Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins
Budd Wilkins's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s): Film Journal International Slant Magazine
Publications: Film Journal International, Slant Magazine, House Next Door

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
3/4 98% Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) One of the most striking effects here occurs whenever Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer slow down the film's often-hectic pace to let viewers ponder the sheer beauty of the imagery. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 19, 2020
75% Psychomagic, a Healing Art (Psychomagie, un art pour guérir) (2019) Whether or not the 91-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky makes another film, Psychomagic could easily stand as a fitting encapsulation of the themes of suffering and transcendence that have run throughout his work. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 4, 2020
3.5/4 98% 63 Up (2019) Throughout, the remaining participants take stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 22, 2019
97% Border (Gräns) (2018) Explores its boundary-pushing notions in ways that can be bracingly stimulating, even when they aren't always dramatically satisfying. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 26, 2018
76% Sadie (2018) Lacks the gritty, grounded specificity that might begin to answer the thorny questions it conjures up. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 11, 2018
No Score Yet Goyo: The Boy General (2018) Goyo: The Boy General offers American audiences a puzzling, inconstant vision of the past. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 20, 2018
73% Nelly (2018) Nelly audaciously renders the contradictions and uncertainties of a writer's inchoate life, even if its central figure remains slightly out of focus. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 6, 2018
76% Cocote (2018) Grafts a fictional narrative onto the sturdy stock of documentary filmmaking. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2018
93% Araby (Arábia) (2018) It's difficult to imagine that you will walk away from Araby unmoved. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 21, 2018
50% Everything Else (Todo lo demás) (2016) Natalia Almada's study of a career civil servant suffering a late-life crisis works best when it plumbs the connections between bureaucracy and violence. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
54% Godard Mon Amour (Le redoutable) (2018) Godard Mon Amour isn't entertainment for the masses, it's closer to character assassination. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2018
96% Zama (2018) Zama is a complex and sometimes deliberately disconcerting film. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 12, 2018
92% The Endless (2018) An excellent foray into Lovecraftian horror, mixing cosmic dread and some mordant humor in ways that manage to be consistently disorienting. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 4, 2018
100% Salomé (2013) Al Pacino's film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Salomé benefits considerably from uniformly strong performances and some consummate technical craftsmanship. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2018
80% Wilde Salomé (2013) Al Pacino's documentary 'Wilde Salomé' proves to be more satisfying as an examination of Oscar Wilde and his play than as an exploration of Pacino's theatrical methodology. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2018
82% Hannah (2018) Andrea Pallaoro's second feature is a formally rigorous, minimalistic character study of a woman who's slowly excommunicated from society. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
57% They Remain (2018) Stylish audiovisual feast for adventurous genre enthusiasts, even if the relatively slender storyline has to rank among the least of its inducements. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 2, 2018
85% Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2018) Wilkerson's ruminative documentary brings home the filmmaker's preoccupation with the confluence of individual and institutional violence in an exceptionally personal manner. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2018
83% In the Intense Now (No Intenso Agora) (2018) Examines the cataclysmic potential, as well as the sobering limitations and unintended consequences, exemplified by the revolutionary movements of 1968. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 31, 2018
57% The Misguided (2018) Doesn't entirely live up to (or is that down to...?) its admonitory title. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2018
No Score Yet Drawing Home (2017) You can tick the boxes of the tired biopic tropes Drawing Home unabashedly indulges. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 30, 2017
100% La Belle Noiseuse (1991) Jacques Rivette's magisterial portrait of the creative process lays bare an artist's conflicted responsibilities toward life and art. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
79% Sweet Virginia (2017) Despite the best efforts of a game cast, Jamie M. Dagg's atmospheric neo-noir is hamstrung by dispiritingly predictable storytelling and thinly drawn characterizations. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 16, 2017
85% Song of Granite (2017) Pat Collins' film about the life and career of Irish folk singer Joe Heaney is oblique to the point of inscrutability. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2017
93% Most Beautiful Island (2017) An intense and sometimes claustrophobic allegory about the pitfalls of the immigrant experience under the generic disguise of a psychological thriller. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 1, 2017
90% Flesh and Blood (2017) Gives us the all-too-rare opportunity to hear testimony from the sort of people who are ordinarily held at arm's length by more mainstream American cinema. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 27, 2017
100% L'enfant secret (1982) Philippe Garrel's brooding 1979 film charts the dissolution of a romance, as well as the birth of a new kind of narrative filmmaking. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2017
No Score Yet Architects Of Denial (2017) David Lee George's documentary offers a stark and compelling, if occasionally muddled, testament to the Armenian genocide and its ongoing geopolitical repercussions. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2017
20% Alina (2017) Ben Barenholtz's debut as a writer/director is a modest meditation on the perils and pleasures of immigration and assimilation. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 14, 2017
63% 6 Days (2017) This historical hostage docudrama aspires to rigorous objectivity but ultimately tips its hand as an endorsement of hardline conservatism. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2017
92% Some Freaks (2017) The psychological acuity with which [director Ian MacAllister-McDonald] delineates his characters more than makes up for [the film's] relatively minor lapses. - Film Journal International EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 4, 2017
No Score Yet Erosu Purasu Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre) (1969) Kiju Yoshida's thought-provoking political trilogy makes its Region A Blu-ray debut with sturdy transfers and some essential contextual bonus materials. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 30, 2017
3/4 74% We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne) (2017) The film establishes a hypnotic rhythm through razor-stropped editing and a reverberant sound design that later scenes will disrupt with alarming impunity. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 17, 2017
4/4 92% Le Jour se lève (Daybreak) (1939) Like Marcel Carné's earlier Port of Shadows, Daybreak establishes a versatile visual palette that exerted a significant influence over classical noir. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 12, 2014
4/4 97% Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960) The facticity of the film itself is continually called into question by Alain Resnais's decision to blur the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction films. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 14, 2014
88% Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) (2014) It's a good bit funnier, as well as freer in its rapid-fire associations, than the more strident and structured Film Socialisme. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 24, 2014
97% Two Days, One Night (2014) An old-fashioned social-problem film where the problem magically evaporates. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2014
88% Amour Fou (2015) An early reference to Kleist's short story The Marquise of O should clue you in on Hausner's stylistic debt to Rohmer's film version, with its static camera setups and gorgeous yet minimalist sets. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2014
94% Wild Tales (2015) As in the episode with the engineer turned terrorist, where restitution of the family unit supersedes revolutionary politics, it's clear that Szifrón lacks Almodóvar's truly confrontational sensibility. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2014
87% Winter Sleep (2014) The obvious analogue here would be Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage; the key difference lies in Winter Sleep's absolute refusal to let anything be at emotional stake. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2014
21% The Search (2015) Michel Hazanavicius's straw man conception of the Russians as brutal homophobes is hammered away at with an emphasis that's questionable at best. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2014
87% Foxcatcher (2014) As a consequence of Bennett Miller's relentless de-dramatization, Foxcatcher offers us next to nothing of utility or complexity about du Pont's pathology. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 19, 2014
81% The Homesman (2014) If what they have to say on the subject is as remotely superficial as The Homesman, maybe the less said, the better. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 18, 2014
95% National Gallery (2014) Its titular establishment as a springboard for an all-encompassing exploration into the multifarious nature of art as both history and object. This is one of Wiseman's richest and most thought-provoking films, and easily one of his best. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2014
97% Mr. Turner (2014) Leigh isn't so much interested in artist as martyr as he is in the artist as self-contained multitude, containing all the foibles and paradoxes of his age. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2014
30% The Captive (2014) For every way that The Sweet Hereafter makes its generic elements seem fresh and even a trifle mysterious, The Captive finds new ways to render them absurd. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2014
4/4 93% Godzilla (Gojira) (1954) Rarely has the open wound of widespread devastation been transposed to celluloid with greater visceral impact. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2014
3.5/4 100% Shonen (Boy) (1969) Nagisa Oshima and screenwriter Tsutomu Tamura encourage empathy without requiring emotionalism. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 15, 2014
95% Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) (1979) Nosferatu the Vampyre Playing to the visual and narrative strengths of the original, Werner Herzog still succeeds in imprinting the material with his own unique sensibility. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 23, 2013
4/4 75% Scarecrow (1973) Jerry Schatzberg's film embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon. - Slant Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 16, 2013