Rotten Tomatoes: Movies | TV Shows | Movie Trailers | Reviews (2024)

Joan Baez I Am a Noise (2023) David Walsh I Am a Noise sheds relatively little light on Baez’s artistic and social development, and what light it sheds on her inner life seems distorted. It is even less illuminating in regard to the period in which the singer came to prominence, the early 1960s.

Posted Mar 29, 2024

The Zone of Interest (2023) Joanne Laurier The Zone of Interest is a misguided and disoriented work, one that conceals the concrete historical circ*mstances that produced someone like Höss, and therefore weakens the ability of the population today to defeat and destroy the fascist menace.

Posted Mar 08, 2024

American Fiction (2023) Joanne Laurier In the end, what the film counterposes to “black trauma p*rn,” as Monk refers to it, which coins fortunes from backwardness, is a bland middle class household full of doctors.

Posted Feb 23, 2024

The Holdovers (2023) Joanne Laurier A pleasant, digestible film and the three leads are appealing. ... It is not a genuine advance for the director. The comedy-drama’s general trajectory and ultimately heartwarming denouement are set out for all to see virtually from its opening sequence.

Posted Feb 02, 2024

Poor Things (2023) David Walsh Bella comes to identify herself and her possibilities ... in accordance with Goethe’s notion that “Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world … Each new object truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.”

Posted Feb 02, 2024

Napoleon (2023) David Walsh Napoleon is a shallow collection of impressions, “psychological” insight of the dime-store variety and brief battle scenes, which are not even presented so as to explain Napoleon’s military prowess.

Posted Feb 02, 2024

Past Lives (2023) David Walsh This is not a bad film, but it is an intensely and conspicuously middle class film.

Posted Feb 02, 2024

May December (2023) David Walsh There are intriguing and subtle observations here about the self-centeredness of certain social layers, but not much more.

Posted Dec 30, 2023

Between Two Worlds (2021) David Walsh Overall, although Between Two Worlds is sincere enough, it has a rather tepid, unadventurous character. The subject matter is worthwhile, but the film is hardly ground-breaking.

Posted Nov 02, 2023

The Present (2020) Joanne Laurier The short film treats the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, focusing on the brutal checkpoint system.

Posted Nov 02, 2023

El Conde (2023) Joanne Laurier Chilean director Pablo Larraín ... has made a horror-satire, the award-winning El Conde (The Count), which imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire. It is a complicated, dark, disturbing film about fascism, bourgeois corruption and counterrevolution.

Posted Nov 02, 2023

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) David Walsh This is an appalling episode and an entirely legitimate subject for a film ... However, Scorsese does not treat the subject well. The three-and-a-half hour work is muddy, murky, repetitive and misanthropic, and even interminable in certain stretches.

Posted Nov 02, 2023

Asteroid City (2023) David Walsh Two themes or moods seem to predominate in Asteroid City: first, despite the entertaining-humorous elements, a general melancholy, a restrained, hushed quality; second, the sense that the writer-director is to a considerable extent overwhelmed by events.

Posted Aug 15, 2023

Barbie (2023) Joanne Laurier Barbie is strained and smug without much wit. One should bear in mind that Mattel, with revenue of $42 billion in 2022, partnered with Warner Bros. on the making of the movie.

Posted Jul 29, 2023

Oppenheimer (2023) David Walsh Oppenheimer is a serious and appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It is intended to leave viewers shaken, and it succeeds in that.

Posted Jul 28, 2023

Guantanamo Diary Revisited (2022) Joanne Laurier In Guantánamo Diary Revisited, Slahi—who endured countless forms of abuse at the hands of the nefarious “special projects” team between 2002 and 2004—and the filmmakers attempt to track down his torturers in the military and intelligence apparatus.

Posted Jul 20, 2023

Chevalier (2022) David Walsh Chevalier is seriously marred, not only by the gravitational pull of identity-racial politics but by a generally low level of historical knowledge and understanding.

Posted Jul 05, 2023

King Coal (2023) Joanne Laurier The present actuality of mine closures, devastated towns, COVID pandemic and a drug epidemic cannot be scrubbed away with fetching façades and charming dance moves.

Posted May 27, 2023

Bad Press (2023) Joanne Laurier Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s Bad Press opens with the revealing fact that only five of 574 sovereign Native American nations legally guarantee freedom of the press,

Posted May 27, 2023

Daughter of Rage (2022) Joanne Laurier To borrow a phrase, ideas never lead beyond the status quo but only beyond the ideas of the status quo (and sometimes not even that). Baumeister’s film is gut-wrenching, but the viewer is left hanging because of a lack of context.

Posted May 27, 2023

The Tuba Thieves (2023) David Walsh All in all, The Tuba Thieves too rambles aimlessly, hoping apparently that it will stumble by accident on important truths about sound, music and listening. Genuine insight does not emerge by accident.

Posted May 27, 2023

Milisuthando (2023) David Walsh The film points to various dilemmas, but it is short of important conclusions. It is easier to have feelings and intuitions, and injured feelings, than definite and substantive ideas.

Posted May 27, 2023

The March on Rome (2022) David Walsh Cousins makes only a fleeting reference to World War I and no mention at all of the wave of militant strikes that erupted in postwar Italy, culminating in the mass occupations of factories and shipyards in 1920.

Posted May 27, 2023

Tori and Lokita (2022) David Walsh It is rather drab and dull, without many compelling moments. Earnestness and conscientiousness are no substitute for artistic flair.

Posted May 27, 2023

American: An Odyssey to 1947 (2022) David Walsh American: An Odyssey to 1947 is a valuable and intriguing documentary film written and directed by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Danny Wu. It centers on the artistic and political evolution of US film director Orson Welles.

Posted May 27, 2023

My Lost Country (2022) David Walsh My Lost Country is a moving and poetically evocative film ... A piece of autobiography ... the work is intended ... as “an act of resistance” against the imperialist devastation of Iraqi culture and society.

Posted May 27, 2023

The Whale (2022) David Walsh One of the most deplorable elements of The Whale is its near celebration of defeat and resignation. The decision by Charlie to eat himself to death is treated as a meaningful act of self-sacrifice. Why would this possibly be so?

Posted Mar 24, 2023

Aftersun (2022) David Walsh The film is small, discreet, intimate, a little coy—at times, a bit self-involved and inward-turning. The somewhat self-conscious insistence on the lack of great drama can be tedious at times.

Posted Mar 24, 2023

Babylon (2022) Joanne Laurier Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

Posted Mar 24, 2023

The Swimmers (2022) Joanne Laurier The Swimmers indelibly depicts the horrors of the refugee crisis. ... The film makes no attempt, however, to explore why millions of Syrians, for example, have been forced to flee their homeland or to name those responsible.

Posted Mar 24, 2023

Living (2022) Joanne Laurier The film’s thrust is humane, but its themes and satirical efforts are somewhat diluted and diffuse.

Posted Feb 26, 2023

Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022) David Walsh A drama along those lines can be trite ... or it may find something fresh and original to say. But if a filmmaker simply wants to do a “love story” about people from opposed social backgrounds, he or she has no real need of Lawrence’s novel.

Posted Feb 10, 2023

To Leslie (2022) David Walsh To Leslie is not flawless, it has contrived and overwrought elements, but it unquestionably and sincerely strives for psychological and social realism. Riseborough is no doubt a fearless and committed performer.

Posted Feb 10, 2023

Voodoo Macbeth (2021) David Walsh Like so many artists at present, taking the line of least resistance, Voodoo Macbeth’s makers largely project their own limited concerns and interests back into the past. The results are weak, flat and muddled.

Posted Feb 10, 2023

The Fabelmans (2022) David Walsh Important art does not emerge from being cut off—or holding oneself apart—from broader realities, even if the source of that separation lies outside one’s immediate control, in definite historical and ideological difficulties.

Posted Feb 10, 2023

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) David Walsh Cameron ... has been fortunate to have emerged—and could only have emerged—in a culture that demanded so little: efficiency, productivity, special effects innovation, sustained bursts of mechanical spectacle, a minimum level of dramatic believability.

Posted Feb 10, 2023

White Noise (2022) David Walsh The film is lively, extravagant, and removes Baumbach, at least for a time, from the narrow confines of the not very fruitful or absorbing middle-class introspection ... within which he previously seemed to be enmeshed.

Posted Jan 15, 2023

Tár (2022) David Walsh Tár, written and directed by Todd Field, is a drama about a world-famous classical music conductor and how she is brought low by a sordid sex scandal. It is a serious and worthwhile film, whatever the balance of its various merits and defects.

Posted Jan 15, 2023

Tantura (2022) Joanne Laurier Given the current official state of Israeli politics, with a new coalition government that includes a fascist party, Schwarz’s effort took some courage.

Posted Jan 15, 2023

Farha (2021) Joanne Laurier Farha has come under ferocious criticism from Israeli officials, especially when Netflix announced plans to stream the work.

Posted Jan 15, 2023

200 Meters (2020) Joanne Laurier 200 Meters is the first (and an impressive) feature written and directed by Palestinian-Jordanian Ameen Nayfeh (born 1988). The fiction film ... depicts the relentless cruelty of the Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinians

Posted Jan 15, 2023

Triangle of Sadness (2022) David Walsh In the new film, reflecting the force of processes too obvious to be ignored, Östlund has expanded his scope. The English-language film is uneven, but its skewering of capitalism is certainly welcome.

Posted Dec 02, 2022

She Said (2022) David Walsh She Said is a bland, stilted work largely without genuine dramatic life or energy. No element of ambiguity or complexity is allowed to intrude. Whatever conceptions and prejudices the viewer enters with, he or she leaves with.

Posted Nov 23, 2022

Causeway (2022) Joanne Laurier Causeway is narrow and shamefully non-committal. Refusing to seriously examine the conflict in which Lynsey suffered her devastating injuries ... the film ends up adapting itself to American militarism and its homicidal operations all over the world.

Posted Nov 23, 2022

Till (2022) Joanne Laurier The filmmakers are incapable of calling on the strongest dramatic forms, of drawing on the noblest ideas—above all, they are not interested in making a universal appeal.

Posted Nov 07, 2022

The Humans (2021) David Walsh How does making the work resemble a horror movie add anything to our understanding of the Blakes and their relationships, to each other and to the world? It might be one of those overly clever conceptions that should have been set aside.

Posted Nov 07, 2022

Cherry (2021) Joanne Laurier Cherry is a commendable film, but certainly not without weaknesses. It is limited by its general air of pessimism and resignation.

Posted Nov 01, 2022

Amsterdam (2022) David Walsh It focuses attention on an important historical episode, the effort by elements in the ruling class to organize a coup in 1933–34 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, but severely fails in its treatment of the event as well as its contemporary significance.

Posted Nov 01, 2022

Gladiator (2000) David Walsh Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, is enjoyable, as long as it's not taken too seriously... Everything is quite improbable, but professionally done and played to the hilt.

Posted Nov 01, 2022

The Woman King (2022) Joanne Laurier In the case of The Woman King, we have anti-history mobilized in the selfish interests of an upper-middle class milieu, rewriting the past for money and status.

Posted Oct 14, 2022