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
83% 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
64% 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
42% 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
95% 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
81% 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
98% 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
100% 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
82% 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
86% 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
84% 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
82% 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
86% 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
91% Mountains May Depart (Shan he gu ren) (2016) close by the human reality observed in minute interactions, and against the backdrop of a world that threatens to muffle their spirit. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
89% My Golden Days (Trois Souvenirs De Ma Jeunesse) (2016) traverses coming-of-age territory that in any other hands might immediately seem over-familiar, but here retains the spark of surprise - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
87% Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) reminds us just how unrivaled a filmmaker Linklater is-how, like few other filmmakers, he's someone you can grow up with and alongside, watching him watch you. - Brooklyn Magazine EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
75% Above and Below (2016) The montage of Mr. Steiner's movie actively looks for links among his subjects: fierce self-sufficiency, absent but not forgotten family, and unachieved dreams. But the most stirring moments can be the stillest ones ... - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2016
88% Havana Motor Club (2016) Mr. Perlmutt ultimately shows that for these drivers, car culture runs deeper than simply winning or losing a race. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 7, 2016
100% I Don't Belong Anywhere - Le cinéma de Chantal Akerman (2015) Ms. Lambert's film builds nicely, staying in tune with the ordinariness and intimacy explored in Ms. Akerman's boldly rendered films. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2016
5% Get a Job (2016) At its sloppy heart, this is meant to be an affirming movie, but the filmmakers could have taken a cue from one line of dialogue: "Don't just feel special. Be special." - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 24, 2016
74% Take Me To The River (2016) There's dramatic potential in Ryder's struggle to assert his identity, only to be upstaged by unforeseen troubles, but Mr. Sobel's film skates past any persuasive sense of motivation. - New York Times EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 18, 2016