Stephen Dalton

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: Hollywood Reporter, Sight and Sound, Times (UK), Uncut Magazine [UK]

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
	60%	Knives and Skin (2019)	An agreeably offbeat coming-of-age thriller steeped in macabre humour and queer feminist attitude. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 15, 2019
	No Score Yet	The Godfathers of Hardcore (2017)	McFarland's doc is clearly a labor of love, and much of the vintage concert footage it contains is undeniably exciting. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 11, 2019
	100%	Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (2019)	Hit and miss, but mostly good fun. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 20, 2019
	No Score Yet	The Portuguese Woman (2019)	It often plods even during its most potentially gripping moments. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 2, 2019
	No Score Yet	The Breath (Der Atem) (2019)	The Breath is a small, personal, emphatically arty mixtape movie whose ghostly narrators leave just fleeting impressions, like chance encounters in late-night bars. But many of their haunting stories linger long after the film ends... - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 28, 2019
	100%	Bait (2019)	The surface plot has the stark feel of classic neorealism, but there are more interesting layers going on below the scuffed surface as Jenkin detours into experimental montage technique, Guy Maddin-style retro pastiche and English folk-horror tropes. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 20, 2019
	80%	Marighella (2019)	Once you accept its binary us-and-them worldview, Marighella works fine as an exciting and highly assured debut, with a terrific ensemble cast at its heart. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 16, 2019
	No Score Yet	2040 (2019)	Gameau's relentlessly cheery screen persona may grate with grouchy old cynics like me, but his noble motives and positive vibes are hard to fault. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 16, 2019
	100%	Varda by Agnès (2019)	A personal, playful account of a rich creative legacy. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 13, 2019
	No Score Yet	Monsters. (Monstri.) (2019)	Touching on dark themes like painfully closeted sexuality and bitter family friction without amplifying them into sensational melodrama, Monsters is a thoughtful and well-acted two-hander with a minor-key, naturalistic aesthetic. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 11, 2019
	No Score Yet	A Dog Called Money (2019)	A freewheeling visual collage which unearths little of substance from a potentially fascinating mass of material. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 11, 2019
	No Score Yet	Flatland (2019)	Flatland is a rough ride in places, staying into clumsy caricature and tonally uneven melodrama. But it is never boring, and riffs on timely themes in an entertaining, compassionate manner. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 8, 2019
	60%	Alita: Battle Angel (2019)	Their chutzpah is admirable, but perhaps, on this occasion, a little misplaced. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 1, 2019
	68%	10 Things I Hate About You (1999)	A witty reworking of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in the form of a modern-day screwball teen comedy, Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate about You actually owes very little to the original beyond basic plot points and a handful of names. - Times (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 27, 2019
	76%	Love Sonia (2018)	A worthy but lifeless passion project. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 24, 2019
	No Score Yet	Offenders (Izgrednici) (2017)	Zecevic has created an atmospheric hybrid of art house and pulp movie elements that could find a cult following among genre-friendly fans and viewing platforms. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 2, 2019
	No Score Yet	Namme (2017)	An exacting but absorbing exercise in slow cinema, Zaza Khalvashi's Namme is a hymn to the majestic mountain landscapes and pagan folk traditions of south-west Georgia. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 2, 2019
	No Score Yet	As I Fall (Når jeg faller) (2018)	Drawing on the director's own life, this polished debut feature paints a commendably unsensational picture of drug abuse and its emotional complications. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 30, 2018
	No Score Yet	Wandering Girl (Niña errante) (2018)	An intimate, tender, bewitching depiction of budding womanhood. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 21, 2018
	No Score Yet	Werewolf (Wilkolak) (2018)	A thematically rich combination of coming-of-age drama, wartime thriller and horror movie. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
	No Score Yet	Why Don't You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni) (2018)	A splatterpunk action comedy drenched in gleefully dark Russian humor. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 13, 2018
	40%	The Wedding (2018)	The Wedding is rooted in potentially rich ingredients, but Abbas shoots it in such a flat, minor-key register that most of the dramatic energy dissipates. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 12, 2018
	No Score Yet	Winter's Night (2018)	Hitting emotional grace notes that belie his relatively tender years, 33-year-old South Korean auteur/director Jang Woo-jin offers a bittersweet rumination on love, marriage and midlife disillusionment in this quietly enchanting third feature. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 28, 2018
	78%	Anna and the Apocalypse (2018)	This schlocky horror picture show combines a zesty young cast with an infectious comic energy. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 28, 2018
	76%	Second Coming (2014)	The premise is pregnant with promise, but the conception is far from immaculate. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 19, 2018
	No Score Yet	Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records (2018)	This love letter to one of Britain's first multicultural pop movements is an effortlessly enjoyable viewing experience with a rich, sunny, consistently uplifting soundtrack. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 19, 2018
	No Score Yet	Amra and the Second Marriage (2018)	A rich, female-driven comedy with timely feminist bite. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 14, 2018
	94%	CAM (2018)	Cam is a suspenseful mind-bender with plenty of timely feminist subtext. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 9, 2018
	100%	They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)	Nothing feels too sentimentalized or sanitized, but nor is it sensationalized for extra shock value either. These are the true accounts of survivors, after all, mostly talking decades after the events and grateful to be alive. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 16, 2018
	89%	Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (2018)	Plenty of classy ingredients here, but Wheatley's tentative first foray into the realm of adult drama is not the heart-bruising emotional assault course it could have been. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 11, 2018
	36%	Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)	Delivers little besides labored jokes, a moronic plot and characters so thinly drawn they make Mister Bean look like the work of prime-time Ingmar Bergman. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 30, 2018
	20%	Nekrotronic (2018)	This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 30, 2018
	34%	King of Thieves (2019)	King of Thieves really should have delivered way more cinematic swag than it does. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 27, 2018
	86%	Let Me Fall (2018)	Framing the plot in female-driven coming-of-age terms, with a tortured same-sex romance at its heart... gives this story a fresher angle than most drug movies. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 24, 2018
	100%	The Man Who Feels No Pain (2018)	The Man Who Feels No Pain is a fun ride, unashamedly zany and eager to please, even if the humor is very broad and the sprawling plot too baggy for an action-driven piece. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 21, 2018
	90%	Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (2018)	A competent but conventional affair, highly watchable but low on fresh angles or bombshell revelations. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 18, 2018
	38%	Farming (2018)	Farming is a great story ultimately defeated by its own unrelenting boorishness. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 17, 2018
2/5	30%	Red Joan (2019)	Dench lends emotional heft and nuance to her handful of scenes, but Red Joan is otherwise let down by leaden dialogue and one-note characters. - Times (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 14, 2018
	80%	Sew the Winter to My Skin (2018)	Qubeka's largely wordless, diffuse, time-scrambled narrative feels willfully confusing at first, but it rewards patient viewers with its sensory riches and hypnotic rhythms. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 14, 2018
	75%	One Last Deal (2018)	This warm-hearted charmer presses some obvious emotional buttons, but with enough deadpan humor and self-aware attitude to avoid schmaltzy overload. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 13, 2018
4/5	95%	If Beale Street Could Talk (2019)	If Beale Street Could Talk becomes a chronicle of crushed innocence and systemic injustice, but also a poetic paean to the healing power of love. - Times (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 11, 2018
	13%	The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018)	[A] half-baked, cumbersome, overlong psychodrama. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 11, 2018
2/5	81%	Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)	Fahrenheit 11/9 is funny and mischievous in parts, but too little of it feels fresh or shocking. - Times (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2018
3/5	91%	Widows (2018)	A flawed but fascinating mismatch between director and project, Widows is tough on crime, but even tougher on the causes of crime. - Times (UK) EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2018
	81%	Quincy (2018)	Quincy is an effortlessly engaging portrait of a major musical icon whose laidback charisma, prodigious ego and poetic turn of phrase can still light up a movie screen. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2018
	83%	Gwen (2018)	Ultimately, McGregor piles so much misfortune on his downtrodden heroines with so little dramatic justification, the net emotional effect is more numbing than moving. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 8, 2018
	91%	Gloria Bell (2019)	Gloria Bell maintains a warm but rigorously unsentimental tone despite material which could easily lend itself to mawkish sentimentality. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 8, 2018
	82%	Ever After (Endzeit) (2018)	The open-ended finale will not satisfy genre fans expecting a more conventional orgy of flesh-chomping carnage. But taken on its own terms, Hellgard's second feature is a smart and stylish treat. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 8, 2018
	59%	Vox Lux (2018)	A deliciously rich treatise on toxic fame and weapons of mass seduction. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 4, 2018
	No Score Yet	Love 1. Dog (Dragoste 1: Câine) (2018)	Taken on its own uncompromising terms, Love 1. Dog has a certain stark beauty and slow-burn intensity. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 3, 2018