Andrew Kendall

Andrew Kendall
Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:
Andrew Kendall is a university lecturer in literature and film who writes a weekly film column for leading local newspaper Stabroek News.
Publications: Stabroek News

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
83% Happiest Season (2020) Even within the parameters of superficiality that come with holiday-romances, Happiest Season feels devoid of anything incisive. Rather than being light and buoyant, it feels incredibly false. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 3, 2020
44% The Lie (2020) The descent into chaos ends on a final shot of such egregious madness, I find myself more amused at Sud's impishness than annoyed at the film's own casual commitment to anarchy. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 3, 2020
96% Shithouse (2020) Shithouse is overflowing with empathy. That it manages to consistently be humorous amidst that empathy is a reward for audiences. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 3, 2020
86% On The Rocks (2020) On the Rocks feel like it should be the beginning of a series. You want to return to this world and the warm chemistry that Rashida Jones and Bill Murray have together. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2020
79% The Kid Detective (2020) The film'final act reflexes on itself in a way that is immediately satisfying; and, it turns The Kid Detective into a perceptive, genre bending thrill built on the backs of Adam Brody's incisive performance. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 16, 2020
98% Time (2020) Time becomes a work of restorative justice, inviting us to experience the film as a series of emotional beats, privileging the humanity in those so often ignored by the justice system. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2020
96% I Carry You with Me (2021) I Carry You With Me is bursting with empathy. Ewing's direction gives a warm and genuine embrace to these characters and then expands that embrace to the audience. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2020
88% Monsoon (2020) Monsoon privileges emotional distance as an aesthetic and thematic preoccupation and Khaou's gentleness in considering these characters becomes a tender tale of finding one's identity. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2020
76% Concrete Cowboy (2020) It has its value but the good intentions, a handful of tender moments, and a closing-credits sequence that feels worthy of its own documentary-feature, are not enough to make Concrete Cowboy feel essential. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2020
93% Another Round (Druk) (2020) Another Round feels skittish about digging beneath the surface and ends up feeling too tidy of a film to excavate the themes it only flirts with. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2020
75% Pieces of a Woman (2020) The more it goes on, the more frustrating its superficiality becomes and by the end Pieces of a Woman is compromised by its own narrative indecisiveness. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2020
91% Gaza Mon Amour (2020) Gaza mon amour develops and then slyly subverts the notions of our ideas of politics on film using a simple story of attempted romance to present a tender work of Palestinian cinema. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2020
71% Memory House (Casa de antiguidades) (2020) Memory House is a disorienting and fascinating invective against white supremacy that feels valuable in spite of, and because of, its narrative abstrusity. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2020
97% Night of the Kings (La Nuit des Rois) (2020) Night of Kings is a haunting and evocative fable that reflexively considers how storytelling becomes an act of survival. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 17, 2020
60% Monday (2020) Papadimitropoulos' dizzying ambivalence in tone and form ambitiously deepens the drama in Monday pulling excellent performances from Stan and Gough whose chemistry is critical to the film's allure. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 16, 2020
100% Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) In establishing the clear-eyed sharpness that defines the tension of the film, Zbanic's greatest ally is Jasna Ðuričić's who builds Aida's temerity, anxiety, indecisiveness and courage into a masterpiece of a performance. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2020
89% Limbo (2020) It feels like a small miracle that ,Limbo never feels condescending or prosaic. Instead, it's the empathy that sustains as it articulates the difficulty of forging one's identity in a strange land. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2020
98% One Night in Miami (2020) One Night in Miami is aware of its own metatextual implications - a film by black artists that considers black artists. It speaks to the moment, even when it does not have all the answers. But it doesn't need to. Its existence is enough. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
78% Akilla's Escape (2020) Akilla's Escape is best when Saul Williams is onscreen, imbuing Akilla with a restless but incisive energy that feels momentous. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
83% The Way Back (2020) . By the time the ending sequence comes, as subdued and meditative as the film that's come before, The Way Back has earned our respect as something thoughtful and precise in its focus. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
67% The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020) Like the painting that gives the film its title, it's not as profound as it makes itself out to be - deliberately so. That's part of its insouciant allure. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
79% How to Build a Girl (2020) There's not enough here to register as more than occasionally diverting, and so How to Build a Girl ends up falling apart. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
76% Summerland (2020) Swale is working towards a moral that is well-intentioned and progressive, but Summerland only understands these women as means to an easily predicted end. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
77% Military Wives (2020) Even when it's straining towards notes to make us feel good, Military Wives is recognising the uneasiness that at the centre of life during war time cutting through the sentiment with clarity and incisiveness. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
93% Around the Sun (2019) Around the Sun is part philosophy discourse, part romance, part science-fiction and a beguiling whole of something unusual and charming. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2020
95% Black Is King (2020) The film seems to arrive just at the right time. Who could predict that in 2020, amidst a worldwide reckoning on blackness and antiblack racism, Black is King would be, not just prescient, but terrifyingly necessary? - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2020
94% Palm Springs (2020) There's a lot going in here that feels larger than a 90-minute film. But even when the parts of the whole don't cohere, Palm Springs is unceasingly warm and pleasant. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
100% Miss Juneteenth (2020) Beharie is so in tune with the nuances of the film, that she avoids any entrapments of banality. People's camera is most confident when it allows Beharie's face to envelope the frame and react to the things around her. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
92% The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020) The theme that runs throughout Iannucci's Personal History is a self-reflexive and self-conscious awareness of the ways that writing and creation are acts of reclamation, incision and even desperation. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
92% Da 5 Bloods (2020) Da 5 Bloods is angry and indignant. But it is also hopeful and thoughtful. It lingers on in the mind. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
95% If Beale Street Could Talk (2019) If Beale Street Could Talk is not a perfunctory adaptation, but a visceral account of blackness as resilient, tender and necessary. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
92% The Assistant (2020) Green avoids any potential hokeyness and prevents anything here from seeming the least bit sensational by presenting the film as a lesson in grim tautness. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
93% End of the Century (2019) End of the Century resists any precious overtures at universality in a reach for specificity that overwhelms and in that specificity feels more moving than its initial casualness might suggest. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2020
89% Ema (2019) Larraín's ambition, daring and relentlessness in Ema feels startling and powerful when measured against many of his contemporaries. It is a singular piece of filmmaking. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 10, 2020
94% Bad Education (2019) Bad Education feels too incurious throughout its running time, content to present rather than analyse. This is not an inherent flaw but its ambivalence sits paradoxically with the way it regards itself. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
79% True History of the Kelly Gang (2020) If Ned Kelly's life flashed before his eyes before he died, one would image that the flashes would be visceral and sensuous rather than thoughtful and contemplative. And, in that way, True History of the Kelly Gang feels apt. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
44% Endings, Beginnings (2020) Doremus puts Shailene Woodley front and centre in a gift of a role, and for all the awkward patches of the narrative, the film becomes satisfying in spite of and then because of its ambling restlessness. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
88% Les Misérables (2020) The urgency that's pulsating through the film is endemic of that same restless energy that Ly is using to tap into a sense of angry despair that each character on screen seems to recognise. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
90% Dark Waters (2019) Dark Waters value is made manifest in the way it mixes the tender with the anxious, presenting rousing interrogation of the contemporary world that feels too angry to ignore. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
88% Onward (2020) Onward gets its job done and presents themes and questions that are interesting to consider, and if it feels too ambitious for its own good, it's doing more than most of the other films currently in theatres. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
63% Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) This is pure fluff, and it's likely destined to be forgotten by year's end. But considering it all, that's very likely all that Sonic the Hedgehog intends to be. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
78% Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020) Robbie's Harley Quinn is best deployed in small doses. By placing her front and centre, in a film that teases a more communal feminine interest, her unceasing penchant for the overzealous quickly becomes exhausting. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
87% Emma. (2020) This Emma is best considered as a magical sojourn to a dreamscape unbound by any semblance of reality. It is mprobable and beguiling throughout. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
13% Dolittle (2020) Dolittle announces itself as an adventure comedy, yet the adventure is nascent and the comedy is tedious. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
80% Jojo Rabbit (2019) Jojo Rabbit feels genuinely spontaneous from moment to moment even as Watiti's clear focus on motif and foreshadowing reveals a film that reflexes and reflects upon itself. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
21% Like a Boss (2020) The final revelation where the good guys outwit the one-dimensional villain is so turgid, because by that point we've forgotten that this crisis is supposed to be built on any tension. It all just plays as effortful, laboured and dull. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
89% 1917 (2020) 1917 ignores larger questions about war for something more personal and humanistic and George MacKay's excellent performance is key to this. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2020
20% Cats (2019) This is inconsistent stuff, surely, but "Cats" is also rewarding enough in bursts of passion that make it a genuinely intriguing experience. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2020
84% Just Mercy (2020) It is blunt, it is unambitious, it is repetitive and it harbours not a shred of trust for the intelligence of its audience. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2020
95% Little Women (2019) Little Women never goes for the easy thing, but instead keeps complicating our ideas of these characters, becoming an impossibly untidy, sprawling mess of a film - in the very best of ways. - Stabroek News EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 29, 2019