David Walsh
Tomatometer-approved critic
Born in New York City, David Walsh has written on film and other artistic matters for the World Socialist Web Site and its print predecessor since 1991.
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/arts/films.shtml
Movies reviews only
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Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022) |
A drama along those lines can be trite ... or it may find something fresh and original to say. But if a filmmaker simply wants to do a “love story” about people from opposed social backgrounds, he or she has no real need of Lawrence’s novel. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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To Leslie (2022) |
To Leslie is not flawless, it has contrived and overwrought elements, but it unquestionably and sincerely strives for psychological and social realism. Riseborough is no doubt a fearless and committed performer. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Voodoo Macbeth (2021) |
Like so many artists at present, taking the line of least resistance, Voodoo Macbeth’s makers largely project their own limited concerns and interests back into the past. The results are weak, flat and muddled. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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The Fabelmans (2022) |
Important art does not emerge from being cut off—or holding oneself apart—from broader realities, even if the source of that separation lies outside one’s immediate control, in definite historical and ideological difficulties. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
Cameron ... has been fortunate to have emerged—and could only have emerged—in a culture that demanded so little: efficiency, productivity, special effects innovation, sustained bursts of mechanical spectacle, a minimum level of dramatic believability. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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White Noise (2022) |
The film is lively, extravagant, and removes Baumbach, at least for a time, from the narrow confines of the not very fruitful or absorbing middle-class introspection ... within which he previously seemed to be enmeshed. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Jan 15, 2023
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Tár (2022) |
Tár, written and directed by Todd Field, is a drama about a world-famous classical music conductor and how she is brought low by a sordid sex scandal. It is a serious and worthwhile film, whatever the balance of its various merits and defects. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Jan 15, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness (2022) |
In the new film, reflecting the force of processes too obvious to be ignored, Östlund has expanded his scope. The English-language film is uneven, but its skewering of capitalism is certainly welcome. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Dec 02, 2022
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She Said (2022) |
She Said is a bland, stilted work largely without genuine dramatic life or energy. No element of ambiguity or complexity is allowed to intrude. Whatever conceptions and prejudices the viewer enters with, he or she leaves with. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Nov 23, 2022
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The Humans (2021) |
How does making the work resemble a horror movie add anything to our understanding of the Blakes and their relationships, to each other and to the world? It might be one of those overly clever conceptions that should have been set aside. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Nov 07, 2022
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Amsterdam (2022) |
It focuses attention on an important historical episode, the effort by elements in the ruling class to organize a coup in 1933–34 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, but severely fails in its treatment of the event as well as its contemporary significance. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Nov 01, 2022
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Gladiator (2000) |
Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, is enjoyable, as long as it's not taken too seriously... Everything is quite improbable, but professionally done and played to the hilt. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Nov 01, 2022
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On the Rocks (2020) |
What could Sofia Coppola possibly be thinking? Why would she make this intensely complacent film? - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Sep 22, 2022
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The Good Boss (2021) |
The Good Boss suffers from superficiality, social and psychological. The characters are efficiently developed but not profoundly. They act more or less as we expect them to. Nothing here is deeply moving or disturbing. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Sep 11, 2022
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Fourth of July (2022) |
But it is all far too small. If an American filmmaker entitles a work “Fourth of July,” a historically and socially loaded phrase, one has the right to anticipate some sort of broader statement. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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The Gray Man (2022) |
The Gray Man is a very bad, almost instantly forgettable film. What makes things worse in this case is that the filmmakers, the Russo brothers, do possess a degree of perception, talent and imagination. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Aug 16, 2022
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Lost Illusions (2021) |
Giannoli and Fieschi ... have attempted to absorb Balzac’s novel as a whole, retain its essential structure and gist, while rewriting the actual dialogue, reworking individual situations and changing certain characterizations. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Jul 26, 2022
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We (2021) |
It is good to pay tribute to “small lives” ... at a time when the human rubbish that lives at the top of society, the billionaires and their celebrity hangers-on, take up so much of the media’s attention. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Jul 15, 2022
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Fire on the Plain (2021) |
But the work seriously goes off the rails, descending into nearly grotesque suffering and mayhem. The social conditions are clearly not filmmaker Zhang Ji’s primary concern. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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Montana Story (2021) |
The relatively conventional “progressive” character of the ideas finds expression, in the case of Montana Story, in the too familiar character of the father’s villainy, as well as the predictability of the siblings’ break-up and their eventual reuniting. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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Private Desert (2021) |
Private Desert too, despite its undoubted sincerity, has self-serving and formulaic features. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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Wet Sand (2021) |
The situation is no doubt painful and oppressive. Wet Sand, as far as it goes, most likely paints an accurate picture. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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Sonne (2022) |
Sonne is lively and often amusing, the girls are energetic and irrepressible, irreverent. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted May 22, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World (2021) |
The reader may have gathered by this time that a greater concern is the largely inconsequential character of the themes and situations taken up in The Worst Person in the World. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Apr 18, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) |
Having misguidedly set themselves the task of turning Tammy Faye Bakker into an icon of female empowerment and sexual tolerance, they make the even more grievous error of treating Christian fundamentalist hucksterism itself with kid gloves. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Apr 10, 2022
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You Mean Everything To Me (2021) |
In You Mean Everything to Me, Wizemann has been slightly blown off course by the concerns that dominate in current artistic circles. ...
Nonetheless, Wizemann remains an artist to keep an eye on. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 12, 2022
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Parallel Mothers (2021) |
With Parallel Mothers, historical questions make their way into Almodvars work for the first time. At one point, in fact, it was one of his claims to fame that they had not made such an appearance. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 11, 2022
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Rifkin's Festival (2020) |
Its also possible that his Allen's traumas have knocked open a small opening through which a portion of realitys complications has unexpectedly made its way. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Feb 11, 2022
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West Side Story (2021) |
The 1957 musical and the 1961 film version each possessed its own considerable degree of heart-breaking "woe." As does the new production, importantly. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Dec 17, 2021
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No Future (2020) |
The film ... is a subdued affair. The music, the colors, the performances all contribute to that. There are moving and effective moments. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 30, 2021
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Mothering Sunday (2021) |
Unhappily, the script focuses on Jane and her musings about love, her future, writing (she will turn out to be a renowned author later in life) and so on. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Where Is Anne Frank (2021) |
Where is Anne Frank, directed by Ari Folman-best known for his remarkable Waltz With Bashir (2008)-and commissioned by the Anne Frank Fonds Basel, is another moving, disturbing work. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) |
Wain and Emily know a stretch of genuine bliss. The artist is madly in love with her. Sadly, Emily develops breast cancer and dies only three years into their marriage. (Cumberbatch and Foy make an appealing combination.) - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Three Minutes - A Lengthening (2021) |
Three Minutes-A Lengthening is a moving tribute to a town and a population destroyed by fascist barbarism. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Benediction (2021) |
Benediction is certainly worth seeing, and a more successful portrait of an artist than Davies' previous effort in regard to 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion (2016). - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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Lingui, The Sacred Bonds (2021) |
The film pays tribute to Amina's determination and resourcefulness, and the determination and resourcefulness of women in general under intolerable conditions. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Ahed's Knee (2021) |
It is one of the most scathing, eloquent and poetical sequences in recent cinema. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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The Gravedigger's Wife (2021) |
The scenes between Guled and Nasra pluck at the heart-strings a bit much, but the group of gravediggers is convincingly and even amusingly portrayed. The terrible deprivation of the village and its inhabitants is searing. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021) |
In its picture of the family and in particular of Walid ... the film strikes an authentic chord. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Attica (2021) |
The Attica uprising took place under politically and socially explosive conditions in the US and internationally. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Hold Your Fire (2021) |
Contemporary American police forces are armed to the teeth in a lethal manner that their counterparts in 1973 could only have dreamed about. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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The Devil's Drivers (2021) |
The Devil's Drivers, directed by Mohammed Abugeth and Daniel Carsenty and filmed over the course of eight years, follows a number of audacious individuals who smuggle Palestinian workers across the border into Israel so they can earn an illegal living. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Unclenching the Fists (2021) |
In fact, the drama becomes somewhat overwrought and murky, but the bleak social and psychological conditions are unforgettable. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Compartment No. 6 (2021) |
The director explains that the film is about "roles that keep people disconnected." The two performers do well. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Ali & Ava (2021) |
Ali & Ava is a generous, warmhearted work. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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The Box (2021) |
The Box is not flawless, at times a little drab, but Vigas places his finger squarely on a vital matter. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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The Odd-Job Men (2021) |
The drama ... is a relatively low-key affair, but has an authentic quality. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Silent Land (2021) |
Polish filmmaking has discovered the new bourgeoisie that has come into being since the restoration of capitalism in 1989-91. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Oct 06, 2021
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Pamilya Ordinaryo (2016) |
Certain of the characters situated around the central pair are the most effectively drawn, come into the socially sharpest focus: the horrible policeman, the opportunist media types and the various do-gooders. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Sep 13, 2021
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Black Widow (2021) |
Black Widow is not as tedious and self-serious an entry as some of them. But that is setting the bar low. - World Socialist Web Site
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| Posted Sep 13, 2021
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