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.

Favorites:

2001: A Space OdysseyGrand IllusionManos: Hands of Fate400 Blows

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

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
50%	Underwater (2020)	As for Stewart, she'll hopefully get a chance to carry something big and shiny that's also less perfunctory, because her boredom during Underwater is palpable. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 10, 2020
74%	Richard Jewell (2019)	Hauser is Richard Jewell's most persuasive asset, and Eastwood shows considerable trust in his star, letting him fully inhabit the contradictions of a man who performatively models a form of meek-shall-inherit humility... - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 16, 2019
85%	Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)	If there's something potentially dangerous or reactionary about Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood's nostalgia for a bygone era and its trickle-down frontier heroism, it's a tension that Tarantino plays with thoughtfully... - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 9, 2019
90%	The Souvenir (2019)	Superbly crafted and acted on every level, The Souvenir is one of the best British films of recent years. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 9, 2019
82%	High Life (2019)	Its brilliance lies in Denis's understanding that the difference between these two extreme polarities is really nothing at all. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 9, 2019
94%	Transit (2019)	...it makes the case for Petzold as the decade's most exemplary foreign arthouse auteur. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 9, 2019
97%	Knives Out (2019)	As a smartly crafted and shaped piece of entertainment, Johnson's movie comes off especially good in a moment when such mid-budget, story-driven movies have all but disappeared; it's a throwback that's also an outlier. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 2, 2019
96%	Atlantics (2019)	...a movie that works to keep its audience suspended vertiginously between states of focus and drift, of realism and fantasy, of confusion and understanding. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 2, 2019
95%	A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)	Marielle Heller's movie isn't driving at docudrama authenticity; it's more of a meditation on the meaning of Mr. Rogers, and of the implications-real and imagined-of a world made in his image. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 22, 2019
97%	Dolemite Is My Name (2019)	Good vibes are infectious only to a point, and two hours of strenuously conflict-free high jinks, with didactic dialogue asserting Moore's importance, eventually gets wearying. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 25, 2019
80%	Jojo Rabbit (2019)	Perhaps it's the ease of Jojo Rabbit that made it an enervating viewing experience. Waititi's ability to engineer emotional effects is real, but it also verges on the mechanical... - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 21, 2019
91%	Uncut Gems (2019)	Even as they prevent the narrative from hurtling off the tracks, the Safdies keep plunging Howard-and the audience-downward, culminating in a final shot that, magically, comes out the other side. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 19, 2019
80%	Jojo Rabbit (2019)	If all of Waititi's smirking fascist slapstick is meant to take away Hitler's power 70 years after the fact... it's the satirical equivalent of dunking on a two-foot hoop (or a basketful of deplorables). - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 15, 2019
70%	Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2020)	Following up his palatably artful (and widely garlanded) Korean-language debut In Her Place, Albert Shin shows a willingness to plunge headlong into genre waters, an immersion that's bracing, if not quite purifying. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2019
84%	Color Out of Space (2020)	What's less assured is the tone, which could generously be described as "elastic..." but strikes one more precisely as desperate, unable to commit to either full-on gross-out comedy or apocalyptic melancholy. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2019
88%	Tammy's Always Dying (2019)	There are all kinds of ways to display directorial chops, and even if Tammy's Always Dying isn't much to look at, Johnson manages her cast well. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 9, 2019
47%	Guest of Honour (2019)	Guest of Honour is sort of a ridiculous movie, and yet the things holding it together-above all its maker's faith in the principles and possibilities of narrative as a restless, ever-shifting experiment in architecture-are worth taking seriously. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 8, 2019
83%	Waves (2019)	The moment when everything starts goes wrong for Tyler involves a piece of tissue stretched well past the breaking point, a rupture caused by stubbornness and egomaniacal overreaching-it is as good a metaphor as any for the movie as a whole. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 7, 2019
81%	Sea Fever (2019)	Sea Fever just sort of watchably bobs along, leaving very little in its wake. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 7, 2019
89%	Bacurau (Nighthawk) (2019)	... its excellent craftsmanship and satisfying follow-through should earn it a devoted cult. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 6, 2019
99%	Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019)	The speed and ferocity with which things fall apart-and with which Parasite mutates from a sly upstairs-downstairs satire into something more literally and tonally multileveled-is something to behold. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 6, 2019
No Score Yet	Castle in the Ground (2019)	There's a lot of talent here, and the film holds together, but it doesn't do much more-it accomplishes being accomplished, and then it's over. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 6, 2019
65%	The Running Man (1987)	However far away from the book's original vision the movie may stray, it ends up right in Arnold's wheelhouse, letting him dispatch a series of worthy rivals with aplomb. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
91%	Stand by Me (1986)	It's among the light sprinkling of King tales that elide the supernatural entirely. But that doesn't mean it isn't morbid... - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
73%	Creepshow (1982)	The team-up of director George A. Romero with King was seen as a monumental summit; the movie that resulted from their collaboration is uneven, but its best bits hold up as well as anything in either master's canon. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
61%	Cujo (1983)	The movie is as nasty and single-minded as Cujo himself: It's simple, and it works. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
72%	The Mist (2007)	H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos has long been one of King's guiding influences, and Frank Darabont's adaptation of The Mist honors that relationship while also working as a 21st-century political parable. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
71%	Christine (1983)	If the '80s were partially defined by revenge-of-the-nerd narratives, Christine is more about the horror of the geek-id unleashed. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
91%	The Dead Zone (1983)	What makes the The Dead Zone so frightening-and finally deeply moving-is how it commits to the psychology of a guy whose destiny is destroyed and fulfilled by the way he's slipping through the cracks. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
92%	Carrie (1976)	It opens with an insidiously brilliant update of Psycho's shower scene and ends with a jump scare that Hitchcock would have envied; in between, it's merely the tenderest and most affecting movie ever made out of one of King's novels. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
85%	The Shining (1980)	[It] Kubrick's gallows humor, which was always about confronting and critiquing his audience's baser impulses: reinventing The Shining as a slapstick comedy about murderous patriarchal insecurity is a daring move. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
91%	The Lighthouse (2019)	If it's possible for a movie made with impeccable craft to be boring and even enervating, here's a candidate. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
87%	The Vast of Night (2019)	The Vast of Night [has] a polished, professional look, punctuated by sinuous tracking shots and featuring better-than-expected acting, both by its leads and a cast of voice actors whose seen-but-not-heard performances are tremendously effective. - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 5, 2019
87%	What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (2019)	In the end, I'm not sure that What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? really "says" anything, and that's OK. Sometimes, the simple acts of looking and listening trump any attempts at eloquence. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 23, 2019
82%	Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019)	Cold Case Hammarskjöld's wild postulations about secret political assassinations and biologically engineered viruses have a gripping, gruesome urgency: Watching it is like getting sucked into a Reddit thread at 3 in the morning. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 23, 2019
49%	Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)	Because Linklater never truly risks alienating his audience, the story's central mechanism of Bernadette as an intractable outsider rings hollow. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 16, 2019
85%	Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)	A slow, indulgent ramble through a gloriously recreated past, placidly hypnotised by its own stately paced and luminous nostalgia. - Sight and Sound EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 15, 2019
63%	A Perfect Getaway (2009)	The intimacy of A Perfect Getaway can be read as Twohy's response to his adventures in mega-budget moviemaking, as can its smartly self-reflexive references to the craft of storytelling itself. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 9, 2019
86%	Luz (2019)	Less-is-more philosophy is crucial to the film's effectiveness. Instead of letting his lack of resources be a liability, Singer leans into the benefits of minimalism. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 16, 2019
83%	Crawl (2019)	What's likable about Aja's new thriller, Crawl, is how the director pares down his indulgences into a fine, sharp point. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 16, 2019
84%	The Hottest August (2019)	The Hottest August confronts the urban, cosmopolitan, festival-going audience that will inevitably comprise its first (and hopefully not last) wave of reception with its own mirror image... - Cinema Scope EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 15, 2019
90%	Luce (2019)	When it goes for grand sociological gesture, Luce reeks of effort, but when the film hunkers down with its characters and their complications, it's compelling stuff. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 15, 2019
83%	Midsommar (2019)	The key dichotomy in Midsommar's network of contradictions is the one between humor and horror, which also informs many of the genre classics that Aster admires. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 3, 2019
91%	Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)	I very much wanted Far From Home to keep the Spider-Man strand of Marvel's experiment-slash-empire-building taut and strong. It doesn't quite hold, though; not all the way through, and not in all the places that count, either. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 28, 2019
33%	Domino (2019)	It's hard to imagine any critic-myself included-suggesting we're looking at an all-time great finale. But I did laugh out loud while feeling liberated, guilty and disgusted for doing so. DePalma's still got it. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 5, 2019
42%	Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)	It's one thing for a blockbuster to skillfully mix tones; it's another when nobody involved in the production seems to have been decisive about managing the overall vibe. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted May 31, 2019
57%	Brightburn (2019)	Its harsh, pitiless violence could earn it a cult, but it's ultimately a workmanlike movie playing at being something more renegade-an unconvincing disguise. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted May 29, 2019
78%	Touki Bouki (Journey of the Hyena) (1973)	...a work of potent postcolonial commentary. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 15, 2019
100%	My Brother's Wedding (1984)	My Brother's Wedding is, above all, representative of a strain of American independent cinema conceived and produced in opposition to (and largely in spite of) the surrounding pop-culture climate. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 15, 2019
No Score Yet	Mural Murals (Mur Murs) (1982)	Varda travelled to Compton and trained her camera's curious, attentive, appreciative lens on a series of murals whose defiance, beauty, and simple existence demolished dominant narratives about Los Angeles' black and Chicano populations. - The Ringer EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 15, 2019