Ryan Gilbey
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 84% | The Wife (2018) |
At least The Wife has Close in its favour, not to mention timeliness.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2018
|
|
| 90% | A Star Is Born (2018) |
Were the actor Bradley Cooper not so tender and hard-working in his performance as the jaded rocker Jackson Maine, it would be possible to regard the whole thing as a vanity project, since he co-wrote and directed it also.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Oct 4, 2018
|
|
| 65% | The Little Stranger (2018) |
[Domhnall Gleeson] keeps Faraday's wounds painfully close to the surface... Faraday's bitterness works like a depressant, consuming him but also the movie, and robbing it of some of the electrical charge vital for fully effective horror. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Sep 25, 2018
|
|
| 97% | The Rider (2018) |
The Rider could easily have been pitying or patronising but it is suffused instead with warmth, understanding and insightful detail‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2018
|
|
| 29% | The King of Thieves (2018) |
We can have the joshing banter, the gags about this over-the-hill Lavender Hill Mob, but they come mixed up with the sniping and snarling, the carnivorous nastiness... Bless.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2018
|
|
| 88% | American Animals (2018) |
American Animals manages to be simultaneously fast-paced and contemplative.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Sep 5, 2018
|
|
| 90% | Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018) |
The whole nature of Cold War is one of abbreviation: snappy editing, temporal jumps, deliberately unresolved emotions... This is a film of glancing, heart-crushing pleasures.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Aug 29, 2018
|
|
| 70% | The Children Act (2018) |
This isn't cinema so much as Sunday evening television, with a moral dilemma laid out in straight-arrow scenes stripped of much cinematic sensibility.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2018
|
|
| 85% | The Festival (2018) |
After the initial sticky patch, audiences are likely to find themselves amenable and even enthusiastic - much like the festival experience, in fact.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2018
|
|
| 95% | BlacKkKlansman (2018) |
Lee's motivating anger produces a unique, electrifying charge.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Aug 17, 2018
|
|
| 96% | The Heiresses (Las Herederas) (2019) |
The Heiresses is nothing so demonstrative as a worm-that-turned story, and it's all the better for that. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Aug 8, 2018
|
|
| 100% | Apostasy (2017) |
Apostasy is muted: hushed, still, almost colourless. But don't let that fool you. Its pain is all the more distressing for being muffled.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 25, 2018
|
|
| 97% | Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) |
It has become everything that recent Bond films have failed to be: fun but not dumb, serious but not glum, frantic yet always lucid, and with an array of dynamic roles for women.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 25, 2018
|
|
| 45% | Generation Wealth (2018) |
Greenfield has shaped the new film into a self-analytical retrospective... Greenfield does, however, seem cognisant of her own wounds. It's just that they're not terribly compelling in the form in which she dramatises them here.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
|
|
| 83% | Path of Blood (2018) |
The knowledge that most of what we're seeing is through Al Qaeda's own eyes lends every shot a macabre chill.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2018
|
|
| 94% | Incredibles 2 (2018) |
More disappointing than the lack of inspiration here is the taint of corporate bias... A studio that has billions of dollars' worth of skin in the game of flogging sequels, merchandise and theme parks is in no position to issue moral instruction. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 12, 2018
|
|
| 90% | The Father of My Children (Le pere de mes enfants) (2010) |
In muting the warning signs, or allowing them to be absorbed into the bustle of life, Hansen-Løve secures for her film its slow-burning emotional impact. ‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Jul 10, 2018
|
|
| 88% | Frozen River (2008) |
Melissa Leo must take at least as much credit for the film's successes as her director. She isn't merely tough as old boots - she makes old boots look like ballet shoes.‐ Sight and Sound
Read More | Posted Jul 6, 2018
|
|
| 44% | Swimming with Men (2018) |
Feel-good is declared the winning tone within minutes. The rest of the film is just splashing around in the shallow end.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jul 5, 2018
|
|
| 100% | Leave No Trace (2018) |
Granik charts the evolution of their relationship in microscopic detail, harvesting from the smallest gestures the sort of emotion that screenwriters spend pages trying to rustle up.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 27, 2018
|
|
| 76% | In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) (2017) |
[Diane Kruger] has an instinct for subtlety that isn't always mirrored in her director, whose appetite for melodrama or contrivance can be destabilising... You don't cast someone as deft as Kruger and then augment her work with gimmicks.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 20, 2018
|
|
| 89% | Hereditary (2018) |
It's poorly paced, with a making-it-up-as-we-go feel; there's a difference between slow-burn and merely slow, and [director Ari] Aster hasn't grasped it yet.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 13, 2018
|
|
| 68% | The Happy Prince (2018) |
A role like this presents a particular challenge for Everett... If his performance as Wilde comes off, it is because as a director he has built the film to compensate for his own shortcomings.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 13, 2018
|
|
| 90% | Studio 54 (2018) |
Despite drawing some dubious conclusions about the club's demise, the filmmakers harvest enough novel footage to justify another airing.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 6, 2018
|
|
| 99% | McQueen (2018) |
It is caught between rejoicing in the era's excess and mourning its effect on the man who embodied it. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jun 6, 2018
|
|
| 96% | Zama (2018) |
The film puts us in a trance, too: one of bewildered, bottomless wonder. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 23, 2018
|
|
| 96% | Filmworker (2018) |
The interviewees in Filmworker are lit unflatteringly and not always asked the most pertinent of questions... But some of them offer telling glimpses of how this relationship looked from the outside. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 21, 2018
|
|
| 68% | On Chesil Beach (2018) |
Self-sabotagingly tasteful and fatally polite; so unwilling to take risks that the comforts of convention become preferable to any potentially fulfilling acts of boldness.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 21, 2018
|
|
| 70% | Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) |
Might have looked more at home on the smaller screen... It's a pedestrian affair, visually flat and dingy, with a plot that amounts to a lot of to-ing and fro-ing without establishing very much.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 16, 2018
|
|
| 92% | Revenge (2018) |
Torture and injury ensue, but nothing is as off-putting as the visual excesses which smack of student film-making beneath the high production values...‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
|
|
| 54% | Godard Mon Amour (Le redoutable) (2018) |
Disciples of Godard will be gritting their teeth... but then Redoubtable isn't really for them.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted May 15, 2018
|
|
| 94% | Beast (2018) |
Beast is a promising British thriller with fairy-tale overtones.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Apr 27, 2018
|
|
| 76% | Funny Cow (2017) |
And while it's admirable that the film honours its un-PC period setting by having Funny Cow deliver a joke in a comic Pakistani accent, it is unfortunate that nothing the character says, either on or off stage, is remotely amusing. ‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2018
|
|
| 98% | BPM (Beats Per Minute) (120 battements par minute) (2017) |
There are elements to admire - committed performances and noble intentions - but as cinema it's a non-starter.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2018
|
|
| 66% | Wonderstruck (2017) |
Even this visionary director can't make shots of people looking at things (books, museum exhibits) feel compelling, or pass off coincidence as drama.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2018
|
|
| 42% | A Wrinkle in Time (2018) |
What DuVernay has delivered is essentially a feature-length screensaver which operates on the assumption that cinema for children is a matter of bright colours and dippy sentiment.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2018
|
|
| 84% | The Square (2017) |
The Square is undeniably entertaining, though its lasting use may be to demonstrate that movies can have the same effect as popping a coin in the collecting tin. Having seen the film, you can rest easy knowing you've already given.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Mar 22, 2018
|
|
| 94% | A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica) (2018) |
From the moment the camera catches sight of the singer Marina Vidal in a Santiago hotspot, where she brings panache to a salsa-infused torch song, it is fully captivated and so are we.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Mar 8, 2018
|
|
| 89% | I, Tonya (2018) |
Craig Gillespie directs with all the subtlety of a baton-wielding thug but has made at least one brilliant decision in casting Margot Robbie, who is practically a machine for generating empathy.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2018
|
|
| 99% | Lady Bird (2017) |
The densely packed detail which makes this such a luminous work shows Gerwig to be an uncommonly alert filmmaker.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Feb 22, 2018
|
|
| 91% | The Shape of Water (2017) |
Refreshingly, the film doesn't shy away from its characters' desires... The Shape of Water spells out in letters taller than the Empire State Building exactly what Fay Wray and King Kong wanted to do all along.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
|
|
| 97% | Black Panther (2018) |
[The] script adheres to the usual genre formula of tomfoolery, in-jokes, mythology and outright poppycock, but their knack for teasing emotional resonance out of standard scenarios gives them the edge over predecessors and competitors alike.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2018
|
|
| 91% | Phantom Thread (2018) |
If Phantom Thread has a problem, it is that it's so full of fraught confrontations, even those that are outwardly genteel, that it sometimes feels more like a compilation of outstanding scenes than a great movie.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2018
|
|
| 88% | The Post (2018) |
The film wrings a fair amount of tension and nostalgia from what is essentially a string of meetings in smoky rooms, though it stints on analysis and ends with a limp punchline.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2018
|
|
| 97% | Coco (2017) |
The film has a galloping rhythm, and the animation is scrupulous and ravishing, from its smallest details to its limitless landscapes.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2018
|
|
| 84% | Darkest Hour (2017) |
The script has been written with the caps lock on and Joe Wright directs accordingly.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2018
|
|
| 91% | Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) |
The result suggests a greeting card spattered with gore. Beneath the little flecks of brain and bone, the Hallmark logo is unmistakable.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2018
|
|
| 85% | The Final Year (2018) |
This is not what the director Greg Barker and his colleagues set out to make, so all they can do is contemplate the wreckage and wonder what went wrong, rather than take control of the narrative themselves and mould it into any kind of coherent lesson.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2018
|
|
| 78% | All the Money in the World (2017) |
Save for a pair of performances of absorbing resolve from Plummer and Michelle Williams, it will take its place in history as a pub-quiz question, a footnote to a scandal.‐ New Statesman
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2018
|
|
| 17% | Terminal Velocity (1994) |
As a wise-cracking sky-diving instructor, Charlie Sheen wears his usual look of someone who has just been asked a really difficult question (like: how come your career has lasted this long?).‐ Independent on Sunday
Read More | Posted Dec 12, 2017
|