Nicolas Rapold

Nicolas Rapold
Nicolas Rapold's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s): Film Comment Magazine L.A. Weekly New York Times Village Voice Brooklyn Magazine
Publications: Film Comment Magazine, L.A. Weekly, New York Times, Village Voice, Reverse Shot, Brooklyn Magazine

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
80% Notturno (2021) Eschewing interviews and captions, Rosi puts his faith in a steady tripod camera and an evident ability to build up trust. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 21, 2021
31% American Skin (2021) Instead of lending immediacy, the padded-out documentary conceit only spotlights the stiltedness, and Parker falls short of building credible drama out of urgent issues. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 14, 2021
98% Night of the Kings (La Nuit des Rois) (2020) Philippe Lacôte's restless film - a rare United States release from Ivory Coast - braids together its struggles for survival to suggest an entire country fighting to emerge. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 30, 2020
91% The Weasels' Tale (El cuento de las comadrejas) (2019) Schemers meet their match in "The Weasels' Tale," Juan José Campanella's crowd-pleasing Argentine comedy. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 10, 2020
100% 76 Days (2020) As the virus resurges across the world, "76 Days" suggests a way to face the future, with tears but perhaps also hope. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 3, 2020
90% Belushi (2020) "Belushi" taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
94% The Twentieth Century (2020) An exuberant feat of visual design, it's meticulously weird and full of rambunctious humor. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2020
79% I Am Greta (2020) It's a bit of a blur, but Thunberg strikingly upends the stereotype of the young innocent as poster girl. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 12, 2020
84% Waves (2019) What probably could or should have taken up the bulk of the 135-minute film is its second act. But by this point, Shults has already run a marathon in circles, exhausting his own film. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2019
66% Mister America (2019) If Heidecker's not holding a mirror up to our idiocy Borat-style, there's no mistaking the echoes in a thin-skinned, name-calling brute elbowing his way onto political center stage for the ugliest reasons. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2019
41% The Laundromat (2019) It's a star-powered, experimental wake-up call, which chutes-and-ladders its way to distraction but keeps its eyes on the prize. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2019
94% Marriage Story (2019) In case it's not apparent, "Marriage Story" is both funny and painful, often at the same time. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2019
71% De Helaasheid der Dingen (The Misfortunates) (2010) The Misfortunates is often very funny, and the rolling remember-when vignettes trump the typical low-country wild-hairy-man sideshows. - Village Voice EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 27, 2018
76% Greenberg (2010) Greenberg is a great spectacle of toxic emotional stasis. - Sight and Sound EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 10, 2018
100% On the Seventh Day (En el Séptimo Día) (2018) The plot does set up a somewhat silly sitcom-ish contrivance at the end, and Cardona's comrades are thumbnail sketches, but none of that ruins the film's on-the-go glimpse of a life. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2018
45% Red Sparrow (2018) [Jennifer Lawrence] throws herself into her role with abandon (cf. mother!), suggesting, pace how some directors cast her, that her bravura dramatic energy flourishes best in worlds of genre extremes. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
97% Ex Libris: New York Public Library (2017) At the same time, thanks to Wiseman's editorial selections, Ex Libris becomes a breathtaking work of erudition, attaining Godardian or Straubian levels of quotation and association. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2017
88% Lady Macbeth (2017) Katherine feels disorientingly more modern than anyone around her, and the cold-blooded finale feels less like a true reckoning with moral character than the filmmakers seem to intend. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 11, 2017
100% Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) While the film's purview may suggest a PBS documentary, the density of Morrison's detail and the twists in his long-game storytelling make for a constant titillating simmer of discovery, a secret history round every corner. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
80% Personal Shopper (2017) As in so many of his films, part of the satisfaction comes from feeling Assayas searching through the possibilities as much as his characters do. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 7, 2017
99% I Am Not Your Negro (2017) By the end... the film has explained how not only action but introspection on the issue(s) of race is a moral and mortal necessity for the republic. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2017
96% Behemoth (Bei xi mo shou) (2017) Zhao plays with perspective and the flatness of the image to suggest that industry and the behemoth-like appetites of modern economies have a way of warping reality itself. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 3, 2017
87% Jackie (2016) Jackie is at its strongest not as a making-of-history biopic, but as a perceptive and aphoristic essay on history. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 2, 2016
96% Manchester by the Sea (2016) Lonergan's latest, finely-tuned work shows an unbowed director plunging into the depths of grief. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 18, 2016
44% Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) Observing these actors' faces, even at rest, is like watching the surface of a lake, noticing it ripple with a breeze. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 3, 2016
83% Captain Fantastic (2016) Writer-director Ross lapses into contrivance, narrative and emotional, but it'd be worse without Mortensen's utter conviction and that rugged, out-of-time mien which has served him well in stories of extremity from The Road to Jauja. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 6, 2016
99% Cameraperson (2016) A celebration of female camaraderie, and a hit-after-hit close-up record of a great cinematographer at the height of her empathic powers. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Sep 6, 2016
84% Fatima (2016) Fatima adds another trim chapter to Faucon's catalog of social dramas with its affecting, highly focused story of a hard-working first-generation Moroccan mother, Fatima, and her two teenage daughters in Lyon. - Film Comment Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Aug 22, 2016
76% Into The Forest (2016) Rozema's sturdy film tugs effectively at the heartstrings with its tragic spiral and infuses one assault scene with true camera-canting terror. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jul 28, 2016
91% Microbe and Gasoline (Microbe et Gasoil) (2016) Gondry's most deeply felt film since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 27, 2016
83% The Idol (Ya Tayr El Tayer) (2016) Mr. Abu-Assad, who wrote the script with Sameh Zoabi, mounts an idealistic appreciation of music as a way of bridging boundaries through a unifying appeal to beauty, gliding past differences in the soulful pleasure of song. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted May 26, 2016
33% Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016) More a familiar tale for fans to nod along with than a sports drama with a real kick. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted May 12, 2016
81% Sunset Song (2016) Davies's late output finds him enamored of female protagonists in ages past as they assert their independence from the confinement of social expectations and, well, men. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted May 9, 2016
80% Viktoria (2016) As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we're left with just picturesque moods. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2016
85% Steve Jobs (2015) The shallow great-man-at-high-costs scenario reveals Sorkin as crafting essentially a pop-psychology sitcom (Zingers! The Steve Jobs Story). - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2016
87% Gone Girl (2014) In its dully paranoid revenge scenario in Main Street USA, Gone Girl consistently postures at being more clever than it actually is. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2016
73% Black Mass (2015) Slavishly hitting Scorsesean music cues, Black Mass lacks the title's implied mystique. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 20, 2016
57% Streit's: Matzo And The American Dream (2016) Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
83% The Walk (2015) Hoky and lovin' it. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
92% The End Of The Tour (2015) It improbably glides along, a conversation of a film, two guys trusting each other or not. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
81% Mistress America (2015) With the eccentric and yet purposeful Mistress America, Baumbach and Gerwig add another chapter to their exceedingly fruitful collaboration. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
92% Sicario (2015) The strength of this essentially psychological thriller lies in its own queasy, cul-de-sac sense of entering a room where very bad things could happen. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
96% The Wonders (2015) Rohrwacher has a deft way of sidling into moments of drama, aided by DP Helene Louvart's extraordinary work - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
97% Arabian Nights: Volume 1 - The Restless One (As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 1, O Inquieto) (2015) a restless work of cultural reframing and repositioning that risks one giant bellyflop - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
94% Carol (2015) In their story set in the past, there lies possibility, which is what infuses Carol and Haynes's best work generally, the transcendence of being and becoming yourself. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
97% Spotlight (2015) Spotlight has many dramatic opportunities to break wide open into moments of outrage, but they're infrequently taken, and keyed to the tensions of characters. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
80% The Assassin (2015) The most beautiful and transcendent film of the year. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
96% In Jackson Heights (2015) In this vibrant string of vignettes from this diverse, multicultural, and colorful neighborhood, Wiseman affirms that politics is part of everyday life. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
96% Son of Saul (2015) Wrenching not just because of its bereft story but because Nemes gives us as a guide a man who may be broken beyond repair. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
85% Hail, Caesar! (2016) a straight-up-funny syncopated comedy about studio-run showbiz in all its bottom-line absurdity - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016