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Esmé Holden

Esmé Holden's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) 94% 4/5 EDIT “Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves.” – Little White Lies Jul 3, 2024 Full Review La Chimera (2023) 95% 5/5 EDIT “Not just great, but expansive: it shows new ways a movie can be.” – Little White Lies May 9, 2024 Full Review The Book of Solutions (2023) 81% EDIT “It’s not very cinematic and it doesn’t fit neatly into a conventional three-act structure of a Hollywood screenplay, but that doesn’t make it any less authentic.” – In Review Online Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Godzilla Minus One (2023) 99% EDIT “Minus One, set immediately after World War II, lacks junky fun... in fact, it bears the stink of seriousness; it’s the most white elephant film in the series — the white ‘zilla if you want a pithy pull quote.” – In Review Online Dec 4, 2023 Full Review Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023) 97% EDIT “Defending My Life is like being invited to the warm reunion of two old friends, softened by the years and lost loved ones, touched and amused anew by the stories they’ve heard countless times before.” – In Review Online Nov 14, 2023 Full Review Yellow Bus (2023) 57% EDIT “Yellow Bus isn’t over-determined in the way many first features are because its intent is too fuzzy and unsure. These are not ideas that are as yet unformed, but rather ones that seem to lack a vision altogether.” – In Review Online Sep 18, 2023 Full Review The YouTube Effect (2022) 85% EDIT “It’s possible the director is trying to make a movie for the totally unaware, but in that broadness he allows too much to fall through the cracks.” – In Review Online Jul 15, 2023 Full Review Aloners (2021) 98% EDIT “Aloners, Hong Sung-eun’s debut feature, recognizes that isolation in the 21st century isn’t quiet or even really solitary; any emptiness is always full of something, and even if it’s little in substance, it can be large in quantity. ” – In Review Online Jun 9, 2023 Full Review The Potemkinists (2022) EDIT “The tragedy of The Potemkinists is hence thus: when the sculptor and bureaucrat look into those eyes, they don’t see the grandeur and cruelty of history, but a postmodern banality.” – In Review Online May 30, 2023 Full Review The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (2022) 88% EDIT “In the presence of these limiting factors, however, The Cow Who Sang ultimately resolves as a less curious film than most of its runtime suggests.” – In Review Online May 20, 2023 Full Review Polite Society (2023) 91% EDIT “Polite Society... isn’t really committed to any of the genres it mashes together, let alone its style. It’s directed with rote competence but pronounced flatness — a true television sensibility. ” – In Review Online Apr 29, 2023 Full Review Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022) 76% EDIT “Blind Willow, Sleep Woman ends up feeling hamfisted whenever it reaches toward profundity, in a similar way that Murakami’s work can, but without that same elusiveness.” – In Review Online Apr 17, 2023 Full Review Tótem (2023) 97% EDIT “There can be no leap to this reverse transcendence, this powerful awareness of material reality, when Avilés takes that leap herself and simply tells us that it’s happening.” – In Review Online Apr 8, 2023 Full Review Rye Lane (2023) 98% EDIT “The heart of the movie has little to do with the way that [they] fall out, nor how they inevitably find their way back together, but rather it’s in the little moments between narrative beats where other people are captured moving through their everyday.” – In Review Online Apr 3, 2023 Full Review The Lost King (2022) 77% EDIT “It’s easy, then, to let one’s eyes glaze over in the face of such commitment to inoffensiveness, but to an extent, that response lets it off the hook too easily, allowing the film’s ideas to slip through unchallenged. ” – In Review Online Mar 24, 2023 Full Review Close (2022) 91% EDIT “How much of this could be attributed to malice and how much to a general lack of imagination doesn’t really matter, since it’s obvious that Dhont isn’t a filmmaker worth taking seriously.” – In Review Online Jan 28, 2023 Full Review All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) 95% EDIT “The way these threads of art and activism intertwine within the film itself ... is much less compelling. Beyond the concept of these ideas sitting aside one another, they seldom interact in a way that isn't according to mere linearity.” – In Review Online Dec 8, 2022 Full Review Mickey: The Story of a Mouse (2022) 89% EDIT “Story of a Mouse is as openly strange and racked with contradictions as the character at its center, and in that sense, it presents a compelling portrait.” – In Review Online Nov 17, 2022 Full Review My Father's Dragon (2022) 87% EDIT “There isn’t much point in thinking about My Father’s Dragon's place within the heralded studio's filmography; more than anything, this is just more content to be ground up into the Netflix machine.” – In Review Online Nov 14, 2022 Full Review
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