's dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock's voyeuristic obsessions and with his own empathy for the tormented husband. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Betty (1992) Sean Axmaker Neither mystery nor crime thriller, Betty is a psychological drama in two halves... EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Taxi Driver (1976) Sean Axmaker ... a primal portrait and uncompromising vision carved out of the New York night, the summer heat, and the garbage of the Times Square cesspool. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
In the Mood for Love (2000) Sean Axmaker There may be no more sensual director in the world than Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai, and In the Mood for Love is one of his richest and most melancholy works, a shadow dance of would-be lovers sketched in suggestions and intimations. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Doctor Strange (2016) Sean Axmaker Doctor Strange has all the strengths of a Marvel movie-a well-told story, a well-tuned sense of humor about itself, a personal drama to shape the hero's journey-as well as all the weaknesses (conventions of a superhero origin tale are getting repetitive). EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Il Poliziotto E Marcio (1976) Sean Axmaker The brutal business of mob enforcement is executed with unflinching directness. They don't simply take care of an inconvenient witness, they complete the job by taking out the man's beloved cat with the same weapon. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
The Italian Connection (1973) Sean Axmaker (Henry) Silva and (Woody) Strode inspired Jules and Vincent (played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Kidnap Syndicate (1976) Sean Axmaker One of di Leo's greatest strengths is his fascination with and focus on process and detail, and one of the pleasures of his mob movies is the detail with which he observes the execution of everything from a payoff to an assassination. EDIT
Posted Mar 10, 2017
Milk (2008) Sean Axmaker Penn's performance is inspiring, a transformation that finds the heart and soul of a historical figure and sends blood pumping through a man who has become practically deified over the decades. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Ixcanul (2015) Sean Axmaker The feature debut of Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante is a beautiful and unsentimental portrait of traditional Mayan culture where peasants live in huts without electricity or running water ... EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Fatima (2015) Sean Axmaker Philippe Faucon's compassionate drama of an Algerian émigré in Lyon, based on the memoirs of Fatima Elayoubi, stars Soria Zeroual as Fatima, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters, working multiple jobs as a cleaner to give her girls a better life. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Night Will Fall (2014) Sean Axmaker ... Alfred Hitchcock himself was drafted to shape the footage into a documentary that would play for audiences on both sides of the war. It was never completed. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
The Salvation (2014) Sean Axmaker It could be Danish filmmaker Kristian Levring's answer to the spaghetti western (this one shot in South Africa with American landscapes CGIed into the background) with a sensibility that echoes the savage frontier novels of Cormac McCarthy. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Frailty (2002) Sean Axmaker ... marvelously off-balance and under-the-skin creepy from the first few minutes. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Twilight (2008) Sean Axmaker The sequels became increasingly silly and overwrought but the original Twilight (2008) is actually kind of interesting even if you are not a devotee of the fan fic-turned-bestseller series. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Shotgun Stories (2007) Sean Axmaker Nichols' original take on classic themes of vengeance and retribution is dropped into a world of real people struggling with the real problems of making a living, taking responsibility for families and dealing with the betrayals of the past. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Jackie (2016) Sean Axmaker The emotions are muted, suggested in gestures and details, as is the drama. Jackie doesn't deliver the catharsis you might expect from the subject matter. It's more interested in the nuances of character... EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Call of Heroes (2016) Sean Axmaker This is real old school action drama, the kind of Hong Kong movie that wears its heart on its sleeve and tends to wave it around with utterly sincere speeches about justice and duty. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2017
Loving (2016) Sean Axmaker The title is more than just a form of shorthand or a clever double-meaning. It is the core of the film. This is about a marriage, a couple deeply in love and devoted to their family, who just want to live together in their home state. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2017
Certified Copy (2010) Sean Axmaker Imagine a cinematic equivalent of a Picasso cubist portrait, but instead of showing multiple perspectives of an object in an image, it presents experiences from different periods in a life in a single narrative. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2017
Kill and Pray (1967) Sean Axmaker Thanks to the power of spaghetti western conventions, you don't need to know the history to get the message, and you don't need to embrace the message to appreciate the brutal justice. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2017
Long Way North (2015) Sean Axmaker This is traditional hand-drawn animation with an unconventional visual style, less drawn than painted with big, bold fields of color and details suggested in splashes of shadow or small, simple lines. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2017
My Beloved Bodyguard (2016) Sean Axmaker This is a classic Hong Kong marriage of weepy melodrama and brutal, bone-crunching action, and there's a touching sweetness and tragedy to the story of the quiet, reclusive old man, a career soldier now abandoned by family and by his very mind. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2017
Magic Mike (2012) Sean Axmaker Matthew McConaughey uses the drawling, at times oily charm to play a low-rent impresario determined to move his weekend enterprise into prime-time Miami and he's superb, and yet it's Tatum who impresses here. EDIT
Posted Feb 14, 2017