Tim Brayton
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Film Threat,
Antagony & Ecstasy,
Alternate Ending
Critics' Group:
Online Film Critics Society
Location:
Chicago, IL
Movie Reviews Only
| T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.5/5 | No Score Yet | Witchcraft II: The Temptress (1989) |
A lot more fun to watch than its 1988 predecessor. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Mar 1, 2021
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| 1.5/5 | 25% | Tom & Jerry (2020) |
Pretty horrible, even at the task of being a mindlessly pleasurable consumer good. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 28, 2021
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| 1.5/5 | 39% | Honest Thief (2020) |
There's only really thing a late-career Liam Neeson action movie has to do... Not a high bar, and yet somehow, this does not succeeded in clearing it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 27, 2021
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| 4/5 | 100% | The Father (2021) |
The sort of thing that gives year-end middlebrow prestige cinema a good name. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 26, 2021
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| 2/5 | 87% | Supernova (2021) |
Listless and drab, and perversely free of emotions for a movie that is about literally nothing else other than the looming terror of death. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 24, 2021
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| 3/5 | 63% | The Transformers - The Movie (1986) |
Simply put, this looks good, and parts of it are visually exciting, and for a non-Disney animated feature in the mid-1980s, that's pretty huge. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 24, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 81% | I Care a Lot (2021) |
Collapses in so many ways in its last act that the whole experience is retroactively tainted by it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 24, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 46% | Monster Hunter (2020) |
A very good movie on its own terms. Which are maybe not the same terms as other movies. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 20, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 78% | Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021) |
It has a delirious amount of energy, whatever else we might say about it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 15, 2021
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| 4/5 | 77% | Shadow in the Cloud (2021) |
Trash cinema made with love and thoughtfulness and a terrific sense of fun. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 15, 2021
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| 3/5 | 85% | Mr. Jones (2020) |
Agnieszka Holland is directing the heck out of this. But she's directing to compensate for the script, not to augment or accentuate it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 13, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 98% | Minari (2020) |
While it would simply be a lie to suggest that this is in any way fresh, surprising, or challenging, its charms are extremely real and well-earned. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 12, 2021
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| 1.5/5 | 24% | The Reckoning (2021) |
An exercise in pointless misery, barely even pretending to have a narrative for most of its deadening 110 minutes. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 10, 2021
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| 1/5 | 33% | Earwig and the Witch (2021) |
The worst Studio Ghibli production by such a gargantuan margin that the only fun lies in trying to come up with sufficiently florid insults to describe it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 7, 2021
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| 3/5 | 76% | Eight for Silver (2021) |
A thorough re-imagining of the werewolf movie that's also the most traditional, formulaic werewolf movie in years. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 4, 2021
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| 3/5 | 96% | Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) |
A perfectly fine film about Fred Hampton, a man who deserves much better than a perfectly fine film. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 3, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 69% | Land (2021) |
Clean, solid filmmaking. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 2, 2021
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| 4/5 | 88% | President (2021) |
May not be the formidable achievement its predecessor was, but it's still a pretty terrific documentary about the enormously hard work of navigating politics. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 1, 2021
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| 4/5 | 76% | Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021) |
While there are certainly individual moments that feel a bit too mannered and self-conscious in their cartoon weirdness, most of it feels like a very genuine dive into feverish madness. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Feb 1, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 79% | In The Earth (2021) |
Pure vintage Wheatley, all about the terrifying things we don't know and can't imagine in the primordial natural mysteries of England. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 30, 2021
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| 2/5 | 95% | CODA (2021) |
Unbearably cloying and contains barely a single narrative beat that isn't an ossified cliché. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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| 4/5 | 87% | Censor (2021) |
The film's strengths are extraordinary, a marriage of period filmmaking pastiche and psychological disintegration that calls to mind Peter Strickland. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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| 1.5/5 | No Score Yet | Witchcraft (1988) |
Bad and drab, but mostly forgettable and anonymous. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 28, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 94% | Boys State (2020) |
It simply presents its material as straightforwardly as it can and lets us decide what to do with it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 28, 2021
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| 4/5 | 100% | Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) |
Corrals all of the difficult emotions of five years into a moving, insightful sketch of a family relationship. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 27, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 92% | The Vast of Night (2020) |
There's simply no gainsaying the ambition, or the creativity in the problem solving. Whether it adds up to a movie worth watching... eh. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 26, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 97% | La Llorona (2020) |
The frustrations of the movie serve to underline the difficulty in extracting any kind of justice for a crime as unfathomable as genocide. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 26, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 96% | Sound of Metal (2020) |
Riz Ahmed's work in the lead role is a tremendous piece of screen acting, easily one of the best performances of the year. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 24, 2021
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| 4.5/5 | 96% | The Wolf House (La casa lobo) (2018) |
A psychological thriller of the most harrowing kind. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 22, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 98% | One Night in Miami (2020) |
Regina King is doing a whole lot to keep this from feeling too talky and overly earnest. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 22, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 99% | Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) |
A tight piece of filmmaking with a focused, nuanced lead performance. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 21, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 72% | An American Pickle (2020) |
Even at just 88 minutes, it's long and stilted. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 19, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | 82% | The Whistlers (2020) |
Very little other than a genre riff for the sake of doing a genre riff. But it is a good genre riff, so it has that going for it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 19, 2021
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| 3/5 | 88% | The Long Walk Home (1990) |
There are enough strengths to make the whole movie feel a little bit more pedestrian for not being able to capitalise on them more. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 17, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 63% | Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) |
123 minutes is a murderous length of time for a comedy. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 16, 2021
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| 3.5/5 | No Score Yet | Dokument Fanny och Alexander (The Making of 'Fanny and Alexander') (1986) |
A marvelous collection of moments, one that finds Bergman in an avowedly sentimental mood. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 15, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 40% | Wasp Network (2019) |
Feels like a crash course in names, dates, and summaries of espionage operations. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 14, 2021
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| 4.5/5 | 92% | Efter repetitionen (After the Rehearsal) (1984) |
The definitive statement of Bergman the film director on Bergman the theater director. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 12, 2021
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| 2/5 | 84% | Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made (2020) |
It has a wildly, indescribably unlikable protagonist. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 12, 2021
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| 1.5/5 | 10% | Brahms: The Boy II (2020) |
A dreadful trudge through dodgy horror clichés. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 11, 2021
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| 3/5 | 89% | Ema (2019) |
A phenomenal dance movie, when it wants to be. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 10, 2021
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| 3/5 | 68% | Ammonite (2020) |
Kate Winslet is primarily the reason to see a movie that is otherwise fairly light on active strengths. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 9, 2021
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| 2/5 | 20% | Iron Mask (2019) |
As aggressively pointless as this can be and generally is, there's something engaging about its proudly threadbare showmanship. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 8, 2021
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| 3/5 | 83% | She Dies Tomorrow (2020) |
It does one thing very well, and it does it with no little amount of style. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 7, 2021
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| 2.5/5 | 91% | Enola Holmes (2020) |
All florid, wild nonsense that feels like it's being played at 75% speed. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 6, 2021
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| 4/5 | 89% | Let Them All Talk (2020) |
The film's chief appeal, by a whole lot, is in watching three AAA-level veterans riff with each other as their director riffs along with them. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 4, 2021
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| 2/5 | 51% | The Midnight Sky (2020) |
A movie that feels like it's on pause for nearly all of its 118 minutes. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 2, 2021
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| 4/5 | 100% | City Hall (2020) |
A bold and comprehensive vision of the how and what of city government, tempered with just enough cynicism to seem like a thoughtful analysis. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 1, 2021
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| 4/5 | 92% | The Wild Goose Lake (Nan fang che zhan de ju hui) (2020) |
A perfect depiction of the inhumanity of an unfeeling city. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Jan 1, 2021
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| 5/5 | 100% | Fanny & Alexander (1982) |
The kind of movie that declares that it's explicit intention is to contain literally everything that cinema can be, and comes rather shockingly close to making good on that. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 31, 2020
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