Tim Brayton
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Film Threat,
Antagony & Ecstasy,
Alternate Ending
Critics' Group:
Online Film Critics Society
Location:
Chicago, IL
Movie Reviews Only
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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 | 41% | 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 | 67% | 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 | 90% | 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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3/5 | 53% | Waiting for the Barbarians (2020) |
The story that all this luscious style is in service to is really not all that great. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 29, 2020
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3.5/5 | 60% | Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) |
It treats the matter of superheroes with the joyous abandon of children hammering their action figures together. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 28, 2020
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4/5 | 95% | Soul (2020) |
Unbelievably nice and sweet, to such a degree that it begins to lose some definition. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 26, 2020
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2.5/5 | 91% | Promising Young Woman (2020) |
A disastrously bad ending... leaves most of the film's themes muddy at best. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 25, 2020
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3/5 | 100% | The Truffle Hunters (2020) |
It is a phenomenal dog movie - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 25, 2020
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2.5/5 | 45% | Fatman (2020) |
When it comes right down to it, Fatman makes us work too hard for the laughs. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 24, 2020
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3.5/5 | No Score Yet | Fårö Document 1979 (1979) |
A simple, earnest tribute to a place, and while it doesn't have the artistic heft of the director's best work, it's extremely pleasant and even heartwarming. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 24, 2020
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3/5 | 98% | Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
One of those plays that is so good that as long as you fill it out with a cast that's at least slightly talented, it's literally impossible to turn it into something bad. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 23, 2020
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3/5 | 72% | Greenland (2020) |
Typical genre fare at worst, and truly ingenious genre fare at best. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 23, 2020
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4.5/5 | 85% | Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) (1978) |
A small and punishingly honest scrap of interpersonal conflict made out almost entirely of grace notes. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 21, 2020
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3.5/5 | 76% | The Croods: A New Age (2020) |
A genuinely fun, visually dazzling example of goofy cartoon slapstick on a grand scale. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 20, 2020
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3.5/5 | 87% | Shirley (2020) |
Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg devour their roles with fearless prickliness and predatory slyness. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 18, 2020
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2/5 | 20% | The Serpent's Egg (1978) |
The Serpent's Egg is just about the worst thing for a film like this to be: it is indulgent and mercilessly dull. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 17, 2020
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1.5/5 | 57% | The Prom (2020) |
Ryan Murphy has literally no facility with anything. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 17, 2020
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1/5 | 69% | Godmothered (2020) |
Jillian Bell is the only reason to watch this film. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 15, 2020
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3/5 | 81% | Face to Face (Ansikte mot Ansikte) (1976) |
It definitely works less than the films immediately preceding it. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 14, 2020
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1.5/5 | 27% | Wild Mountain Thyme (2020) |
Cobbled together out of generations of dumb light drama about colorfully rural Irish types. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 14, 2020
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4/5 | 98% | Corpus Christi (Boze cialo) (2020) |
A film of narrow concerns, but it expresses them with uncommon power and delicacy. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 12, 2020
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4.5/5 | 99% | Wolfwalkers (2020) |
A consummate work of animated art. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 11, 2020
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4/5 | 92% | The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten) (1975) |
Paradoxically, Bergman has completely re-imagined The Magic Flute as a cinematic work, despite how blatantly theatrical it is in virtually every imaginable respect. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 10, 2020
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1/5 | 11% | Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite! (2020) |
Delights us with scenes of real animals whose CGI mouths turn into the hideous devouring maws of some eldritch forgotten god, attempting to make it look like they're speaking. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 9, 2020
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5/5 | 91% | Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) (1974) |
One of the most deeply intimate works of filmed media. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 8, 2020
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1/5 | 14% | Stardust (2020) |
A brown on brown, hold the lighting, exercise in making 1971 look as glum and joyless as you could want. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 6, 2020
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1.5/5 | 40% | Capone (2020) |
A kind of appalling, negative-imprint version of grandeur, where we are watching something misguided being done as fervently as possible. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 5, 2020
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3/5 | 83% | Mank (2020) |
While Mank is incredibly beautiful, it's perhaps not beautiful in a productive way. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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2/5 | 80% | The Old Guard (2020) |
Filmed through a muddy digital veil that pushes all of the colors hard towards grey, unless the entire purpose of the scene is that they are yellow. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 4, 2020
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2/5 | 27% | Hillbilly Elegy (2020) |
Gets through the material with grim professional competence, and not the slightest spark of artistry. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 3, 2020
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3.5/5 | 90% | Run (2020) |
Meat-and-potatoes thriller filmmaking of the first order. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Dec 3, 2020
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2.5/5 | 69% | The Christmas Chronicles 2 (2020) |
The substantial increase in Goldie Hawn at least offsets the diminishing of Kurt Russell. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Nov 30, 2020
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2/5 | 48% | Unhinged (2020) |
As long as it doesn't even pretend to have thoughts in its ugly little head, it's reasonably okay at being disreputable... Unfortunately, it tries to think rather too often. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Nov 27, 2020
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2.5/5 | 83% | The Way Back (2020) |
Oppressively solemn. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Nov 24, 2020
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5/5 | 90% | Cries and Whispers (1972) |
Maybe the "easiest" of Bergman's major films, blunt in its symbolism, literal in its dialogue, unmistakable in its style. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Nov 23, 2020
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3/5 | 98% | Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) |
The diluted version of a Herzog film. - Alternate Ending
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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