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Charles Mudede
Tomatometer-approved critic
(Photo Credit: J. Vespa/ Contributor/ WireImage /Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Fantasy A Gets a Mattress (2023) |
This no-placeness explains the film’s incoherence and powers its feverish plot and acting. Fantasy A is all over the city. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Sep 14, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
Oppenheimer should have been called Oppie. And the shorting of the film's name should have been accompanied by an equally dramatic shorting of the film itself. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Users (2021) |
It becomes clear that the deepest meaning of this documentary, Users, is the terrifying future that capitalism is presently preparing for our one and only planet... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jun 23, 2023
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They Live (1988) |
The sunglasses in They Live are ideological. Meaning, they reveal the real message. When you don't wear them, a couch is a couch; when you do, a couch is just the same old boss. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jun 09, 2023
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Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) |
Nothing but electric... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2022) |
This documentary, which is worth your time (it is, after all, about one of the iconic works of American cinema), only complicates our picture of Voight. He is one strange dude. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted May 15, 2023
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Art for Everybody (2023) |
The subject of this excellent documentary mesmerized me. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted May 15, 2023
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A Disturbance in The Force (2023) |
This documentary, which must be seen if you are a true fan of all that takes place in that faraway galaxy, is about what led to this very special mess and flop. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted May 15, 2023
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Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005) |
The whole film is off the register, off the rails, mind-bending. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 21, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) |
A history lesson lurks below the explosions, clashing swords and other Superhero Spectacles. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Nov 17, 2022
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Flight / Risk (2022) |
In short, avoid Flight/Risk and watch instead Downfall, another 737 Max doc. It at least mentions the stock buybacks... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Oct 05, 2022
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Vesper (2022) |
Vesper returns sci-fi cinema to the body, to the mud, to the monsters of life. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Oct 04, 2022
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End of the Road (2022) |
Get Out, the defining 21st-century Black horror film, is ostensibly about white supremacy in the Obama age. The End of the Road is the follow-up; because it's dealing with a different kind of beast... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Sep 22, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) |
...in Everything Everywhere All at Once, we enter the universes, the many branches of the central character, Evelyn Wang... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jun 17, 2022
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In the Mood for Love (2000) |
In the Mood For Love is not a 'hole in the wall' but a universe filled with possibilities that are invisible to us Westerners... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jun 10, 2022
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Know Your Place (2022) |
This kind of city has less and less space for the working classes. Two: the city that's losing its color. Black Americans were the first to go. Now it's black Africans. Next will be East Asian Americans. Know Your Place takes place in the now. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 18, 2022
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In Front of Your Face (2021) |
The movie somehow finds something new and meaningful to say about art and life and the region of shades between the two. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Nothing Compares (2022) |
Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares makes several mistakes in its noble mission to recover the mostly unhappy pop career of the Irish-born singer Sinéad O’Connor. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 09, 2022
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The Automat (2021) |
Utopias are easier to find in the past than they are in the future. This, I think, is the source of The Automat's greatness. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Heavenly Creatures (1994) |
When watching this masterpiece of '90s art house cinema, keep your eye on how the relationship between Juliet and Pauline is structured. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 01, 2022
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Eve's Bayou (1997) |
The film -- which is expertly directed and written by Lemmons (the director of Harriet), and edited by Terilyn A. Shropshire (one of the few black female editors in the industry) -- is about the messiness of sexual awakening. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 23, 2022
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Mars One (2022) |
Marte Um never screams about racism or the daily indignities black workers endure. It instead simmers at what feels like a warm temperature... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 01, 2022
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Free Chol Soo Lee (2022) |
A straightforward but engaging documentary by Julie Ha and Eugene Yi. But why is this story at all important? The answer: It preserves and narrates an important episode in the development of what can be called Asian American identity. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 29, 2022
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Don't Look Up (2021) |
Don't Look Up spends an inordinate amount of its time mocking a web phenomenon that's ubiquitous and requires very little effort to explain, virality. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 12, 2022
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Chameleon Street (1989) |
...this is the point where the entanglement of quantum physics is a much more useful metaphor for blackness than that afrofuturist capture of cosmology's dark matter... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Dec 08, 2021
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Ascension (2021) |
This film is not about present-day China, which is still the factory of the world. It's about a China that's in the near future, a China that depends far more on spending than producing. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Nov 12, 2021
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Blue Collar (1978) |
Blue Collar is one of the best studies of the essential flaw of the revolutionary character in the context of the oppressed. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Aug 21, 2021
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En Route pour le Milliard (2020) |
That's the story. But what makes this film a work of cinema, which it certainly is? The answer is found in the cinematography, which is by the director and writer of the work, Hamadi. The real star of this film is black skin itself. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 29, 2021
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Coming 2 America (2021) |
I did not like Coming 2 America; but I did love Wesley Snipes' interpretation of a black African tyrant. It's pitch perfect. That man can act. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 11, 2021
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Space Sweepers (2021) |
Maintains a fast pace, includes plot twists and turns that are not always easy to track, features lots of explosions, lots of robots, and that raw examination of capitalist class structures we have come to expect from the best of South Korea's directors - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 11, 2021
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Pleasure (2021) |
Boogie Nights for Gen Z... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021) |
What does Thompson's eye want to tell us? Not only that the amazing event was retrieved from oblivion but also to make the viewer wonder why the record of such a culturally significant and beautifully filmed event... was in oblivion in the first place. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 01, 2021
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A Glitch in the Matrix (2020) |
It is an important story, but its substance is not found in the ravings of Musk, or Pothast's explanation of the spectacle under pre-capitalist conditions (Plato's cave), but simply in the unjustified social power of the NRA and GOP. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 01, 2021
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Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (2021) |
The question that the documentary fails to ask and attempt to answer, then, is why a show of this kind was even needed in the richest country in the world? - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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Soul (2020) |
Soul is about a person who happens to be black, and not a black American film. Have no confusion about that... But the film is really funny. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 12, 2021
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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
Nothing in Ma Rainey can escape the pull of Boseman's personal off-screen tragedy and its powerful interaction with one of Wilson's most tragic characters. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 12, 2021
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Without (2011) |
Without is the region's first erotic tour de force... - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted May 27, 2020
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Holy Motors (2012) |
The film answers nothing and leaves all of its balls wonderfully suspended in the air. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 29, 2020
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Bird (1988) |
Eastwood directed Bird in much the same way he plays jazz piano-not with caution, not with precision, but with a love that is supreme. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Feb 12, 2020
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Babylon (1980) |
The film is also visually rich. Every minute is filled with the details of a period and milieu that's rarely so crisp on film. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 02, 2020
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) |
It is during this battle we have one of the most numinous moments in the Star Wars franchise... The scene lasts for about three or so seconds, but it's incredibly beautiful. The rest of the film was dead to me. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 02, 2020
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When Lambs Become Lions (2018) |
It is here that the director takes a clear side, his film clearly denounces the extreme poverty that both the poachers and the rangers face. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 02, 2020
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Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer (2019) |
While watching this entertaining documentary, keep in mind the claim made by journalist Ronan Farrow: The National Enquirer has buried at least 60 super-sleazy stories about our... president. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Nov 06, 2019
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The Wandering Earth (2019) |
Loud, frenetic, and filled with sublime industrial and cosmic moments, blasts for fire and rockets, falling boulders and chunks of ice and blocks of concrete. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted May 14, 2019
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Rafiki (2018) |
It's rare to see this side of Africa (middle-class, urban, post-postcolonial) on the screen. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Apr 24, 2019
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Transit (2018) |
Transit is not Petzold's first ghost story, but it is certainly his boldest and most intense. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 27, 2019
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What Is Democracy? (2018) |
This doc, which is weirdly tranquil, explores not so much democracy but the roots of much of the misery in our one and only world. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 13, 2019
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The Wild Pear Tree (2018) |
The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has finally made a masterpiece. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Mar 07, 2019
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One-Armed Swordsman (1967) |
If you want an idea of how the unspoken class issues of the Jedi movies could have been represented or expressed, you only have to watch martial-arts masterpiece One-Armed Swordsman. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 18, 2019
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Cold War (2018) |
When together, they are madly in love, fight a lot, and make beautiful jazz. The film has a perfect ending. - The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
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| Posted Jan 18, 2019
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