Richard von Busack
Richard von Busack's reviews (from any publication) always count toward the Tomatometer
because this critic is a Tomatometer-approved critic.
| Biography: |
Born in Los Angeles, von Busack attended school at UC Santa Cruz and went on to be the lead film critic at Metro Newspapers, the Silicon Valley-based chain of weeklies.
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| Favorites: |
This year it was: Late Marriage, Spider-Man, World Traveller, Y Tu Mama Tambien...
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| Publications: | MetroActive |
| Critics' Group: | San Francisco Film Critics Circle |
| Location: | East of the San Francisco Bay |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 35% | American Assassin (2017) |
... American Assassin is of a piece with other 2017 action flicks that are turning our multiplexes into mausoleums.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2017
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| 100% | Dolores (2017) |
It's an amazing story.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan 35th Anniversary (2017) |
What is an appropriate 35th anniversary present?... It's the Coral Anniversary of 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2017
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| 76% | The Limehouse Golem (2017) |
... the mystery's revelation is unsatisfactory, with withheld evidence and reverse angles we didn't get clues on the first time around.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 7, 2017
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| 30% | I Do... Until I Don't (2017) |
Happily, I Do... Until I Don't is better than it sounds.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 1, 2017
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| 83% | Patti Cake$ (2017) |
This is a sweet movie, but it'll gall viewers who believe that fighting the viciousness of the world with troubling art is a duty-it's not just a stage you get over, as if you were a rebellious kid who finally learned to clean up and be nice.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Sep 1, 2017
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| 100% | Pursued (1947) |
Raoul Walsh's Pursued is a different animal-a noir-Western with Freudian underpinnings.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Track of the Cat (1954) |
Track of the Cat (1954) a late period William Wellman picture in fine CinemaScope, exemplifies the 1950s Westerns that were trying to muscle in on Eugene O'Neill's turf.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2017
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| 99% | Whose Streets? (2017) |
THIS IS ESSENTIAL viewing.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2017
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| 93% | Logan Lucky (2017) |
Here is a likable, sometimes uproarious, movie in which every actor comes up with something funny. We've got a lot of Southern gothics, but very few southern Ealing comedies.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2017
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| 38% | The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017) |
There's no other word for The Hitman's Bodyguard than garbage. But it's not a failure; it does what it was intended to do, which is to give a showcase to Samuel L. Jackson.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2017
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| 16% | The Dark Tower (2017) |
The latest Stephen King adaptation shoots blanks.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 11, 2017
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| 87% | Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk (2017) |
If there were a more thorough account of second-wave punk than Corbett Redford's documentary Turn it Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, would you even be able to sit through it?‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 11, 2017
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| 82% | Detroit (2017) |
It's said you can never make an anti-war movie, that some of the thrill of battle will leak in to even the most pacifistic film. Give Bigelow credit -- this certainly isn't an anti-rebellion movie.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 75% | Atomic Blonde (2017) |
This vicious, contorted spy film is without the smoother qualities of a Bond flick, movies made for an audience that accepts the old movie euphemisms for sex and violence.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Aug 3, 2017
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| 88% | Lady Macbeth (2017) |
Oldroyd deserves praise for some ingenious sailing with the prevailing winds. The British describe Jane Austen-mania as "Bonnet tradition films." At a quick glance Lady Macbeth looks like such a film, but it's colder, trickier and bloodier.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jul 28, 2017
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| 50% | Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) |
Watching this, your cerebral activity may not be as intense as usual.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jul 28, 2017
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| 93% | Dunkirk (2017) |
Nolan makes up a triptych with war's relativity -- time stretching or standing still in the presence of death.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jul 21, 2017
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| 93% | Baby Driver (2017) |
A musical more than a rubber-burner, Baby Driver is the La La Land of caper films, derivative and occasionally fun -- take that as praise if you loved La La Land.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jul 7, 2017
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| 92% | Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) |
In director Jon Watts' hands, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a true comedy. There may be better Spider-Man movies, but there's never been a funnier one, one that avoids the origin story and poor old Uncle Ben.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jul 7, 2017
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| 89% | Maudie (2017) |
Maudie would be captivating even if the title character had never painted a lick.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 30, 2017
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| 78% | The Beguiled (2017) |
Coppola seems to be one of those directors who believe that if you get the actors into the right costumes, the story will tell itself.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 30, 2017
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| 100% | Monterey Pop (1968) |
With its banners touting love and flowers, Monterey Pop shows the tribes before they went their separate ways.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 23, 2017
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| 15% | Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) |
Bewilderingly bad.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 21, 2017
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| 16% | The Mummy (2017) |
Kurtzman prefers the kid fodder of zombies, rot and crazy double-irised eyeballs to romance. And by the time of the final wire-work fight, with Cruise and Boutelle throwing each other around the room, it's all just another bent tent pole.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 16, 2017
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| 68% | Cars 3 (2017) |
Children have a lot of anxieties, but being made old, useless and surpassed by the new generation might not quite be one of them.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 16, 2017
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| 92% | Wonder Woman (2017) |
A long, long overdue movie, given our taste for superheroics, Wonder Woman deserves to be a hit. All the things that go right here overwhelm the few that don't.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 9, 2017
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| 75% | My Cousin Rachel (2017) |
My Cousin Rachel withholds an extremely important bit of information until the last minute. And the denouement isn't set up in a way that can be believed. It's rushed, it's abject.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 9, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Heartland (2016) |
Here's to a director who knows that a love scene should tell a story about what the characters have been through, and not just be an erotic display for us. And here's to a director who prefers a well-played, hopeful ending to a forced happy one.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 2, 2017
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| 92% | I, Daniel Blake (2017) |
Loach's half-century long efforts in his many films about the working class haven't always succeeded, but he's always tried. For the most part, this time he's succeeded beautifully.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Jun 2, 2017
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| 91% | A Quiet Passion (2017) |
Dickinson's struggle against lifelong underestimation had its light side. Sometimes wrenchingly sad, A Quiet Passion is a funny movie, by far Davies' funniest.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted May 19, 2017
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| 70% | Alien: Covenant (2017) |
There's more monster for the buck than there was in the previous Prometheus, but the human hosts don't make an impression. I'll walk that back. Katherine Waterston makes an impression, a negative one.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted May 19, 2017
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| 28% | King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword (2017) |
The cockney-dickhead approach to Arthurian lore has never been tried before.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted May 12, 2017
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| 84% | My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2017) |
It's a veritable Poseidon Adventure for a new century. The school may be wet, but Shaw's writing style is dry, having the tang of brilliant, bored high school kid comedy to them.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted May 5, 2017
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| 82% | Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) |
There are a lot of morsels here -- dozens, really -- and it starts off the summer with a bang.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted May 5, 2017
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| 50% | The Promise (2017) |
The script here is more than problematic, uneasy with levity ("Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder," says Myers, telling a joke already centuries old in 1915). It's ready for mawkishness.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2017
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| 61% | Cezanne and I (Cézanne et Moi) (2017) |
The historical back and forth wears out this film.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 21, 2017
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| 66% | The Fate of the Furious (2017) |
Autos cascade like a waterfall from the top of a parking garage; sometimes their on-board computers are cyber-jacked so that they besiege midtown Manhattan in an attack wave of shiny expensive plastic and chrome.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 21, 2017
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| 66% | Tommy's Honour (2017) |
Connery excels in showing the changing of times, the shifting from the early to the middle Victorian era over the course of the young Tommy's short life.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2017
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| 89% | The Curse of the Cat People (1945) |
Despite the snazzy title... Curse of the Cat People has as much pity and tears in it as chills.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 14, 2017
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| 52% | The Boss Baby (2017) |
It's vibrantly colorful, delightfully odd and seriously under the influence of Looney Tunes.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 7, 2017
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| 44% | Ghost in the Shell (2017) |
ScarJo breaks a lot of real and synthetic bones, but the movie doesn't break any new ground.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 7, 2017
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| 67% | Life (2017) |
It's unclear this movie has a reason to exist, beyond the reason of showing what a sucker's game it is to try to top Alien.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 96% | After the Storm (Umi yori mo mada fukaku) (2017) |
Even Kore-eda's lesser movies show a Japan that doesn't appear much in the movies, and After the Storm is one of his best.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 80% | Personal Shopper (2017) |
Very sexy and very scary.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 23, 2017
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| 87% | My Scientology Movie (2017) |
My Scientology Film's novelty is it finds a bleak humor in the problems of a reporter trying to crack a stone wall.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 71% | Beauty and the Beast (2017) |
One of the blandest, most nervous and most cluttered fairy tale movies that Disney has ever released -- Bill Condon's redo is a rococo La La Fantasyland, complete with sort-of dancing and autotuned singing.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 76% | Kong: Skull Island (2017) |
The witty and energetic director Jordan Vogt-Roberts corrals hallucinatory megafauna, who attack with viscera-splattering violence.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 9, 2017
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| 98% | Kedi (2017) |
In 80 minutes, the city and the cats never get stale. Torun's marvelous film is capped with a soundtrack of '60s Turkish rock, as if the cats were living the old hippie dream of life without responsibility and sustenance without work.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 2, 2017
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| 93% | Logan (2017) |
With dignity and grace, Jackman says sayonara to this signature role. It's clear how much physicality and humor he passed on to this mashup of comic book action and political allegory, in his portrait of the ronin with six swords.‐ MetroActive
Read More | Posted Mar 2, 2017
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