Nick Johnston
Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:
Nick Johnston is the Film Editor and Critic for the Boston-based online magazine Vanyaland.
Publications:
Vanyaland
Movie Reviews Only
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98% | One Night in Miami (2020) |
It is a really, really solid little film, stuffed to the brim with beautiful moments between the men, and will enthrall viewers with the cast's skill and King's grace as a director. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jan 15, 2021
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98% | Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
Wolfe's made a sturdy and good film here, a work which deeply respects both the talents of its origins and its ensemble. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 28, 2020
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60% | Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) |
[F]undamentally misunderstands what made people enjoy the first film - or the character - so beloved after their first big-screen outing. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 25, 2020
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87% | News of the World (2020) |
All in all, News of the World is a fine and sweet film, one to be shared and savored with dads across the country whenever it's safe to do so, but I couldn't help but feel that it was just a little bit slight. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 18, 2020
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95% | Soul (2020) |
It is an astonishingly beautiful film, one that plays with abstract, cartoonish animation forms in its scenes set in the Great Beyond and Great Before while also providing some of the best photorealistic digital animation. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 18, 2020
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76% | The Croods: A New Age (2020) |
A New Age is a looser, wackier experience that trades the traditional Dreamworks pathos for genuinely funny slapstick, and it's a pretty good time for kids and parents alike. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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96% | Nomadland (2020) |
I tend to see [Zhao's] work as closer to later-period Terrence Malick, whose "Modern Life Is Rubbish" trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song) strikes a similar chord of melancholy restlessness. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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83% | Mank (2020) |
It is a lovely film, a gorgeous tribute to writers the world over, and one of the best releases of this calendar year. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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83% | Freaky (2020) |
Freaky is a lot of fun, and it really proves Landon's strategy of reappropriating comedy premises into horror films works as intended. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Nov 20, 2020
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39% | Rebecca (2020) |
This Rebecca is a particularly dull two hours, one that will probably alienate classic viewers, familiar with du Maurier's work or Hitchcock's adaptation, while boring new ones to tears. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 23, 2020
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49% | The Witches (2020) |
Zemeckis's The Witches might entice audiences with just how different is in appearance [from the 1990 version] but have them reaching for the remote by the half-hour marker. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 23, 2020
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85% | Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) |
What's novel is the film's surprising feminist slant, which is, of course, elevated by the incredible work from Balakova, who is just as committed to the bit and wide-eyed and earnest in her execution of these jokes. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 23, 2020
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44% | The Lie (2020) |
It's endowed with a compelling premise and a decent cast, all of whom it fails in its weirdly toothless execution. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 9, 2020
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73% | Black Box (2020) |
Osei-Koeffer's visual imagination is limited by his budget and the stereotypical trappings of this particular moment in the horror genre... but his work with his actors is skilled and top-notch. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 9, 2020
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88% | The Phenomenon (2020) |
A surprisingly compelling watch that takes full advantage of the new and fascinating revelations about true Unidentified Flying Objects. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Oct 9, 2020
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65% | The Devil All the Time (2020) |
I was oddly moved by the film, and I think it's one of the more interesting stories about American faith that has emerged in the last couple of years. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 24, 2020
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53% | Joe Bell (2021) |
Around 30 minutes into Reinaldo Marcus Green's Good Joe Bell, I very nearly turned the movie off out of sheer frustration with a narrative choice so mind-numbingly misguided that my brain nearly dripped out of my ears as it unspooled in front of me. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 18, 2020
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76% | Concrete Cowboy (2020) |
It's safe to say that the reason I enjoyed this so much is because of how delightful the film looks. Concrete Cowboy's urban Philadelphia setting is fantastically captured. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 18, 2020
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77% | Shadow in the Cloud (2021) |
It's a hell of a premise, right? Well, it didn't really flow well or work for me in practice. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 18, 2020
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81% | I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) |
I'm Thinking of Ending Things gives [Kaufman] the chance to embrace his worst impulses, and he grips it in a bear-hug, squeezing all of the life and color out of it in the process. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 4, 2020
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35% | The New Mutants (2020) |
It's the kind of crushingly mediocre spin-off superhero movie that came to define the latter half of the pre-Disney Fox slate. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 2, 2020
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82% | Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) |
Most people will be glad to rock out with Wyld Stallions one last time, even if, like most reunion tours, it can't beat the first time you saw them when they were in their prime. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 2, 2020
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70% | Tenet (2020) |
Tenet is the kind of thrilling blockbuster that we so desperately need in any summer. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Sep 2, 2020
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48% | Unhinged (2020) |
A moderately effective and bleakly funny thriller with a full-on Nicolas Cage-style Russell Crowe performance at its core. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Aug 21, 2020
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61% | Project Power (2020) |
As an action spectacle, Project Power is remarkably interesting and stylish, even if the coherence of the moment-to-moment choreography is occasionally sacrificed at the altar. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Aug 20, 2020
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73% | An American Pickle (2020) |
It's not anywhere close to a perfect film, or even a "great" one, but An American Pickle is a pretty good way to spend an afternoon reminding yourself what it looked like when star-driven comedy vehicles existed in the multiplex. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Aug 7, 2020
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92% | A Vigilante (2019) |
A Vigilante is an incredibly tough watch, but it may be a necessary one for many. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jul 19, 2020
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79% | Greyhound (2020) |
A really interesting watch, even if it's stripped of the traditional creature comforts of the genre. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jul 11, 2020
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63% | Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) |
Eurovision provided me with enough joy and good humor to easily excuse a number of its flaws, and it works like gangbusters as a piece of advertising for the cultural institution it's meant to represent... - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jul 2, 2020
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40% | Irresistible (2020) |
[Irresistible] begins as a dull and uninspired political satire and winds up being an unmitigated disaster. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jun 26, 2020
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92% | Da 5 Bloods (2020) |
Spike Lee really is one of the greatest American filmmakers currently working, and that Da 5 Bloods is one of the best films to hit screens [this] year. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jun 19, 2020
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21% | Infamous (2020) |
If you want to watch attractive people rob banks and romance one another, there are better options, but Infamous is a passable substitution in a pitch. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jun 18, 2020
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77% | Judy & Punch (2020) |
...there's very little room for nuance or anything once she becomes a mouthpiece for her director, rather than a character. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jun 11, 2020
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74% | The King of Staten Island (2020) |
Davidson is very strong here, and it's weird how much I prefer him as a dramatic performer than as a comedian. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Jun 10, 2020
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66% | The Lovebirds (2020) |
It's a real bummer to see Rae and Nanjiani, who established their careers coasting on the border between comedy and drama, diminish their wattage in something so bland and false-feeling. - Vanyaland
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| Posted May 21, 2020
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40% | Capone (2020) |
Capone is a fascinating and intensely personal film, a reboot of Trank's career in all the best ways, and it provides the director with a solid foundation upon which he can rebuild. - Vanyaland
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| Posted May 14, 2020
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77% | Gladiator (2000) |
Gladiator... is popcorn entertainment at its most polished and exciting; the film is responsible for a renewed interest in antiquity and was, somewhat unsurprisingly, incredibly influential. - Vanyaland
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| Posted May 6, 2020
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31% | Village of the Damned (1995) |
The film feels somewhat dead. It's not tapping into a cultural vein, or expressing some sort of parental nightmare, it's just echoing those prior ones in a totally unsatisfying way. - Vanyaland
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| Posted May 1, 2020
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91% | The Willoughbys (2020) |
It's also funny, unlike many of its counterparts, gleefully indulging the anarchic tastes of its younger audiences in both its writing and its staging... without being loud enough to annoy their parents. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 28, 2020
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67% | Extraction (2020) |
Hargrave's action direction is solid and clean, and there's one absolutely superlative moment... where the director attempts to outdo Atomic Blonde's insane single-shot fight/chase and manages to come reasonably close to doing so. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 28, 2020
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79% | True History of the Kelly Gang (2020) |
The gender-bending politics of something like Nicholas Roeg's Performance...mesh-up quite nicely with the Alex Cox-style ferocity that manifests itself in the sets and in MacKay's astonishing performance. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 28, 2020
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45% | The Basketball Diaries (1995) |
For as much as The Basketball Diaries wants to claim that it's a realistic portrayal of addiction, it might have done better to root it in its honest time-and-place and play Carroll's story as straight-forward and as honest as they could. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 22, 2020
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70% | Butt Boy (2020) |
I've never been happier for a filmmaker to just finally be so firmly up his own ass. Butt Boy can't really live up to the wildness of its premise, but it makes for entertaining viewing in its own right. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 20, 2020
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97% | Why Don't You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni) (2020) |
It's a very amusing little film, one smart enough to know you've seen something like it before and to try and do something reasonably formally innovative to keep you entertained. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 20, 2020
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7% | Fantasy Island (2020) |
Look, this remake of the '70s TV show about - you guessed it - a Fantasy Island, where your dreams come back to haunt you, is horrible. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 20, 2020
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28% | The Rhythm Section (2020) |
We saw this Blake Lively-led spy thriller back when it came out, and, to say the very least, we were disappointed. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 20, 2020
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69% | We Summon the Darkness (2020) |
We Summon the Darkness is the kind of heavy metal horror we've been longing for these last couple of months. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 20, 2020
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33% | 28 Days (2000) |
Thomas does a few interesting things here, including shooting the flashbacks and heavy-drinking scenes on video, which has a weird and wild grain to it when contrasted with the rest of the film. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 15, 2020
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69% | Keeping the Faith (2000) |
It's light and affable, for the most part; it has a relatively novel premise, even if it's not really explored in depth; and it features three charming leads at a strong point in their careers. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 15, 2020
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48% | Where the Money Is (2000) |
It's not a great film, and Road to Perdition will probably be remembered as Newman's best work from this period, but it just goes to show you how essential actors like him really were. - Vanyaland
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| Posted Apr 15, 2020
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