Philip De Semlyen
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Empire Magazine,
Time Out
Movie Reviews Only
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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4/5 | 97% | Dear Comrades! (2021) |
The script finds plenty of mordant humour in the Kafka-like contortions of the state and its lackeys. - Time Out
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| Posted Jan 15, 2021
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4/5 | 99% | MLK/FBI (2021) |
This captivating and enraging doc records a battle between two forces vying for moral authority with only one combatant. - Time Out
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| Posted Jan 14, 2021
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2/5 | 51% | The Midnight Sky (2020) |
The sleek sci-fi visuals occasionally elevate it, although more often it's just a bit of a slog. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 23, 2020
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4/5 | 60% | Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) |
In a year when the cinemagoing experience could be categorised as 'much too little', you can't really blame WW84 for giving us a bit too much. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 15, 2020
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4/5 | 96% | The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (2020) |
The story beats are so irresistible, the arc of its trio of big-haired disco titans so snappy, the music so contagious, that it soars like a Barry Gibb falsetto above the clichés. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 6, 2020
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4/5 | 100% | Host (2020) |
Until someone makes a film about a haunted sourdough starter, this ingenious horror movie will remain the zeitgeistiest thing to emerge from lockdown. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 5, 2020
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1/5 | 27% | Hillbilly Elegy (2020) |
It may once have seemed like an Oscar-winning proposition, but Hillbilly Elegy arrives feeling more like an ill-judged, mind-numbing exercise in Hollywoodsplaining heartland America. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 18, 2020
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5/5 | 99% | Collective (Colectiv) (2020) |
A matryoshka doll of a doc, Collective keeps finding new ways to reinvent itself and knock you for six in the process. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 17, 2020
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5/5 | 83% | Mank (2020) |
The last time Gary Oldman played a heavy drinker from the 1940s, he won an Oscar for it. Don't be surprised if he does it again. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 11, 2020
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4/5 | 66% | The Secret Garden (2020) |
It's a tale of healing that will steal your heart. Step under its canopy. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 27, 2020
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2/5 | 39% | Rebecca (2020) |
The rest is a bit of a damp squib. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 27, 2020
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2/5 | 85% | Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) |
Borat is hardly Borat anymore. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 27, 2020
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4/5 | 100% | Being a Human Person (2020) |
A film about filmmaking to stand alongside Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams, this portrait of one-of-a-kind Swedish director Roy Andersson offers a generous, honest, insightful and at times rather sad glimpse of the man at work. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 16, 2020
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4/5 | 90% | The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) |
When it all clicks, its terrific cast in full flow in the packed courtroom, it's truly stirring stuff. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 2, 2020
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4/5 | 86% | On The Rocks (2020) |
Sofia Coppola's latest rumination on ennui, drifting relationships and the rarified discontent of comfortable lives may be exactly the existential crisis you need right now. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 2, 2020
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5/5 | 98% | Rocks (2020) |
This tough but hopeful London coming-of-age story will fill your heart. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 14, 2020
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3/5 | 73% | Mulan (2020) |
Talking animals and slapstick silliness are very much out and stiff-lipped themes of family, duty and honour are in. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 5, 2020
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2/5 | 35% | The New Mutants (2020) |
It finally arrives more than two years after its original planned release date and at times it's hard not to stifle the unkind thought: 'Why so soon?' - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 5, 2020
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3/5 | 70% | Tenet (2020) |
After five months stuck in front of the small screen, maybe being a little overwhelmed is no bad thing. But it's hard to escape the sense that less might have been more. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 21, 2020
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4/5 | 94% | Boys State (2020) |
The sight of a thousand frat boys chewing over women's reproductive rights is not going to be for everyone, but there are some genuinely inspiring moments among the discord. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 14, 2020
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4/5 | 93% | The Guardians (Les Gardiennes) (2018) |
Full of the sleepy rhythms of rural life, this beautiful-looking French drama has a powerful story of emancipation stitched into its period garb. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 4, 2020
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3/5 | 76% | Dragged Across Concrete (2019) |
The dialogue has a nicely off-kilter feel. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 4, 2020
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5/5 | 100% | Make Up (2020) |
This magnificently unsettling British debut is a serious calling card for writer-director Claire Oakley. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 31, 2020
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2/5 | 76% | Summerland (2020) |
Where films like The Railway Children and Hope and Glory handle the tricky balance between children's coming-of-age story and adult wartime drama perfectly, Summerland fudges it. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 31, 2020
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3/5 | 48% | Unhinged (2020) |
Russell Crowe's satisfyingly nasty turn deserved a bit more brains to go with the brawn. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 31, 2020
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2/5 | 41% | The Big Ugly (2020) |
The preponderance of middle-aged men doesn't help: world-weary, seasoned villains they may be, but you wouldn't bank on any of them breaking into a sprint without pulling something. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 24, 2020
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4/5 | 92% | Clemency (2019) |
The moral and ethical debates around the death penalty rarely touch on the toll it takes on the people involved, but that's the grey area writer-director Chinonye Chukwu explores with a humanist's touch and an keen ear for all her characters. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 17, 2020
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3/5 | 52% | Love Sarah (2020) |
It's easy to be sniffy about a film that sets three friends on an against-all-odds quest to set up Notting Hill's 400th artisanal bakery, but its big-heartedness manages to defy cynicism. - Time Out
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| Posted Jul 10, 2020
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2/5 | 40% | Irresistible (2020) |
It's a big old nothingburger of a movie: Wag the Dog with a muzzle on. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 26, 2020
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4/5 | 93% | The Delivered (Fanny Lye Deliver'd) (2019) |
It's a film that always looks to plough its own furrow: chewing over biblical text one minute, unleashing lurid splashes of violence the next. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 26, 2020
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4/5 | 99% | On the Record (2020) |
This compelling story of sexual assault and powerful men violently abusing their positions is a reminder than the #MeToo movement didn't begin - or end - with Harvey Weinstein. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 26, 2020
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4/5 | 94% | Babyteeth (2020) |
Eliza Scanlen mainlines its young protagonist with herky-jerky energy and otherness as she rapturously loses herself in music, dancing and the swells of first love. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 19, 2020
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4/5 | 100% | The Australian Dream (2019) |
You don't need to be Australian, know a bean about Aussie Rules football or have even heard of its subject, indigenous AFL player Adam Goodes, to walk away from this moving documentary fired up and challenged. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 12, 2020
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1/5 | 8% | Artemis Fowl (2020) |
It's 90 minutes of barely established characters doing half-explained things with mysterious objects. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 12, 2020
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3/5 | 88% | You Don't Nomi (2020) |
Searching for hidden depths in Showgirls might feel like going deep sea fishing in a puddle, but this fun, likeable doc makes a decent case for a reappraisal. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 12, 2020
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3/5 | 90% | Days of the Bagnold Summer (2019) |
Monica Dolan exudes warmth, intelligence and resilience as a woman whose self-confidence has taken knocks but who's still out there fighting. - Time Out
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| Posted Jun 5, 2020
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3/5 | 67% | Extraction (2020) |
It packs some of the visceral punch of a Tony Scott action thriller but little of the heart: not so much Man on Fire as Man Smouldering Gently. - Time Out
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| Posted Apr 22, 2020
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2/5 | 57% | The Hunt (2020) |
How entertaining you think it is depends on how funny you find your Twitter feed: the 2020 version, not when it was all Pikachu and 'Hotline Bling' memes. - Time Out
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| Posted Mar 11, 2020
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3/5 | 88% | Onward (2020) |
There's a little inspiration missing in its bog-standard hero's journey -- even if the bog is a magical one. - Time Out
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| Posted Feb 27, 2020
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4/5 | 91% | The Invisible Man (2020) |
It's a #MeToo horror film that couldn't be any more timely if it shuffled into a courtroom with a Zimmer frame. - Time Out
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| Posted Feb 25, 2020
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4/5 | 92% | Bacurau (Nighthawk) (2020) |
It crams elements of the western, John Carpenter-y beats, mordant wit and peppery political commentary into one hugely entertaining modern exploitation flick. - Time Out
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| Posted Feb 24, 2020
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2/5 | 79% | True History of the Kelly Gang (2020) |
The climax is a punky, Peckinpah-lite splurge that jettisons the emotion and power in a hail of lead. - Time Out
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| Posted Feb 21, 2020
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4/5 | 86% | Color Out of Space (2020) |
It takes a lot for a movie to out-bonkers Cage on this kind of form. Color out of Space manages it in style. - Time Out
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| Posted Feb 21, 2020
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2/5 | 47% | Underwater (2020) |
The plot is 'The Abyss'-lite, the horror beats feel cadged from 'Alien' and the seafood-looking CG monsters appear to have been liberated from a bin outside Iceland. - Time Out
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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3/5 | 36% | Seberg (2020) |
Kristen Stewart's performance burns with far greater intensity than the middling material that surrounds it. - Time Out
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| Posted Jan 14, 2020
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4/5 | 97% | The Kingmaker (2019) |
The first half is a conventional biography but as it progresses, 'The Kingmaker' takes shape as an acute study of the psychology of power. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 9, 2019
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4/5 | 74% | Pink Wall (2019) |
What makes it stand out from the well-stocked ranks of indie relationship dramas is the way Cullen plays with traditional gender expectations. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 9, 2019
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2/5 | 91% | QT8: The First Eight (2019) |
For all the fun clips and well-placed interviewees, this Tarantino doc has all the critical punch of a DVD extra. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 9, 2019
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3/5 | 85% | The Wolf's Call (Le chant du loup) (2019) |
The plot, which heads off in some improbable directions, recalls 'The Spy Who Loved Me' in a way you suspect it's not supposed to. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 29, 2019
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4/5 | 91% | The Biggest Little Farm (2019) |
Like a cross between 'Microcosmos' and an origin story for Old MacDonald, this wonderful doc is possibly the most joyous 90 minutes you'll spend in a cinema this year. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 28, 2019
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