Ryan Gilbey

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: Guardian, Independent (UK), Sight and Sound, Observer (UK), Heat Magazine, New Statesman, London Review of Books

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
	93%	Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)	[Antonio] Banderas has a tentative charm - he is always holding something in reserve - and is captivating in an encounter with an old flame, Federico, but he's fighting a losing battle against the lugubriousness of the material. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2019
	85%	Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)	If Once Upon a Time... falls a long way short of meaningful, it still deserves credit for groping in its graceless way towards profound ideas about the restorative miracles of cinema and the consolation of lies projected at 24 frames per second. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 13, 2019
	81%	Animals (2019)	The debauchery on screen sometimes feels like an overcompensation for a lack of authenticity. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 1, 2019
	100%	The Chambermaid (La camarista) (2019)	Avilés's disconcerting film takes us from the starched suites to the service lifts, laundries and back corridors hidden from view. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 24, 2019
	53%	The Lion King (2019)	Restaging a superannuated property such as The Lion King can leave decent performers with nothing to play with, no meat on the bone. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 17, 2019
	54%	The Dead Don't Die (2019)	The appeal of the film's practised and deliberate amateurism is exhausted fairly quickly. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 10, 2019
	90%	Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)	The picture does a fair bit of narrative slaloming, each new twist revealing an ever-more exasperating switcheroo. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 3, 2019
	63%	Yesterday (2019)	If Yesterday is a failure it is because, it lacks the sort of robust rules that are crucial to the most far-fetched fantasy. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 27, 2019
	87%	Sometimes Always Never (Triple Word Score) (2018)	The director Carl Hunter, formerly the bassist of the Liverpudlian band the Farm, puts rather too much faith in quirkiness to see the film through. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 12, 2019
	80%	Late Night (2019)	Though the film is about people striving for comic excellence, its own quality control hints that mediocre is good enough; it's stuck between 30 Rock and a hard place. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 5, 2019
	59%	Sunset (Napszállta) (2019)	All the good intentions in the world can't compensate for an audience's alienation, and with nothing to sustain the suspense from one scene to the next, it dwindles away after an hour. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted May 29, 2019
	89%	Rocketman (2019)	Crushingly literal... More redolent of a Christmas round-robin letter than of anything resembling cinema. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted May 21, 2019
	96%	Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) (2019)	A film of unshowy and eye-opening surprises, which leads its audience somewhere previously unexplored by cinema: into the dream lives of drug lords. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted May 15, 2019
	83%	High Life (2019)	In working without exteriors, Denis sacrifices a crucial component of her range... For all its intimacy, it says less about the isolating expanse of mortality than it does about the limitations of a Claire Denis movie shot entirely in the studio. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted May 9, 2019
	61%	Vox Lux (2018)	Corbet's thesis that a world in thrall to spectacle risks conflating hedonism with horror has a strong whiff of the undergraduate about it. In practice, though, his movie is a satisfying experience that consistently resists hysteria. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted May 1, 2019
	99%	Eighth Grade (2018)	The movie catches every marginal cringing embarrassment and each infinitesimal joy. Very little happens in it, and yet everything does. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 17, 2019
	81%	Mid90s (2018)	The dingy cinematography and abrasive score scream authenticity, but Mid90s hits every last beat of the coming-of-age movie... Mostly the film strives desperately for effect over logic. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 10, 2019
	93%	Wild Rose (2019)	Jessie Buckley... makes a mighty impact in Wild Rose. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 10, 2019
	90%	Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice) (2018)	Rohrwacher handles the shifts of tone gracefully, as she did in The Wonders, which also explored the tension between a rustic idyll and the modern world. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 4, 2019
	52%	Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)	The first 40 minutes of the movie contain the most giddy and intoxicating action scenes you'll find in any cinema this summer. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 1, 2019
	29%	Empire Records (1995)	It was never on the cards that Allan Moyle, the director of Pump Up the Volume, would deliver an authentic study of modern youth with his new film Empire Records. But the picture is barely even set on this planet, let alone in this era. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 28, 2019
3/5	67%	The Break (1998)	The film is over-ambitious, yet the confident direction of Robert Dornhelm helps it hang together. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 28, 2019
2/5	14%	Persons Unknown (1996)	[Director George] Hickenlooper himself cannot get a firm grasp on the trashy noir dynamics of the piece, and by the final 20 minutes, all credibility and sympathy has dissolved. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 28, 2019
3/5	58%	Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)	Despite the film's faults, David Arnold's score, which layers industrialised sounds over traditional orchestration, can make some sequences seem more exciting than they actually are. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 28, 2019
3/5	42%	I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)	Tthe frights come fairly regularly, and though the picture neither haunts nor tickles you the way Scream did, it's diverting enough as mindless Saturday-night entertainment. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 27, 2019
	98%	3 Faces (2019)	Panahi has already made one decisive study of gender oppression (his fiery 2006 comedy Offside...) and it is into this territory that 3 Faces proceeds with warmth, curiosity and ultimately anger. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 27, 2019
	43%	Space Jam (1996)	Space Jam is nothing if not a product made by men who gauge a film's success by how many soft toys it spawns. - Independent (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 22, 2019
	93%	Us (2019)	Us represents a definite advance on Get Out, and establishes Peele as a fascinating film-maker. When he learns to stop over-complicating things, he may even become a great one, too. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 21, 2019
	95%	Ray & Liz (2019)	The lives we see are eked out on the breadline with an air of desperation and feverishness. Yet Daniel Landin's cinematography captures them affectionately. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 15, 2019
	57%	Under the Silver Lake (2019)	Pop culture can furnish us with potent hits of meaning, and the film rejoices in that. But it also asks what happens when they eclipse or outstrip lived experience. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 14, 2019
	78%	Captain Marvel (2019)	Vital to the success of Captain Marvel is Larson, whose amused intelligence warms the movie through like Carol's hands heating a kettle. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 6, 2019
	92%	Fighting with My Family (2019)	Fighting with My Family is a rare and delightful beast: a movie that seems to understand the world of professional wrestling. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 5, 2019
	No Score Yet	Women of Mafia 2 (Kobiety mafii 2) (2019)	The absence of a moral component, or some indication that what we're seeing isn't meant to be titillating, renders the film about as enjoyable as surgery without anaesthetic. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 28, 2019
	86%	Hannah (2018)	It's a bit rum to make a sophisticated performer go through the motions in this way. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 27, 2019
	90%	Capernaum (Capharnaüm) (2018)	Labaki directs the inexperienced cast sensitively, and mixes appalled commentary on the bureaucracy conspiring against the disenfranchised with the occasional indelible image. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 21, 2019
	55%	Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2017)	Like the characters, Mektoub, My Love is itself apparently aimless, often irritating, prone to treading water -- indeed, it could be accused of being one long longueur. But I found plenty to admire in it. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 19, 2019
	89%	A Private War (2018)	The director Matthew Heineman has a background in documentary, and Pike serves as a one-woman answer to the question of why he didn't make a factual piece: her tenacity, swagger and depth are astonishing. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 13, 2019
	95%	If Beale Street Could Talk (2019)	Jenkins's greatest achievement is to recreate Baldwin's depiction of the psychological horror of racism, the dread and claustrophobia it generates, along with the surging passion the couple use to try to defeat it. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 6, 2019
	98%	Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)	For what could have been a sordid and interior little yarn, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" positively glows. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 30, 2019
	82%	Dogman (2019)	A character study rather than the conventional thriller hinted at by its gangster trappings... In little more than 90 minutes, [Marcello Fonte] completes the unlikely metamorphosis from a Mr Bean to an El Greco. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 29, 2019
	97%	Tehran Taboo (2018)	The lyrical animation, and especially an expressive use of shadows which illuminates emotion in the actors' faces, makes it all appear to be unfolding in a woozy dream. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	87%	First Man (2018)	In those sequences when Armstrong is heading for the stars, the approach is so immersive on a sensory level -- cacophonous sound design, juddering cinematography verging on the abstract -- that it almost compensates for the void at the film's core. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	89%	Possum (2018)	In taking his inspiration from Jimmy Savile, Holness has placed at the centre of his film the sort of bogeyman who could give even Michael Myers nightmares. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	79%	Halloween (2018)	[Forgets] that a decent Halloween movie should take its cue from Michael Myers: low on chat, high on surprise. Even so, this one can still boast a higher-than-average proportion of treats among its tricks. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	65%	Peterloo (2019)	It seems perverse that a film of such length should find no home for so many of its director's assets. Detailed character-work, complex domestic relationships, humour: these are elements that would have made the picture engaging. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	91%	Widows (2018)	It would be wrong to place all the credit on the script when every element of Widows expresses character and theme with intelligence and concision. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	91%	The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)	The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels like the Coen brothers' B-sides compilation... . That smugness to which the Coens are susceptible is in plentiful supply here. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	66%	Suspiria (2018)	Guadagnino claims that his Suspiria is not a remake at all but a cover version. If that's the case, it can only be the equivalent of turning a three-minute glam stomp into a bloated rock opera. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	84%	Disobedience (2018)	Chilean director Sebastián Lelio lends this adaptation of Naomi Alderman's 2006 novel of the same name an outsider's curiosity... only a foreigner could bring this much lyricism to locations within spitting distance of the North Circular. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019
	96%	Three Identical Strangers (2018)	Dramatises the nature vs nurture argument in a murky and intriguing way. If only its stylistic mannerisms didn't threaten to obscure the storytelling. - New Statesman EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 25, 2019