Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Chance Solem-Pfeifer's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
PopMatters
Willamette Week
Movies reviews only
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Moving On (2022) |
While major script contrivances link the murder threat's ridiculousness to the unspoken insecurities of a failed marriage, Moving On does the splits more ambitiously than most American indies of this dramedy ilk. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 16, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
Even Sandra’s career as a translator deemphasizes her perspective. That’s a fascinating challenge for Seydoux, a movie star (best known for Bond films and Blue Is the Warmest Color) inhabiting an everyday person decentralized in her own life. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Juniper (2021) |
Filmmakers should showcase Rampling’s indomitable presence and deep-set eyes for as long as she’s working, but ideally with more actors capable of facing the look. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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The Quiet Girl (2022) |
The result is a soft summer fable that all but attacks our tear ducts. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Creed III (2023) |
Like all the Creed films, III reimagines its Rocky forebears in better taste: empathy for “villains,” better roles for women, honest conversations between Black heroes and antiheroes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Emily (2022) |
O’Connor’s script largely invents a web of Brontë family dynamics, positing her path to becoming the lit-loving clan’s simultaneous North Star and black sheep. That’s a welcome alternative to depicting staunch Victorian manners. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 23, 2023
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The Civil Dead (2023) |
Tall premise aside, the film’s generative force is the duo’s meandering chemistry and the silly way they mumble in support of idiotically jagged haircuts and dance-karate kicks. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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The Volcano: Rescue From Whakaari (2022) |
Intermittently, the film verges on criticizing ineffective threat systems or irregulated eco-tourism, but The Volcano isn’t willing to explore controversial ramifications, even to illustrate how responsibility was eluded. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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Close (2022) |
[Close] remains involving and intimate throughout—and it’s arguably a playbook for how adults should treat children. Maybe they just do middle school better in Belgium. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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No Bears (2022) |
In No Bears, as with This Is Not a Film and Taxi before it, Panahi autobiographically prods the very meaning of cinematic intervention and political filmmaking. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Infinity Pool (2023) |
Infinity Pool may not blow minds, but it reliably explodes heads. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Living (2022) |
As a showcase for Nighy, the film is all a veteran character actor could wish for. He plays Williams as hushed and upstanding, with sadness carved into his frown lines decades ago. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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The Pale Blue Eye (2022) |
Given the story’s flat complications, it’s frustrating how magnificent the movie appears when Bale is silhouetted in his top hat amid the Hudson Valley fog. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 19, 2023
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The Son (2022) |
Be furious at this faux awards contender or guffaw through its pitch-black subject matter. Whatever you choose, it’ll still be in better taste than the movie itself. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 19, 2023
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EO (2022) |
You’d have to be made from stone not to care, though that’s precisely the deep uneasiness Skolimowski probes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 12, 2023
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Women Talking (2022) |
The dialogue, loosely inspired by true events, is brought to life by an elite ensemble featuring Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey and (very briefly) Frances McDormand, but it’s Rooney Mara’s performance that leaps out. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 11, 2023
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Skinamarink (2022) |
Skinamarink is not strictly a found-footage film, but it plays with the aesthetics of forced-perspective camcorder movies like V/H/S, only to fall into languorous Lynchian rhythms. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 11, 2023
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Corsage (2022) |
Corsage aimlessly repeats the notes of Elisabeth’s quiet, failed rebellions to diminishing returns. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 05, 2023
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Holy Spider (2022) |
Unquestionably, Holy Spider packs a gut punch, released into a world where Iranian women are fighting openly for their lives... But as a piece of filmmaking, its fixation on sheer impact snuffs out story, character and even humanity. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 15, 2022
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Memories of My Father (2020) |
Director Fernando Trueba’s adaptation flattens the doctor’s achievements and humanity into an unwieldy, lovesick ballad from son to father -- with a style that’s often cheesy and sometimes just plain shoddy. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 08, 2022
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) |
The slow revelation of the film’s title poignantly proves that Goldin’s life runs too deep, too heated for conventional reconstruction, which makes her a perfect subject for Poitras. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 08, 2022
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The Fabelmans (2022) |
That’s the life of a film devotee, no? Our families introduce us to movies as a new way of seeing, but we end up loving what we see alone. And if we’re lucky (and good), dreaming it back into existence. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 02, 2022
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The Wonder (2022) |
At last, a movie for which Florence Pugh will do a press tour. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 25, 2022
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Aftersun (2022) |
First-time director Charlotte Wells memorializes the singular, unreal and entirely fleeting feeling of a vacation bond shared with one’s irregular guardian. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 25, 2022
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Utama (2022) |
Though thematically weighty, the story is almost wishfully simple in execution. It’s proud and hushed, performed with rough-hewn starkness by nonprofessional actors José Calina (Virginio) and Luisa Quispe (Sisa). - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 17, 2022
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Bad Axe (2022) |
Bad Axe’s best quality [is] the specificity of one family trying to do the impossible in a grounded way in a precise town at a precise moment. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 17, 2022
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Stars at Noon (2022) |
Stars at Noon is based on a 1986 Denis Johnson novel, but in cinematic form, it plays like a guilty, libidinal echo of Casablanca mixed with the understated deathtrap politics of a John le Carré story. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 03, 2022
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Decision to Leave (2022) |
Rest assured, there are jaw-dropping foot chases and skirmishes, but Decision to Leave is mostly Park Chan-wook at deconstructive play. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 20, 2022
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Hold Me Tight (2021) |
Krieps brilliantly employs her preternatural normalcy to ground a character whose new life on the road seems fueled by emotion alone. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 06, 2022
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Blonde (2022) |
Ana de Armas capably evokes Monroe, but authenticity is hardly Blonde's north star. It's a labyrinth of trauma-collapsed time, space and iconography. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 04, 2022
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The Story of Film: A New Generation (2022) |
Cousins is always humble and affectionate enough to avoid excesses of snark, pretension or even genre bias. He’s just the shepherd through the latest chapter of a 120-year dream. May none of us ever wake. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 21, 2022
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All Sorts (2021) |
All Sorts is a series of atmospheric comedy montages -- e.g., rifling through all the contortionist positions from which a worker could type to avoid falling asleep. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 21, 2022
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Flux Gourmet (2022) |
Make no mistake, terrifying corporeal experiences abound in Flux Gourmet and its invention of a hybrid gastro-audio arts residency, but fear and suspense are nearly totally absent. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 14, 2022
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God's Country (2022) |
With a nod to Do the Right Thing, this is one of the few modern Westerns that becomes something new while invoking age-old American conflicts - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Peter von Kant (2022) |
Given that Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a signature work of ‘70s European cinema, a remake isn’t a ridiculous idea. But the original certainly deserves a more illuminating interpretation than the one offered here. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 07, 2022
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Saloum (2021) |
It’s best viewed as a glint of first-act promise (and a glimpse of what Herbulot could make with a few more million dollars and a VFX assist). - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 07, 2022
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Loving Highsmith (2022) |
Loving Highsmith paints itself into a melancholy corner. It fails to understand that while Highsmith’s life was sad, it was full. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 07, 2022
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Free Chol Soo Lee (2022) |
Channeling the spirit of Sacramento Bee reporter K.W. Lee, who first led the charge for Chol Soo’s exoneration, Ha and Yi embrace detailed reportage, demonstrating the racially biased bunglings of police and judicial procedure. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 18, 2022
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A Love Song (2022) |
More akin to a short story than a novel, the movie is a mere 81 minutes, but in every dusty frame, it features some of 2022′s finest acting. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 18, 2022
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Anonymous Club (2021) |
We witness Barnett plumb the existential value of her songwriting, battle writer’s block, and embark on her first solo tour, but none of these decidedly uncinematic ideas necessitates a documentary. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 18, 2022
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Claydream (2021) |
[Vinton is] portrayed more as a being in perpetual motion than as someone whose imagination can be unpacked. Granted, that appears accurate, according to the many interviews conducted by director Marq Evans... but it leaves frustration behind. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 18, 2022
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Prey (2022) |
You can holler aloud at the spectacular violence as Naru proves her gravitas and the series is rescued by filmmakers who have discerned its decades of latent potential. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 04, 2022
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Sam Now (2022) |
Sam Now affords screen time and consideration to everyone in the family, and it’s a masterful editing achievement to stitch an 80-minute family portrait from material that could so easily be precious, overlong and myopic. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 04, 2022
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Apples (2020) |
You can come away from Apples chewing not only on weighty themes related to pandemics and “do it for the ‘Gram” culture, but on how the fallible space between what we remember and forget is endlessly, essentially human. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Fire of Love (2022) |
It’s a film begging for big-screen beholding. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 20, 2022
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Both Sides of the Blade (2021) |
Blade is hardly Denis’ best script, but she has still crafted a tense, erotic yarn about characters unable to savor real life amid looming ideas of who they once were. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 20, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022) |
Cha Cha Real Smooth isn’t necessarily a sophomore slump, but it’s certainly an indicator that Raiff should evolve his onscreen persona and formula before they strain credulity (and amplify his vanity) any further. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 29, 2022
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Mad God (2021) |
Behind the mayhem lies Tippett’s conviction that true creation is an act of unrelenting authority, solipsism and propagation. Why else would one work for 30 years to render an exquisitely hopeless night terror? - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 23, 2022
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Spiderhead (2022) |
[It's] set mostly in the shadow of a two-way mirror, with Steve observing his subjects and mining Jeff for feedback. Unfortunately, Kosinski too strongly prefers the deluded, borderline satirical vantage of Steve to Jeff’s interrogation of this dystopia. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 23, 2022
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Neptune Frost (2021) |
Neptune Frost may well be the most ambitious indie film this year, but the invitation to collectively reimagine human existence is obscured in intellectual and mythic static. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 09, 2022
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