Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications: Hollywood Reporter, Sight and Sound, Times (UK), Uncut Magazine [UK]

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
60% Homeward (Evge) (2019) Plainly operating on a small budget, Aliev does good work with limited resources in Homeward. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 29, 2019
98% Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019) Parasite is generally gripping and finely crafted, standing up well as Bong's most mature state-of-the-nation statement since Memories of Murder in 2003. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2019
83% Dogs Don't Wear Pants (Koirat eivät käytä housuja) (2019) However limited its ambitions, Dogs Don't Wear Pants is still a witty premise clothed in an attractive technical package. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 21, 2019
83% Room 212 (Chambre 212) (2019) Honore's bubbly bottle of cinematic champagne runs out of fizz somewhere around its midway point. Even so, there are still enjoyably shallow pleasures to be savored here... - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 19, 2019
82% Diego Maradona (2019) This film is a solidly made summary of his golden years, full of energy and swagger. But Maradona's colorful life story is richer and stranger, deeper and darker than the greatest-hits reel captured here. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 19, 2019
60% The Best Years of a Life (Les plus belles années d'une vie) (2019) This wistful closing chapter has little chance of repeating the big splash made by A Man and a Woman. Even so, there is bittersweet humor and poignant insight here... - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 19, 2019
83% Vivarium (2019) It is a superior genre piece at heart, but elevated by its high-calibre leads Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, plus a script rich in political and cultural resonance. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 18, 2019
100% First Love (Hatsukoi) (2019) The Tarantino-style rollercoaster ride is as effortlessly enjoyable as ever, accentuating the director's lighter comic leanings over his bloodthirsty side. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2019
100% Living and Knowing You are Alive (Être vivant et le savoir) (2019) A gently moving meditation on friendship, grief and the strangely sensual beauty of pumpkins. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 16, 2019
83% Song Without a Name (Canción sin nombre) (2019) Leon seems firmly in command of the material, bringing a strong voice and an even stronger eye to this Kafka-esque tale of low crimes and high-level corruption. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 16, 2019
86% Nighthawk (Bacurau) (2019) Though handsome in style and admirable in ambition, this sprawling neo-western never comes together as a satisfying whole. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 15, 2019
100% Stories Of Our Lives (2015) The film has a luminous monochrome look and slickly edited polish that defies its minimal $15,000 budget. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 14, 2019
No Score Yet The Corrupted (2019) Scalpello and screenwriter Nick Moorcroft take the lowest common denominator route, falling back on tired mob-movie clichés, stock characters and leaden dialogue so generic it could have been written by an algorithm. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2019
No Score Yet Sublime (2019) Sublime is a straight rise-and-fall chronicle which rarely steps outside the bland conventions of officially endorsed promotional documentaries. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 29, 2019
No Score Yet Run (2019) Though the notion of transposing Springsteen's revved-up Americana to a faraway Scottish coastal community is an admirably bold conceit, it loses too much in translation. - Hollywood Reporter EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2019
72% 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
80% 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
83% 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
100% 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
100% 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
100% 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
37% 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 (2019) 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
No Score Yet 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