Calum Marsh
Calum Marsh's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer when
published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Film Comment Magazine,
Film.com,
National Post,
Village Voice,
Globe and Mail,
Sight and Sound,
Slant Magazine,
Little White Lies,
Paste Magazine
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 96% | Thief (1981) |
On the one hand, it looks and feels like a high-gloss fantasy... But on the other, it's as gritty a crime picture as they come, dead set on getting even the smallest touches right. The combination makes for a movie unlike any other.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 64% | The Glass Shield (1994) |
While it carries an unavoidable social charge, the movie never feels dogmatic or moralistic.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 100% | The Lady Eve (1941) |
A hilarious comedy of misunderstanding, and even at more than 70 years old, it seems as fresh and relevant today as ever.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 87% | The Hunt for Red October (1990) |
It's to McTiernan's credit that so much of this is made intense. Every silence on board the Russian sub, whether they're squeaking through a narrow underwater canyon or sending out a single sonar ping, seems occasion to hold your breath.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 17, 2018
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| 80% | Fong juk (Exiled) (2006) |
Exiled takes the familiar story of a mob hit gone awry and tells it with such artfulness and virtuosity that it feels like nothing you've ever seen before.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 17, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Hellraiser - Inferno (2000) |
Though it is sometimes plagued by the problems typical of low-budget horror, you can tell at all times that Inferno has a lot of ambition for a B-grade picture of its kind - and that sense makes all the difference.‐ Esquire Magazine
Read More | Posted Oct 17, 2018
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| 90% | A Star Is Born (2018) |
It is maudlin, earnest and unfashionably melodramatic. It is too long. It is self-serious. And it is really, truly great.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2018
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| 100% | Chained for Life (2018) |
Chained for Life is a fine film about how disability is misappropriated.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2018
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| 64% | Clara's Ghost (2018) |
Writer-director Bridey Elliott's debut feature has more wit and ingenuity than is suggested by its familiar logline - and in fact this playful, intelligent film is a genuine original.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2018
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| 90% | Relaxer (2018) |
Wildly, happily unique.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Task (2018) |
A documentary experience more intense and provocative than any in recent memory.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2018
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| 18% | The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) |
The Cloverfield Paradox borrows liberally from better science-fiction. ‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Feb 6, 2018
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| 96% | Groundhog Day (1993) |
Are we all just wasting time squandering eternity? The film doesn't make this accusation lightly. And it takes an outrageous concept, a big premise with a science-fiction spin, to level the idea in terms we accept and understand.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2018
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| 87% | The Post (2018) |
[Spielberg] has misjudged the effect of his sermon, and has the wrong idea about what we need now. The choir is preached to; those deaf to such matters will continue to ignore. Such a feeble cry of outrage isn't really relevant at all.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2018
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| 70% | Happy End (2017) |
It reminds one that Haneke is nowhere near as grim or solemn as his reputation sometimes suggests, and that his art is infinitely more mischievous, teasing and loose than the many lesser filmmakers who have descended from his legacy.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2018
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| 57% | The Commuter (2018) |
[The film is,] for one trip, action and drama that elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It's a marvellous film‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2018
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| 32% | Pitch Perfect 3 (2017) |
Of course this sort of thing lapses into cliché soon enough. One anticipates the hallmarks of the series in much the way one expects jump-scares in a horror film.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2017
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| 57% | Murder On The Orient Express (2017) |
It is heartening to find Branagh afforded the means to realize a personal, idiosyncratic interpretation of this material, dazzling in scope but the product of care.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Nov 17, 2017
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| 70% | Annabelle: Creation (2017) |
Sandberg often seems an artist bored by his own material, resigned to doodling in the margins. ‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Aug 10, 2017
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| 60% | Despicable Me 3 (2017) |
Why resist, frankly? This is our truth now. We might as well resign ourselves to it. Long live the Minions. Tulaliloo ti amo. Bi-do. Banana.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Jun 29, 2017
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| 97% | Columbus (2017) |
Something not merely impressive, but in every respect a surprise.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 67% | Golden Exits (2018) |
It is Perry's masterpiece, and one of the finest American films I've seen in many years.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 100% | I Am Another You (2017) |
It's a canny bit of human-interest reportage and criticism of the form at once.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 92% | Princess Cyd (2017) |
I can think of no higher compliment than that the film's warmth and generosity reminded me of the late Jonathan Demme.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 76% | Gemini (2018) |
An uncanny, exquisite synthesis of naturalism and genre, the film is a heady cocktail of high style and lo-fi whose sum effect is irresistible.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 3/4 | 45% | Paris Can Wait (Bonjour Anne) (2017) |
[Coppola] shoots, with Girlhood DP Crystel Fournier, in sumptuous glossy-magazine-spread fashion, the effect of which ought to impel the most abstemious moviegoer to dash to the nearest bistro immediately upon leaving the theatre.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted May 25, 2017
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| 1/4 | 29% | Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) |
Dead Men Tell No Tales hasn't the faintest residue of piratic thrill. It arouses no joy, no sense of daring. The prevailing register, instead, is indifference -- the bone-deep dispassion of mediocrity.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted May 25, 2017
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| 1/4 | 17% | Baywatch (2017) |
Baywatch in its big blockbuster iteration is a flippant, juvenile comedy, only nominally indebted to its source material and desperate to prove itself above it.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted May 25, 2017
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| 1/4 | 46% | Everything, Everything (2017) |
How can any interesting comment be made about how we live today if the reality of that living is so decorously rejected? It's a parable compromised by politesse.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted May 18, 2017
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| 1/4 | 31% | King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword (2017) |
I would suggest we are firmly in the realm of self-parody here, but that presumes anything about Ritchie's modus operandi could have at any time been enjoyed in earnest. ‐ National Post
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 90% | Rat Film (2017) |
In Theo Anthony's excellent new documentary Rat Film, these parasitic little critters seem to be scuttling about wherever the camera happens to look.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Apr 27, 2017
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| 1.5/4 | 69% | Free Fire (2017) |
[It] takes a director of real virtuosity and vision, someone who can ennoble and invigorate paltry material by technique alone. Ben Wheatley does not have those gifts, however malleable his instincts.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2017
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| 1/4 | 90% | David Lynch: The Art Life (2017) |
Proximity is not proof of tact, let alone need. And given the paucity of what Nguyen extracts from the patient under his microscope, we'd be better off if he'd simply let the patient be.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 3.5/4 | 79% | Personal Shopper (2017) |
The competing styles are unified, under the deft command of director Olivier Assayas, by the swell of feeling coursing beneath them: grief, sorrow, yearning. And of course love.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Mar 23, 2017
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| 1/4 | 42% | Goon: Last of the Enforcers (2017) |
The end result is mediocrity - just the kind of movie, indeed, of which we need much less.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 1/4 | 76% | The Sense Of An Ending (2017) |
Because film is by nature a more literal medium than literature, and because the novella's first-person account has by necessity graded into cinematic omniscience, Batra's adaptation forfeits the ambiguity that for Barnes was precisely the point.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 2.5/4 | 99% | Get Out (2017) |
All this diabolic lunacy, of course, Peele depicts with B-movie relish, delighting gamely in the comic-sinister thrill.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Feb 26, 2017
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| .5/4 | 8% | Rings (2017) |
It is an audacious writer who sizes up this material and decides "more backstory" is the way to go. It is a pained audience who must endure the result.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Feb 3, 2017
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| 100% | Behemoth (Bei xi mo shou) (2017) |
Much as Antonioni did in the petrochemical plants of northern Italy, Zhao finds in the coal mines and ironworks of Inner Mongolia a devastating, infuriating splendor.‐ Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2017
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| 3.5/4 | 92% | Sieranevada (2016) |
That's the other thing about Puiu's brand of realism: it effaces the virtuosity required to pull it off. The very mode downplays the feat.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Jan 12, 2017
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| 2/4 | 91% | La La Land (2016) |
Audiences find themselves carried away. That may be sensible enough. What's odd is that La La Land is not the merry entertainment it sometimes seems to be.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2016
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| 1/4 | 18% | Assassin's Creed (2016) |
Both perform -- Fassbender as the death-row convict whose ancestral memories Abstergo is after; Cotillard as the lead scientist working on behalf of the Templar cause -- with grim conviction. Neither seem to be having any fun.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2016
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| 3/4 | 100% | Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016) |
Things to Come charts its year briskly, never stopping to linger for long on any one moment or event. The days recede and fade and evaporate -- as they invariably do.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Dec 4, 2016
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| 2.5/4 | 76% | The Other Half (2017) |
Maslany and Cullen have been praised extensively (and justly) for their work here in festival reviews and across the trades; no less excellent, if perhaps less conspicuous, are the performances of the film's supporting players.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Dec 2, 2016
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| 1/4 | 23% | Bad Santa 2 (2016) |
Endless is the wink-wink oh-no-they-didn't jesting. Exhausting are the faux-defiant rib-nudging jibes.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Nov 23, 2016
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| 2/4 | 33% | Lavender (2017) |
As with nearly every other machination of this shopworn plot, how the psychiatrist turns out to be involved in this story would surprise only someone totally unacquainted with the medium of motion pictures.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Nov 4, 2016
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| 2/4 | 95% | The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) (2016) |
The flourishes of brutality, the pageantry of hardcore, the punchlines and slapstick gags: what's all this doing in an otherwise earnest film about deception and love?‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Oct 28, 2016
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| 1/4 | 21% | American Pastoral (2016) |
American Pastoral is a good novel and now a very bad film. ‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2016
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| 3/4 | 82% | Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) |
Flanagan does indeed dazzle and rouse and win the skeptical over. ‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2016
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| 4/4 | 100% | Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016) |
Certainly it's possible that a live JT concert would entertain. But can this special achieve anything more? Oh, yes.‐ National Post
Read More | Posted Oct 14, 2016
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