Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair
Gilbert Adair's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s): Film Comment Magazine Sight and Sound Independent on Sunday Monthly Film Bulletin
Publications: Film Comment Magazine, Sight and Sound, Independent on Sunday, Monthly Film Bulletin

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
50% Le Casanova de Fellini (1976) Donald Sutherland commands a stunning array of gestures both precise and revealing...an extraordinarily physical performance and the gem of this flawed masterpiece. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 6, 2020
75% Empire of the Sun (1987) What is most remarkable about Empire of the Sun then, is the almost seamless fashion in which a faithful adaptation... has nevertheless contrived to become a proto-Spielbergian affirmation of faith and optimism in the universe. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 28, 2020
100% High Hopes (1988) Cyril and Shirley both have and are the high hopes of Leigh's title, which is absolutely not ironic; and theirs is a story of grace under pressure. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 16, 2020
6 87% What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (2019) World's on Fire never manages to bring the different elements of the narrative together. It's neither truly immersive nor is it able to establish a critical distance from its subjects - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2019
6 60% Young Ahmed (Le jeune Ahmed) (2020) In the film's slightness as well as its focus on a young boy, Young Ahmed calls to mind The Kid with a Bike, previously the brothers' shortest, loosest movie. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted May 22, 2019
71% Dead Man (1995) [It's a] bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western - Time Out EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 8, 2018
76% Bulworth (1998) Beatty is to be congratulated on even attempting to prick America's conscience in these conservative times, but the real reason for seeing it is the panache with which it captures the irresistible flash and filigree of American politics. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
66% Tea with Mussolini (1999) It's a lazy, thoroughly old- fashioned entertainment... Yet it's also unexpectedly watchable and unpretentious -- campy, too, if you're into that kind of thing -- and it communicates a sense that everyone involved had a super time making it. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
83% Crna macka, beli macor (Black Cat, White Cat) (1999) It's like a novel written entirely in italics, every single sentence of which ends with an exclamation mark. As there are people of whom it's said that they don't know their own strength, Kusturica is a film-maker who doesn't know his own brilliance. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
71% The Idiots (Idioterne) (Dogma 95) (2000) Not everyone's cup of tea and, indeed, not a cup of tea at all, but one of those extremely rare films that aren't content to leave the cinema as they found it. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
52% Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) From the ridiculous title, with those two M's gummily stuck together in the middle, to the uniformly atrocious performances, from the incomprehensible plot to the sluggish pacing, The Phantom Menace is an unsalvageable disaster. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
71% Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) (1979) It's a masterpiece, still the most convincing representation of human cruelty in the history of the cinema. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
93% Memento (2000) If the prospect of having to do some of the work yourself doesn't alarm you, then Nolan's first American film is well worth catching, a thriller which is for once authentically Borgesian, to use an overworked qualifier. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
90% In the Mood for Love (2001) The problem with In the Mood for Love is that its imagery has far too many face-cards and not enough twos and fives and eights, which, boring as they are, nevertheless constitute the indispensable nitty-gritty of narrative. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
82% The Mask of Zorro (1998) The problem with Martin Campbell's new movie is that, even though by no means a disgrace, it's finally just another inflated big nothing. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
98% All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) (1999) It's the film we, Almodvar's faithful fans, have been waiting for, the film we knew he had, as they say, in him. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
No Score Yet Aprile (1998) There's really no getting away from it. As an actor, Moretti is a ham. Parma ham, maybe, but ham nevertheless. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
86% A Clockwork Orange (1971) It's one of those meant-to-be films whose refutation of every conceivable criticism has been pre-programmed into the work itself. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
93% Being John Malkovich (1999) It's a film, indeed, of such jaw-dropping originality that its flaws -- and it definitely has some -- count for far less than they otherwise would. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
79% Fight Club (1999) Just when it's supposedly getting to grips with its theme, the movie goes utterly haywire and becomes yet another brainless, humourless bone-cruncher. - Independent on Sunday EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2017
18% Sextette (1978) Sextette is, of course, a bad film, shakily acted, carelessly written (from "a play by Mae West") and directed without an iota of style by Ken Hughes. What is striking, however, is the wholly relative degree of its badness. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2017
No Score Yet City on Fire (1978) The attractions of City on Fire may be encapsulated thus: Fire destroys city. Not many stars killed. Except that 'dull', as criticism, scarcely does justice to the ludicrous contrivance of this disaster movie. - Monthly Film Bulletin EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
67% The Dogs of War (1980) Completing the tableau is the requisite whiff of Boy's Own Fascism, too diffuse to spoil our entertainment but tangible nevertheless. - Monthly Film Bulletin EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
20% Moment by Moment (1978) Critics are fond of attributing a film's badness to some hypothetical computer: this truly terrible movie might have been made by HAL in his most maudlin "Bicycle-built-for-two" mood, as the plugs were being pulled out. - Monthly Film Bulletin EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
43% North Sea Hijack (ffolkes) (Assault Force) (1980) Such eccentric coating on basically humdrum material is symptomatic of the film as a whole. - Monthly Film Bulletin EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
46% La Luna (1979) In elegance, rapidity of execution and perfection of expression, Bertolucci is the cinema's Stendhal. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
63% The Outsiders (1983) One of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art's-sake films in Hollywood's history, a faux-naïf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
No Score Yet That Sinking Feeling (1979) Its too frequent lapses into nudgingly facetious whimsy... tend to swamp the more delicate trouvailles. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
95% Gregory's Girl (2019) Within its modest narrative framework, Gregory's Girl strikes me as a well-nigh flawless comedy. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 2, 2015
50% The Mystery of Oberwald (Il Mistero di Oberwald) (1981) Mine is a minority opinion, but I am convinced that his experiments with video and colour will make Il Mistero di Oberwald the Becky Sharp of cinema's long-promised and long-deferred electronic era. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
No Score Yet Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) (1984) Straub and Huillet have filmed Kafka in unslavishly faithful fashion, with a serenity strangely belying the venerable controversy which still cramps the cinematic adaptation of classic texts. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
100% Stalker (1979) With this film, Tarkovsky re-entrusts to the medium a responsibility which in the West is upheld, if at all, only by documentaries (and by a rare maverick work like Pasolini's Salò): that of testifying, of showing. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
83% Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred) (1986) The scenes in and around the television studio, as the two forlorn old troupers come to terms with the punkish fauna of the 1980s, are -- for this director -- strangely verveless and unfocused. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
98% E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Spielberg would seem to be groping towards a virtual theology of space, space as Heaven, offering solace to a world which has foolishly renounced its traditional God but still aches to extend its own spiritual frontiers. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
88% Carmen (Bizet's Carmen ) (1984) The organising flaw of this Carmen, which turns it into one long longueur, lies at the nub of the medium's specificity - of what it means to make, or be, a film. - Monthly Film Bulletin EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 1, 2015
93% Amadeus (1984) [Forman's] is a genuine adaptation, not only because the play is permitted to stretch its legs beyond the pop-up book confines of a proscenium arch, but because he has leavened its High Art pretensions with a dash of showbiz raciness. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 3, 2015
68% City of Women (La città delle donne) (1981) Only a pinchpenny soul could denigrate the generosity, the sheer fertility of the Maestro's invention in this curate's egg by Fabergé. - Time Out EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 24, 2006
100% Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (Trial of Joan of Arc) (1962) The tension generated by juxtaposing such humiliation with the serenely beautiful text (from the transcription of the trial) resolves itself in the unforgettable final image. - Time Out EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2006
100% The Two of Us (Le vieil homme et l'enfant) (1967) The film's good humour and discretion, plus Simon's virtuoso performance, make it never less than watchable. - Time Out EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 11, 2006
90% Sous les Toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris) (1930) A miniaturist masterpiece. - Time Out EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 9, 2006