>
Guy Lodge
Tomatometer-approved critic
UK
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Close Your Eyes (2023) |
A shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Oct 01, 2023
|
|
|
|
A Silence (2023) |
There is a gasping power to its staggered reveals, and a searching sadness to the emerging family portrait that outweighs the film’s shock factor. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
Fingernails (2023) |
The longer its ideas gnaw at us, the less alternate its universe seems. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
Day of the Fight (2023) |
“Day of the Fight” lunges for the tear ducts while never quite ringing true, rooted less in real life than in the tradition of countless underdog boxing dramas that have gone before. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Featherweight (2023) |
- Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
Coup! (2023) |
Fleet and frisky at just 97 minutes, tidily but not ostentatiously crafted, and in thrall to the pleasurably low-stakes sport of watching one scoundrel outwit another. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 16, 2023
|
|
|
|
Housekeeping for Beginners (2023) |
Like an unkempt home that is messy to the visitor’s eye, yet where the owner can find anything in a heartbeat, “Housekeeping for Beginners” is in full control of its disorder. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 14, 2023
|
|
|
|
Society of the Snow (2023) |
Grips with alternating waves of dread, horror and heart-swelling relief, even as it can hardly surprise. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 10, 2023
|
|
|
|
Out of Season (2023) |
“Out of Season” caringly presents two people holding themselves back from the world, hindered by a shared knot in their past, looking again to leave other, but better this time. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 08, 2023
|
|
|
|
Woman Of (2023) |
It holds its audience with the sheer, plangent emotional force of its storytelling, and via an enormously sympathetic lead performance by Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 08, 2023
|
|
|
|
Holly (2023) |
If there are missing patches in the bigger picture... the smaller one is filled in with curiosity and care, the film’s subtly permeating atmospherics constantly balancing the banal with the possibly divine. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 07, 2023
|
|
|
|
Io Capitano (2023) |
For Garrone, this proves an energizing shift in focus, yielding his most robust, purely satisfying filmmaking since his international breakthrough with “Gomorrah” 15 years ago. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 06, 2023
|
|
|
|
Explanation for Everything (2023) |
Escalatingly absurd but underpinned by a mordant plausibility throughout... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 06, 2023
|
|
|
|
Enea (2023) |
[A] slickly mounted but stultifying portrait of privilege and ennui among Italy’s silver-spoon set... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 05, 2023
|
|
|
|
Sidonie In Japan (2023) |
Élise Girard’s droll, bittersweet romance mostly dodges [pitfalls] with grace and good humor, plus a pointed awareness of the limitations of its outsider perspective. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 04, 2023
|
|
|
|
Exit Music (2018) |
“Exit Music” covers the spectrum with grace, good humor and no emotional filter: It’s an unabashed tear-jerker that earns its saltwater through candor rather than undue manipulation. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 03, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Beast (2023) |
A film palpably frustrated by a lack of human contact and connection, though it’s frustrating for viewers in turn. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 03, 2023
|
|
|
|
Poor Things (2023) |
Oddly moving in its fervor and abundance... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 01, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Promised Land (2023) |
Arcel — comfortably back on home turf as a director, after 2017’s drab Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Tower” — has a pleasingly sturdy, old-school feel for grand-scale period filmmaking. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Sep 01, 2023
|
|
|
|
God is a Woman (2023) |
With some humility, “God is a Woman” merges its outside point of view with that of a younger generation of Kuna filmmakers determined to tell their own stories. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Aug 31, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Issue With Tissue: A Boreal Love Story (2022) |
“These are not environmental issues, these are existential issues,” states one elder. Zelniker’s film is attentive to the overlap. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Aug 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Unknown Country (2022) |
Andrew Hajek’s patiently roving lensing isn’t averse to the odd enraptured magic-hour vista, but binds the film’s various modes and methods in a common, sandy-hued visual language. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 28, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021) |
“The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Sitting Duck (2022) |
Salomé’s film pivots from itchy whistleblower thriller to irate courtroom drama, with institutional misogyny as its binding thread. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Girls Are Alright (2023) |
Occasionally skirts preciousness but is mostly rather affecting, bound by a palpable sense of female friendship and a perceptive interest in the dynamics thereof. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 09, 2023
|
|
|
|
Restore Point (2023) |
This is a notably ambitious and auspiciously well-realized first feature for Hloz: the kind that appears to be flaunting his capabilities for even bigger international and Hollywood assignments. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 07, 2023
|
|
|
|
We Have Never Been Modern (2023) |
A lacquered Czech period piece with surprisingly topical interests at its core... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 07, 2023
|
|
|
|
Blaga's Lessons (2023) |
This is tense, tough-minded fare that isn’t afraid to test the bounds of realism for the sake of a good story, but nonetheless feels authentically rooted in an ailing, neglected strand of Bulgarian society. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 07, 2023
|
|
|
|
Empty Nets (2023) |
This is a confidently quiet, elegiac first feature from Iranian-German writer-director Karamizade — who brings a certain European arthouse sheen to a story otherwise steeped in the stark modern tradition of Iranian social realism. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 06, 2023
|
|
|
|
In Camera (2023) |
Simultaneously playful and savagely pointed... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 04, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Buriti Flower (2023) |
Blending candid vérité with extravagant flourishes of fiction, the film sees its helmers sharing screenwriting duties with a trio of Krahô locals, and feels more textured for their collaboration. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jul 01, 2023
|
|
|
|
Pictures of Ghosts (2023) |
A documentary that feels acutely, even eccentrically, personal, but never navel-gazing. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jun 29, 2023
|
|
|
|
Just the Two of Us (2023) |
[A] nervy, finely acted domestic thriller. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jun 29, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Stroll (2023) |
Ostensibly a slice of local history of an increasingly gentrified city that sees marginalized folks as handily disposable, “The Stroll” is an empathetic portrait of a community still fighting for its own survival. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jun 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Lesson (2023) |
Who is writing what, and to what extent it matters, are the questions that keep director Alice Troughton and screenwriter Alex MacKeith’s mutual debut feature interesting, even as it slides into occasional, overheated cliché. - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jun 16, 2023
|
|
|
|
Eureka (2023) |
Never an abrasive watch, even at its most elusive, rich as it is in visual and ambient pleasures... - Variety
Read More
| Posted Jun 04, 2023
|
|
|
|
Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
An often sensationally funny black comedy, poetically punctuated by the horror of the human condition. The connecting tissue between all three films is the dread of mortality, which in Beau is Afraid is given a run for its money by the terror of living. - Film of the Week
Read More
| Posted Jun 02, 2023
|
|
|
|
May December (2023) |
Both wickedly funny and piercingly sad, Todd Haynes’ new film ponders one such improbable union — the subject of a national tabloid scandal, no less — as it lurches through its third decade - Film of the Week
Read More
| Posted Jun 02, 2023
|
|
|
|
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
What we get instead, over an expansive but consistently riveting two-and-a-half-hour runtime, is a kind of emotional procedural, less concerned with cold facts than with multiple parties’ fluid, permeable ideas of the truth, and the ellipses between them. - Film of the Week
Read More
| Posted Jun 02, 2023
|
|
|
|
Last Summer (2023) |
By Breillat’s standards, this is an unprecedentedly sleek commercial play, alluring and grabby — yet with an innate, considered nastiness, an unspoken intellectualisation of our least explicable instincts, that never feels compromised. - Film of the Week
Read More
| Posted Jun 02, 2023
|
|
|
|
Kennedy (2023) |
Though the film’s visual design doesn’t make good on the kitsch comic-noir styling of its opening credits, it’s shot with varnished verve by Fonseca, while Chhabria and Kattar’s agitated editing ensures the film always feels busy... - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 30, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Wrath of Becky (2023) |
“The Wrath of Becky” is entertaining enough. But perhaps inevitably, with its heroine grown to near-adulthood, the novelty is a bit dulled now. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
La Chimera (2023) |
Marvelously supple and sinuous... - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
Perfect Days (2023) |
Sincere and unassuming, and owns its sentimentality with good humor. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 25, 2023
|
|
|
|
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) |
Challenging but seductive art cinema that invites comparisons to such titans as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang and even Theo Angelopoulos, without feeling derivative of any. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 25, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Taste of Things (2023) |
“The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
Hounds (2023) |
A trim, unsparing crime tale that pits social desperation against a nagging spiritual conscience. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 23, 2023
|
|
|
|
How to Have Sex (2023) |
Manning Walker’s film lays out the minefield of sexual education and consent for a post-#MeToo generation, with a precision to its ambiguities that will draw gasps from its characters’ contemporaries and elders alike. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 21, 2023
|
|
|
|
The New Boy (2023) |
Meandering but never uninvolving, the film benefits, like its predecessors, from its writer-director-cinematographer’s extraordinary eye for light and locale, which goes beyond dewy pictorialism to reclaim a landscape from its imposing occupiers. - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 19, 2023
|
|
|
|
About Dry Grasses (2023) |
Long, languid but slowly captivating... - Variety
Read More
| Posted May 19, 2023
|