Andrew Barker
Andrew Barker's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Variety
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Jamojaya (2023) |
“Jamojaya” is elevated above its familiar narrative paces by sensitive camerawork and a pair of intriguing performances, and its suggestion that showbusiness ambitions and family ties don’t so much collide as unravel on parallel tracks. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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On the Come Up (2022) |
As frank and tough-minded and as it is warm and sweet, “On the Come Up” is a hugely promising debut from the actor-turned-director. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 09, 2022
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Pinocchio (2022) |
As with so many of the director’s previous CGI extravaganzas, all the meticulous surface detail in the world can’t compensate for the core emptiness of the film’s digital creations. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 08, 2022
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808 (2015) |
A consistently entertaining, instructive look at the unlikely heartbeat behind so much of the past three decades’ standout pop music. - Variety
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| Posted Jun 02, 2022
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Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain (2022) |
A deeper look through the smoke clouds on the surface reveals much more than meets the eye. - Variety
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| Posted Apr 24, 2022
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Umma (2022) |
Shim handles the film’s grab bag of individual jump scares and creepy sight gags well, but without conveying much tangible sense of overall peril or threat, these scenes start to feel almost academic. - Variety
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| Posted Mar 18, 2022
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Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) |
If it's sometimes a little rough around the edges and not always structurally coherent, well, the same was true of these bands. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 24, 2022
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Malignant (2021) |
It's hard to say whether a film this bonkers "works" or not, but it's impossible not to admire both the craft and the extravagant bad taste behind its go-for-broke energy. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 10, 2021
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All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997) (2021) |
Vividly recalling the collision of two young cultures on the streets of New York City, Jeremy Elkin's documentary sometimes struggles to figure out what it all meant. - Variety
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| Posted Jul 31, 2021
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Great White (2021) |
The film's human characters make for drab company, leaving one with little to do but admire the scenery, waiting for dinnertime. - Variety
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| Posted Jul 16, 2021
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The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021) |
Well, they made a sequel to "The Boss Baby." - Variety
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| Posted Jun 30, 2021
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Bliss (2021) |
Little more than a listless "Matrix" retread, minus the spectacle and the suspense. - Variety
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020) |
With this film, she just does the two things she does best: making excellent music, and giving people a new reason to talk about Taylor Swift. But at least she's made sure that this time we're talking about her for all the right reasons. - Variety
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| Posted Nov 27, 2020
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All Together Now (2020) |
"All Together Now" has plenty to say about community, altruism and the limits of self-reliance that could strike a chord in such stark times. - Variety
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| Posted Aug 26, 2020
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The 24th (2020) |
"The 24th" can at times be cumbersomely didactic and formulaic, but it finds plenty of contemporary relevance in a story that should be far more widely known than it is. - Variety
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| Posted Aug 20, 2020
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All I Can Say (2019) |
[I]t does offer an intriguing peak at overnight success as it's lived minute-to-minute, as well as providing a reminder that Millennial YouTubers were hardly the first generational cohort to document their every waking moment with a video camera. - Variety
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| Posted Jul 01, 2020
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Le choc du futur (2019) |
For those who couldn't tell you the difference between a Mellotron and a Mu-Tron, this amiably aimless film may prove patience-testing with its languid narrative rhythms, thinly sketched characters and on-the-nose electro evangelism. - Variety
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| Posted May 02, 2020
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EMMA. (2020) |
de Wilde is smart enough to trust her source material where it counts. - Variety
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Gretel & Hansel (2020) |
And for all of the care that went into its look and its sound, the world of the film never feels more than halfway formed; in the rush to tie up its narrative loose ends, it leaves its more intriguing thematic ones hanging. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) |
At once dreamlike and ruthlessly naturalistic, steadily composed yet shot through with roiling currents of anxiety, "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" is a quietly devastating gem. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 25, 2020
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Troop Zero (2019) |
A movie that's content to make do with whatever spare parts are lying around, and eventually does so more successfully than one might expect. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 17, 2020
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(undefined) |
While it never quite reaches Jack T. Ripper levels of absurdity, Water nonetheless drowns out its science with hazy spirituality and utterly preposterous claims. In the end, it all smells fishy. - Variety
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| Posted Dec 13, 2019
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Cyrano, My Love (2018) |
"Cyrano, My Love" attempts to give the "Shakespeare in Love" treatment to the timeless French play "Cyrano de Bergerac," with shamelessly derivative yet undeniably entertaining results. - Variety
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| Posted Oct 18, 2019
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Dirt Music (2019) |
"Dirt Music" is a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 09, 2019
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The Giant (2019) |
Raboy gives us so little to hang onto - be it an arresting image, a palpable touch of the uncanny, or a moment of real tension - that it gets harder and harder to want to follow him. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 08, 2019
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Midsommar (2019) |
Once the real fireworks start to ignite, you realize how powerfully the film's themes resonate when they're given room to breathe. It's just a shame it takes so long to bring them into focus. - Variety
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| Posted Jun 19, 2019
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The Black Godfather (2019) |
Does yeoman's work introducing a figure that few outsiders have likely heard of, but who needs no introduction in the power corridors of the entertainment industry. - Variety
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| Posted Jun 04, 2019
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Everybody's Everything (2019) |
...quiet ruminations on mortality and manhood land with shattering force. - Variety
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| Posted May 24, 2019
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John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum (2019) |
As it stretches beyond the two-hour mark the film becomes, to use a loaded term, desensitizing. - Variety
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| Posted May 10, 2019
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Tolkien (2019) |
The film - stately, well-acted, and ultimately insubstantial - dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration. - Variety
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| Posted May 03, 2019
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(undefined) |
"Sublime" never delves far enough beneath the surface, nor does it make much of an attempt to contextualize the band for those who weren't around to see their heyday. - Variety
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| Posted May 02, 2019
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Five Feet Apart (2019) |
Richardson gives a star turn every bit as charismatic and assured as the film is formulaic and forgettable, bringing soul, style and nuance to a character that could have easily been a condescending caricature. - Variety
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| Posted Mar 14, 2019
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Love, Antosha (2019) |
A touching and surprising portrait of an actor who had much more going on in his life - from a serious illness to some seriously left-field artistic inclinations - than was mentioned in his obituaries. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 30, 2019
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High Flying Bird (2019) |
It's certainly more interested in ideas than characters, and the film stumbles when it makes half-hearted attempts at romantic intrigue or tragic backstories, but its subversive view of race, money and power in modern sports couldn't be more timely. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 28, 2019
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Imaginary Order (2019) |
Admirably acted and powered by a loopy internal rhythm, the film nonetheless wears out its welcome long before it's done inflicting indignities on its heroine, arriving at its main point early and then repeating it again and again. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 27, 2019
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Serenity (2019) |
"Serenity" sees a usually reliable screenwriter-turned-director take a bold swing and miss the mark completely, so intent on pulling the rug out from under you that he never notices you weren't even standing on it. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 24, 2019
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Perfectos desconocidos (2018) |
Its focus on our newfound willingness to collect all of our darkest secrets behind such an easily pierced veil... provides for plenty of squeamish entertainment. - Variety
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| Posted Jan 10, 2019
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Mortal Engines (2018) |
The movie devolves from promising to unwieldy, then baffling, then exhausting, then finally unintentionally hysterical. - Variety
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| Posted Dec 05, 2018
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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) |
"Fantastic Beasts" assumes a similar level of engagement with its swollen dramatis personae, without allowing the time or putting in the work to earn it. - Variety
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| Posted Nov 08, 2018
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The Chinese Widow (2017) |
An inoffensive, well-intentioned film derailed by a dozen little head-scratching decisions. - Variety
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| Posted Nov 06, 2018
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Hold the Dark (2018) |
A strangely seductive film, and one that understands the difference between simple plot resolution and catharsis, leading us on a journey into Alaska's frigid heart of darkness that poses more questions than it answers. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 13, 2018
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Quincy (2018) |
For those unfortunate souls who only know Jones as the producer of "Thriller" or, more recently, a giver of deliriously entertaining interviews, "Quincy" presents a streamlined and convincing case for taking a much deeper dive into his accomplishments. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Freaks (2018) |
A tight yarn whose structural cleverness makes it easy to ignore the deeply familiar story at its core. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 09, 2018
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Peppermint (2018) |
Garner gives everything that is asked of her, from brute physicality to dewy-eyed tenderness, but this half-witted calamity botches just about everything else. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 06, 2018
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The Nun (2018) |
There is rarely any sense that anyone involved with "The Nun" takes anything here too seriously, and audiences are advised to respond in kind. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 05, 2018
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The Man From Mo'Wax (2016) |
Jones struck gold when both Lavelle and DJ Shadow opened their personal video vaults to him, and even if he does rely on a number of talking-head interviews, the film feels largely primary-source. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 01, 2018
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The Happytime Murders (2018) |
Its most fatal miscalculation is the decision to frontload so many of its crassest setpieces into the first 15 or 20 minutes, depriving the rest of the film of the shock value that is its entire raison d'etre. - Variety
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| Posted Aug 22, 2018
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Siberia (2018) |
It can never decide what kind of film it wants to be, drifting into drab formlessness when it needs to find moments of poetry, and reverting to dull clichés when it wants to indulge its thriller instincts... - Variety
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| Posted Jul 13, 2018
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Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) |
Though burdened with a slow start and enough thirsty fan-service to power Comic-Con's Hall H for a decade, it has a kicky, kinetic heist movie at its heart, and its action sequences are machine-tooled spectacles of the first order. - Variety
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| Posted May 15, 2018
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Deadpool 2 (2018) |
In almost every respect, this sequel is an improvement on its 2016 predecessor: Sharper, grosser, more narratively coherent and funnier overall, with a few welcome new additions. - Variety
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| Posted May 15, 2018
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