Armond White

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: National Review, NPR's Fresh Air, New York Press, Out Magazine, CityArts, First Things

Critics' Group: New York Film Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
99%	Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019)	Bong is an unfunny extremist. In Parasite, he annihilates the concept of the nuclear family by setting a brood of lower-class con artists against an upper-class family unit. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 11, 2019
96%	Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)	All these performances (Pain and Glory is the best-acted film of year) idealize complicated human relations. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 4, 2019
68%	Joker (2019)	Phoenix and Phillips turn Joker into a sociopolitical mishmash. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 2, 2019
83%	Judy (2019)	Judy's lapidary construction is a setting for Renée Zellweger's performance, which attempts a precarious tribute... Zellweger's sensitivity ensures that only a cruel viewer could ignore Garland's struggle against common obstacles. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 27, 2019
81%	Socrates (2019)	Trading on sentimentality, this type of storytelling coerces viewers by projecting social consciousness through juvenile media icons. Above all, the ploy is politically devious; the idea of innocence is manipulated as rhetoric. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 25, 2019
No Score Yet	Tattoo of Revenge (Rencor tatuado) (2019)	Tattoo of Revenge's kaleidoscopic cross-section of bohemian, underworld, and media types is such a sensual feast that it evokes the troubled temperaments of today's social disorder. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 20, 2019
93%	Nashville (1975)	Works of popular art are rarely so pertinent as to make viewers rethink their own lives. Seen today, Nashville fills in the intellectual, spiritual, and political chasm caused by Hollywood's juvenile Millennial escapism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 19, 2019
88%	Hustlers (2019)	Hustlers is appalling. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 13, 2019
85%	Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019)	Now that the fashionable Left has abandoned compassion -- and complexity -- this slicker-than-Michael Moore doc buries Roy Cohn as a paradigm for Machiavellian ruthlessness. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 12, 2019
87%	Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019)	Ronstadt speaks of herself honestly and modestly, but the talking-heads tributes in this doc are trite. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2019
69%	Bottom of the 9th (2019)	A rare, affecting baseball film, it's also an unapologetic, unhip redemption tale. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 6, 2019
88%	Blinded by the Light (2019)	Blinded by the Light actually avoids everything that is interesting about cross-ethnic pop culture. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 29, 2019
97%	American Factory (2019)	[A] facile, generalized survey. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 23, 2019
100%	Olivia (The Pit of Loneliness) (2019)	Director Audry and her sister, screenwriter Colette Audry, made Olivia as artists, not activists. And the cast of exquisitely nuanced actresses exercised imaginative understatement. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2019
79%	Good Boys (2019)	Thor's final school pageant performance of "I Want To Know What Love Is," intended to express his sense of growing apart, is the single most mawkish and dishonest movie ending so far this year. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 19, 2019
100%	Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas) (2019)	Children could enjoy watching the story as an ever-changing fable, but adults will get more out of its depiction of multifaceted political art. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 15, 2019
22%	The Kitchen (2019)	The Kitchen is neither a good movie nor a reliable dramatization of female power. It is, in fact, a laughable insult to women and their social circumstances. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 9, 2019
92%	Luce (2019)	More than a battle of wills between a high-school teacher and her star pupil, the movie Luce uses that familiar premise to explore the beliefs -- and the fears -- by which our enlightened, progressive society lives. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 2, 2019
85%	Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)	Finally, Tarantino asks audiences to think about life -- not just the movies. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 26, 2019
94%	Mike Wallace Is Here (2019)	Thanks to Belkin, we can appreciate the difference between what Wallace called "tough questions" and what an irate interview subject called "rude." - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 26, 2019
53%	The Lion King (2019)	Biblical and Shakespearean archetypes are trivialized by the new Disney. Its style of fake realism prevents one from imaginatively projecting onto the animation. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2019
96%	I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) (2019)	Barbarians makes the nightmare of Communist oppression, and its continuing effect on the popular and artistic psyche, absolutely clear -- and pertinent. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 18, 2019
No Score Yet	The New King of Comedy (2019)	Stephen Chow has replaced Steven Spielberg as the world's most humane, unifying filmmaker. The latest proof is The New King of Comedy. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 3, 2019
90%	Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)	This plot device, in which Spidey realizes duty and hormones, feels gimmicky to anyone not suckered by the Marvel-Pixar contrivance that makes formula analogous to "home." - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 3, 2019
100%	Toy Story 2 (1999)	Toy Story 2 shows how pop art can disarm your loftiest objections with unexpected wit and genuine insight. "Magical" describes it but not its aspects that are superlatively humane. - New York Press EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 1, 2019
95%	Control Room (2004)	Control Room leave viewers susceptible to the deceptions of politicians and media charlatans. - New York Press EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 28, 2019
62%	Yesterday (2019)	In this tragic new world, taste and feeling are ignored for fame and group-think correctness... Yesterday entertains this possibility as if it were fun. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 28, 2019
85%	Liberty Heights (1999)	It's atrocious. Twisted sociology. - New York Press EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 27, 2019
97%	Toy Story 4 (2019)	Pixar continues to indoctrinate viewers into childish, compulsive consumerism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 21, 2019
64%	Our Time (Nuestro tiempo) (2019)	In the nearly three-hour Our Time, Reygadas has gone completely worldly -- still aestheticizing nature and behavior, yet always bypassing the spiritual for the carnal. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 20, 2019
56%	The Dead Don't Die (2019)	In The Dead Don't Die, Jarmusch's hipster sense of brotherhood is an assertion of perpetual liberal schmaltz. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 14, 2019
92%	Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese (2019)	Here's the problem: Scorsese, whose moralistic ethnic thrillers or genre fantasies are politically evasive, picks up the usual leftist cant... The voice-of-a-generation routine is not helpful to a new, politically disingenuous era. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 13, 2019
54%	Ma (2019)	Ma's humor works best in its trailer, while the film itself is only fitfully funny. This isn't only a matter of Taylor and Landes's ineptitude and incoherence; Ma is the most strikingly conflicted Hollywood movie of the season... - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 7, 2019
33%	Domino (2019)	Each character's desperation and personal motivation are vivid; the global nightmare is conveyed with such quick efficiency that Domino plays like a B-movie dream of a great De Palma film. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 31, 2019
57%	Aladdin (2019)	Director Guy Ritchie's hackwork in this musical adventure film performs sleight of hand, moving so fast that his razzle-dazzle blurs any sense of personal ethnic insight. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 24, 2019
94%	Echo In the Canyon (2019)	Echo in the Canyon prizes class opportunity and artistic consciousness. It promises that musicians who stay true to their muse don't then have to make exasperating soundbites. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 22, 2019
90%	John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)	[Director Chad] Stahelski knows there's pleasure in movie kinetics. The sheer nerve of the relentless fight scenes is hilarious, and their proficiency is cinematically gratifying. Parabellum lifts him to action-movie heights. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 17, 2019
79%	Pasolini (2019)	This gives Salò, and the figurehead that Ferrara and Dafoe create from Pasolini's artistic courage, great and undeniable significance amid the political hypocrisy and artistic crises of today. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 15, 2019
96%	The Iron Giant (1999)	The Iron Giant should have been immediately recognized as a near-perfect, classical expression of imagination, combining childlike wonder and adult sophistication. - New York Press EDIT Read More \| Posted May 14, 2019
81%	Furious 7 (2015)	Furious 7 works on the simplest level: Bad guys die, good guys win. Success. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 10, 2019
51%	Tolkien (2019)	Giving priority to Peter Jackson's blockbuster doesn't make what Tolkien lived through profound; it distorts historical and cultural reality... All of life is seen as a boyhood tentpole adventure. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 10, 2019
89%	Non-Fiction (Doubles vies) (2019)	The film becomes insufferable when Assayas's perspective generates approval rather than criticism... Assayas resists judging his characters and winds up praising them. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 8, 2019
95%	Shadow (2019)	Most remarkably, the film's political conspiracy and moral fascination contain such depth of insight that Shadow achieves what deserves to be called visual Shakespeare. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 3, 2019
97%	Apocalypse Now (1979)	Although Apocalypse Now is not a great movie, it shows a still-impressive, politically inspired ambition -- a reminder of why film culture matters... Mixing pessimism with astonishment, it expanded cultural unease on a grand 70mm scale. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 1, 2019
93%	Being John Malkovich (1999)	For two hours, it works like the best music videos: making high-concept philosophies graspable, marvelous and fun. - New York Press EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 30, 2019
94%	Avengers: Endgame (2019)	Endgame's three-hour length suggests profundity, but each bout of knuckle-busting between the specially gifted vigilantes and the demonic Thanos either panders or, at best, is merely redundant. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 26, 2019
66%	The White Crow (2019)	The film is clear-eyed about immigration because it focuses on a privileged artist's selfishness, the part of his humanity that is inseparable from his ambition and probably inherent to his talent. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 25, 2019
81%	Fast Color (2019)	By bringing lead singer Poly Styrene's eccentric musical and political wit into Ruth's already mysterious saga, Hart interprets the millennial black girl's plight in her own, fresh way -- as universal. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 22, 2019
30%	Red Joan (2019)	Red Joan's sentimental exoneration of one woman's treason and sedition fits with how today's media pay tribute to the kaffeeklatsch of political resisters. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 18, 2019
92%	Sauvage / Wild (2019)	Sauvage/Wild is surprising and compelling for scenes that constantly convince you of Leo's sympathetic humanity, whether he is being childlike, naïve, angry, tender, filthy, or troublesome. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 12, 2019