Adam Nayman
Tomatometer-approved critic
| Biography: |
a 21 year old film critic at Eye Magazine in Toronto, Adam has been writing about movies for as long as he can remember, and just can't believe they're paying him for it.
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| Favorites: |
2001: A Space OdysseyGrand IllusionManos: Hands of Fate400 Blows
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| Publications: | Boxoffice Magazine, Cineaste Magazine, eye WEEKLY, Film Comment Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Sight and Sound, AV Club, Reverse Shot, Little White Lies, The Grid, The Dissolve, The Walrus, The Ringer, Cinema Scope |
| Location: | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 98% | First Reformed (2018) |
This scenario is serious almost to the point of silliness: It could be parody of a morality play. But the heaviness is also essential to the architecture and impact of what I'm thinking is the year's first maybe-great American movie.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted May 21, 2018
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| 32% | Fahrenheit 451 (2018) |
As an attempt to really bother an audience, Fahrenheit 451 is a failure; at best, it's a mildly irritating waste of some major talent.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted May 17, 2018
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| 87% | Tully (2018) |
Even the most resourceful, imaginative filmmaker would be hard-pressed to redeem Diablo Cody's screenplay.‐ Reverse Shot
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
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| 5/5 | 86% | Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) (2018) |
Scintillating and complex, boasting a career-best performance from Juliette Binoche.‐ Little White Lies
Read More | Posted Apr 18, 2018
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| 73% | Ready Player One (2018) |
Turns out that treating the movies entirely as a jungle gym brings out Peter Pan's inner brat. He's made a movie for lost boys. ‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Apr 4, 2018
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| 45% | The Strangers (2008) |
Bertino's directorial smarts are on display from the first slow-cut montage of rural homes glimpsed from the window of a moving car. It's a passage suggesting free-floating, arbitrary menace.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Mar 9, 2018
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| 96% | The Death of Stalin (2018) |
As long as The Death of Stalin is sticking it to the hypocrites in the Kremlin-mocking their vanity, pride, and other deadly sins-it's got the righteous riotousness of its creator's best work.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
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| 87% | Annihilation (2018) |
Garland's Annihilation is disturbing. Not the whole way through, maybe, but there's at least one scene that qualifies as high-octane nightmare fuel...Annihilation is well-made and absorbing, and yet still not quite its own thing in the end. ‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Feb 23, 2018
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| 93% | Loveless (Nelyubov) (2018) |
The characters have no life beyond what they symbolise, including Alexey himself, whose absence is the biggest metaphor of them all: he's the lost innocence of a society deep in the throes of self-absorption.‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2018
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| 91% | Phantom Thread (2018) |
Phantom Thread's apparent severity is a brilliant disguise that only really unravels in retrospect: what's underneath is a battle-of-the-sexes comedy that ruthlessly strips away layers of archetype and artifice.‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2018
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| 57% | The Commuter (2018) |
The Commuter's own problems in the home stretch don't damage it too badly, but because Collet-Serra is generally so good at what he does, it's important to hold him to a high standard.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2018
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| 87% | The Post (2018) |
This might be the worst thing he's ever filmed. These were my thoughts during the final scene of The Post, a movie I found flawed and unconvincing but never truly bad until the last 45 seconds, at which point I sort of wanted to hide under my seat.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Dec 26, 2017
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| 51% | Downsizing (2017) |
Downsizing's coda has been designed to tell us precisely how and what to feel about what we've seen, and it makes an otherwise admirably sprawling, discombobulating movie feel that much smaller as a result.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2017
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| 31% | Wonder Wheel (2017) |
This is sophisticated filmmaking, but so what? Wonder Wheel is magical in a superficial way; it has a surface beauty that can't disguise the material's basic banality and ugliness-or the feeling that we've seen it all before.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Dec 1, 2017
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| 68% | Happy End (2017) |
Not only is Happy End less imperious and prescriptive than its predecessors, it's also more generous, both to its characters and to the audience. ‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Nov 30, 2017
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| 52% | Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017) |
What's even harder to take seriously is the film's late shift into genre territory, which includes the most shameless and unnecessary car chase I've seen in a long time. ‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Nov 22, 2017
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| 96% | Mudbound (2017) |
What really lifts the heaviness of Mudbound's story over the top is the excellence of its cast, starting with Mulligan, who plays Laura as a woman whose adaptability to farm life is more about survival instinct than enthusiasm.‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Nov 22, 2017
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| 92% | Good Time (2017) |
The masterstroke of the script is how it takes a situation that, in almost any other film of this type, would be played for pathos... and instead strip-mines it for every last iota of moral ambiguity.‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Nov 17, 2017
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| 92% | Super Dark Times (2017) |
[Super Dark Times] is an impressive piece of work that deserves to be seen. And if it takes the hype around something more mainstream to draw attention to its existence, well, stranger things have happened.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Oct 27, 2017
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| 8% | The Snowman (2017) |
The storytelling in The Snowman is the cinematic equivalent of listening to somebody trying to remember the plot of a paperback they read in an airport 10 years ago.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Oct 22, 2017
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| 95% | Call Me by Your Name (2018) |
There's something quite touching about watching Stuhlbarg in Call Me by Your Name eight years after his breakthrough in A Serious Man.‐ Reverse Shot
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2017
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| 95% | Enough Said (2013) |
Enough Said, which is set in a Los Angeles so blandly lit that it barely seems to be playing itself, is a movie that seems made to be watched on On Demand (or on an airplane).‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2017
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| 5% | Flatliners (2017) |
Flatliners is a movie made by people who don't respect genre but try to fake it.‐ The Ringer
Read More | Posted Sep 29, 2017
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| 94% | Zama (2018) |
Zama takes on a strange and overpowering sense of liberation.‐ Reverse Shot
Read More | Posted Sep 29, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Endorphine (2015) |
Turpin shows real confidence slicing through mental and physical spaces, but that doesn't mean that he or his unrewardingly puzzling film get anywhere in the end.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 61% | Desierto (2016) |
Jonás Cuarón's Desierto has a certain abstract, conceptual power. ‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 50% | Der Nachtmahr (2015) |
On a formal level, the only thing that really distinguishes Der Nachtmahr is the thermonuclear sound design, which blows up every time the characters enter an underground night club.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 80% | Closet Monster (2016) |
Murder, masturbation, melancholy, molly-this is one overstuffed Canadian debut feature. Perhaps they should have cut the talking hamster. ‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 83% | Chevalier (2016) |
Anybody who doubts that the film's trivial pursuits belie a cutting, Buñuelian subtext should watch the final exterior shots carefully.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 97% | Brooklyn (2015) |
Brooklyn arrives duly hyped, and disappoints just as reliably.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 74% | The Hateful Eight (2015) |
The Hateful Eight may really be sort of terrible.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 45% | Knight of Cups (2016) |
On a single, devotedly attentive viewing, I couldn't grok the logic of these headings beyond the lamely prosaic.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| No Score Yet | X Quinientos (2016) |
X Quinientos is finally so schematic that its craftsmanship comes to feel like an airless enclosure for notions about loneliness and belonging that could really have used some breathing room.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 93% | Weirdos (2016) |
It's nice that this latest work by a filmmaker who has sometimes chased hipness past its expiration date concludes on a note of deliberate, intergenerational non-cool.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 89% | Werewolf (2018) |
The finely gradated interactions between the protagonists and different representatives of various institutional establishments place empathy and ambivalence side by side.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| No Score Yet | We Can't Make the Same Mistake Twice (2016) |
[Alanis Obomsawin's] never been a flashy or self-consciously dexterous director, and yet she's managed-here and elsewhere-one of the greatest tricks a documentarian can pull.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 56% | Trespass Against Us (2017) |
On-the-nose-ness, multiplied across the film's running time, undermines the film's sturdy dramatic arc and absorbing local texture.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 100% | Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016) |
As Denis Lenoir's camera recedes into a carefully bisected domestic composition, the boundaries between the past, the present, and the future shimmer and blur together in a way that suggests that nothing ever really slows down.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 94% | Prevenge (2017) |
If the script's conflation of delicate conditions is never quite as outrageous or unsettling as its creator intends, Prevenge is still filled with moments that show Lowe's skill as a director and as an actress.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 44% | It's Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) (2016) |
This pumped-up chamber drama feels like Dolan's stab at a Bergman movie, and it's predictably all cries and no whispers, with a few especially egregious sequences and a final shot with laughably pat symbolism.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 83% | The Fixer (Fixeur) (2016) |
The Romanian Nightcrawler is probably not the most accurate description of Adrian Sitaru's new film, but it captures something of its commitment to attacking present-tense fifth-estate ethics.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 83% | Denial (2016) |
A movie that stayed rigorously inside its heroine's muzzled sense of frustration could be compelling, but Jackson keeps cutting to superfluous subplots.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 87% | Christine (2016) |
A perfect exemplar of a bad good movie, Antonio Campos' Christine traps (an excellent) Rebecca Hall in a series of impeccably composed frames as the famously ill-fated Sarasota local news anchor Christine Chubbuck.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 23% | Below her Mouth (2017) |
Below Her Mouth's more significant claim to relevance is its all-female crew, but while Maya Bankovic's cinematography is typically fine, the production is unfortunately in the service of subpar material.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 22% | American Pastoral (2016) |
The whole production feels verged on the perch of camp.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 100% | Hello Destroyer (2016) |
[Hello Destroyer] is constructed sturdily enough to stand up to any forthcoming scrutiny, and maybe also built to last in a way that most feature debuts simply are not.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 91% | Elle (2016) |
On the level of craft, Elle is excellent.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 72% | The Birth of a Nation (2016) |
It's very strange to watch painful verities staged in a way that diminishes their power under the guise of amplifying it. This is a film about deep-seated systems of oppression that feels tonally like a superhero origin myth.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 78% | American Honey (2016) |
It's the strategic vaporousness of the entire enterprise-its canny refusal to be "about" anything except an immersion its own roiling, over-conscientiously detailed millennial milieu-that rankles.‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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| 88% | Jackie (2016) |
If Jackie has a conceptual emblem, this is it: messy reality splattering all over a carefully maintained façade. ‐ Cinema Scope
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2017
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