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
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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96% | Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) |
Audiences are left frustrated and susceptible to easy suasion; this superficial view of the past contributes to the national dismantling perpetuated by mainstream media. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 12, 2021
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No Score Yet | The Tree, The Mayor, and the Mediatheque (L'arbre, le maire et la médiathèque) (1998) |
Rohmer's mastery reveals characters speaking in the language of their times, then honestly confronting their own moral imperatives. The revelation is beautiful, beyond Hollywood's self-satisfied groupthink that passes for thoughtfulness. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 11, 2021
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98% | Minari (2020) |
Patronizing reviewers misread Chung's informal style as eloquence or charm. But for alert movie-watchers, this lack of affect feels unimaginative. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 5, 2021
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95% | Soul (2020) |
Not since the Beat movement has "soul" been so easily sold to all (meaning white hipsters). - National Review
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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90% | The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) |
Whether dealing with bureaucrats or student zealots, the film has a perspective on social turmoil that falls short of the insightful panorama in the French AIDS-activism epic B.P.M. Sorkin's right-side-of-history saga is the bent history. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 27, 2021
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96% | Sound of Metal (2020) |
Sound of Metal shows the millennium's avoidance of soulful self-examination. Merely a showy cinematic tattoo, a narcissistic desecration of the body, Sound of Metal is a work of spiritual vacancy. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 22, 2021
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91% | Promising Young Woman (2020) |
Dark comic nihilism like this has appealed to hipsters ever since Gus Van Sant's To Die For, but now it resembles regime change -- confirming a major fault of the indie film movement that traded populist sentiment for elitist cynicism. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 20, 2021
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95% | Nomadland (2021) |
Nomadland looks both sociological and touristy; it's a visual lecture teaching America to pity itself. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 15, 2021
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98% | Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
Instead of the fraternal interplay that [Robert] Altman and [Darnell] Martin were so good at, Wolfe and Washington aim for predictable tragedy. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 4, 2021
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98% | Time (2020) |
The film is predicated on deliberate, phony artiness... Nothing like liberal condescension to turn what might have been a sincere vow into 100 percent pure cliché. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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70% | Tenet (2020) |
Fact is, Tenet should not be taken more seriously than a James Bond movie. As an action film, it isn't nearly as skillful as a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible commodity. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 29, 2020
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59% | Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) |
The tone of Wonder Woman 1984 wobbles from half-serious political satire to silly comedy. Jenkins parodies Back to the Future to depict Eighties kitsch, but her film ends up just being tacky like Richard Donner's 1978 Superman. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 29, 2020
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79% | True History of the Kelly Gang (2020) |
This pop-art method suggests Alex Cox crossed with Pier Paolo Pasolini. Kurzel has made a post-punk, post-hip-hop, post-neo-realist post-Western. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 18, 2020
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No Score Yet | With Drawn Arms (2020) |
Its arrangement of stock civil-rights clips leads to unoriginal conclusions, in fact twisting facts to fit an obvious agenda. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 16, 2020
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83% | Mank (2020) |
Mank is so bogus, and so lacks dramatic credibility, I'll skip the shoddy narrative to note the immediate offense of this folly. Fincher has chosen to honor Mankiewicz over director, co-writer, and lead actor Orson Welles as a celebrity-cult aberration. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 11, 2020
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No Score Yet | The Plot Against The President (2020) |
The Plot Against the President doesn't end with triumph and victory like Costa-Gavras's rousing Z. Neither does it end with vengeance like Red Dawn. Fact is, Milius has made a cliffhanger -- but with an informative explanation. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 9, 2020
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88% | THE GODFATHER, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020) |
The rich complexity of Coppola's vision was never fully appreciated -- not even by Coppola himself, who has altered it to fit contemporary negativity. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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31% | Up Close & Personal (1996) |
Up Close and Personal isn't even a particularly good movie, but it's more revealing than most other films about the degradation of what used to be called "the press." - National Review
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| Posted Dec 3, 2020
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84% | The Way I See It (2020) |
In his work and in this film, Souza conflates idolatry with history. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 30, 2020
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55% | Joan of Arc (Jeanne) (2019) |
For Dumont, revisionist history -- and revisionist filmmaking -- is not a matter of do-over. It's about starting over and for reasons that we must heed. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 20, 2020
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25% | Hillbilly Elegy (2020) |
The film shows shallow -- fake -- empathy with the Appalachian background that begins Vance's humble brag about leaving backwoods hollers and winding up at Yale University. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 18, 2020
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68% | Ammonite (2020) |
Ammonite's refinement merely lifts up the skirts of what is essentially romance-novel passion. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 13, 2020
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83% | Let Him Go (2020) |
Costner wears his familiar Western heartache, which was never any more fake. Bezucha's narrative comes down to this: superior but dissatisfied Americans vs. Hillary's "Deplorables" and Biden's "Chumps." - National Review
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| Posted Nov 6, 2020
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43% | Native Son (2020) |
Every close-up, even when scaling the top of a water tower to evoke James Cagney at the end of White Heat, conveys the no-hope fatality of the novel's tragedy. It's not so much poetic or expressive as banal. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 4, 2020
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87% | On The Rocks (2020) |
Bill Murray makes it work... Murray walks around carrying his own bon vivant spotlight. He's the life of the party, but with actorly gravitas. - National Review
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| Posted Oct 23, 2020
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No Score Yet | What Killed Michael Brown? (2020) |
What Killed Michael Brown? is a rare doc that opposes the media's current trend of fabricating race and "justice." - National Review
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| Posted Oct 16, 2020
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85% | Martin Eden (2020) |
This film's many literary and cinematic echoes may please the cognoscenti, but Jack London's heroic neophyte subject needs a more self-critical update. - National Review
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| Posted Oct 16, 2020
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98% | David Byrne's American Utopia (2020) |
American Utopia fails as entertainment because it comes across as a political lecture about national consciousness. - National Review
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| Posted Oct 9, 2020
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28% | Antebellum (2020) |
Antebellum is as risible as it is obvious exploitation. Its back-and-forth narrative is a Critical Race Theory bonanza, blending contemporary race-and-gender-awareness with disdain for American history. - National Review
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| Posted Oct 7, 2020
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82% | The Boys in the Band (2020) |
The Boys in the Band now exhibits the typical Millennial segregation of race, sex, and class experience. - National Review
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| Posted Oct 2, 2020
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89% | Kajillionaire (2020) |
It's a peculiarly class-based, bohemian ideology that Kajillionaire expresses with a perfectly oddball plot - the dreaded heist movie taken to philosophical extremes. - National Review
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| Posted Sep 25, 2020
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96% | The Human Voice (La Voz Humana) (2020) |
The way Almodóvar's formal delight replaces Cocteau's probe of his protagonist's psyche makes The Human Voice minor rather than emotionally powerful. - National Review
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| Posted Sep 25, 2020
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68% | I Am Woman (2020) |
Rebooted for Millennial consumption, I Am Woman remains a damnably catchy novelty tune, but this movie raises the cultural problem: Do we learn from the past or reinterpret it to suit the moment? - National Review
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| Posted Sep 16, 2020
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73% | Mulan (2020) |
By now we've seen too many authentic, dynamic Chinese action movies, especially Zhang Yimou's recent Shadow and The Great Wall, to accept this dross. - National Review
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| Posted Sep 9, 2020
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42% | Guest of Honour (2020) |
Egoyan offers a clumsy intellectual exercise. These characters stand out like metaphors in New Yorker magazine short-story fiction. Each one is a stick figure in a narrative maze. - National Review
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| Posted Sep 4, 2020
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99% | On the Record (2020) |
On the Record is propaganda made on the divide-and-conquer principle of the progressive movement. - National Review
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| Posted Aug 21, 2020
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77% | Summerland (2020) |
Summerland epitomizes much of the lousy storytelling artifice in recent films. It may have something to do with "dramaturgy" also being a sociological term. - National Review
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| Posted Aug 12, 2020
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96% | Creem: America's Only Rock 'N' Roll Magazine (2020) |
Give credit to writer-director Scott Crawford and the Creem-magazine veterans Jaan Uhelszki, Susan Whitall, and others for caring as much about putting the publication's history on film as they do about getting it right. - National Review
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| Posted Aug 7, 2020
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98% | The Go-Go's (2020) |
The Go-Go's have not yet been awarded their proper place [in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame]... After the world sees Alison Ellwood's splendid documentary, that omission is bound to be put to rights. - National Review
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| Posted Aug 5, 2020
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95% | Black Is King (2020) |
It follows the coffee-table-book graphic appropriations of the music video genre's peak achievements only to illustrate how disoriented, misguided, and commercialized black identity has become. - National Review
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| Posted Aug 5, 2020
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95% | First Cow (2020) |
We sit and watch Reichardt play out her bitter thesis without being astonished. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 17, 2020
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88% | The Truth (La vérité) (2020) |
We're unlikely to witness such brutal honesty about the clash of art and politics in any other movie this year. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 10, 2020
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98% | Hamilton (2020) |
Miranda's unprepossessing lead performance depends on whiny hectoring, rather than brainy charisma; the role needs a star, and this film doesn't have one. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 6, 2020
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88% | Deerskin (2020) |
This slyly paranoid art film proposes what cannot be put back in order -- or, as an amateur filmmaker might think, rectified by pressing a rewind button. It defies back-to-roots, back-to-nature aspirations and so goes forward into murderous madness. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 1, 2020
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99% | Miss Juneteenth (2020) |
Miss Juneteenth feels like the era's first black conservative movie. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 24, 2020
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No Score Yet | Right On! (1971) |
Right On! exposes the chasm between what used to be black pop consciousness and today's political attitudinizing. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 19, 2020
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74% | The King of Staten Island (2020) |
Apatow's glib narrative both sneers at and pities this working-class phenomenon, oblivious to the deep-seated social unease that defines America's lost generation. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 17, 2020
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76% | Tommaso (2020) |
Tommaso is not a slog through guilty self-hatred. Tommaso's marital jealousy exposes reasonable insecurity. More than a diaristic confession, it is an effort toward integrity and self-acceptance. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 10, 2020
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60% | Young Ahmed (Le jeune Ahmed) (2020) |
Despite their sophistication, the Dardennes offer sop to the new Europe, awash in liberal pity and sitting-duck weakness. - National Review
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| Posted May 27, 2020
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40% | Capone (2020) |
British Hardy dramatizes the guilt that American actors avoid. As the most talented and charismatic actor of the millennium, Hardy displays his gifts modestly and shrewdly: Sickly pale Capone has a carrot stuck in his face where a stogie used to be. - National Review
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| Posted May 22, 2020
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