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Jay Kuehner
Jay Kuehner's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Cinema Scope
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Tale of King Crab (2021) |
Such a formal conceit could easily descend into mere pastiche if not for both the undercurrent of melancholy and the formal rigour with which de Righi and Zoppis render nature, which together hint at immanence amid the absurdity. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Apr 01, 2022
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Azor (2021) |
Azor ultimately performs a critical inversion of the film's motif of nomenclature: an indexical reckoning of the belongings, purloined and now bankable, of those disappeared by the junta... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Collective (2019) |
Collective is more record than remembrance, an investigative procedural that's equally observational and true to its genre. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 07, 2020
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Ghost Fleet (2018) |
Hard to harp on a film of such sincerely good intentions, but a more rigorous approach could do the issue more justice. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 10, 2018
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Cocote (2017) |
The unclassifiable film befits, none too comfortably, the hard-to-classify subject. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 21, 2018
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Golden Exits (2017) |
The film's measure of inertia among its characters is putatively more eloquent, loquacious even, which appears to be part of Perry's paradoxical point. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 28, 2017
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Nana (2005) |
At a lean 68 minutes, and denuded to its cryptic core, Nana may be insular to a fault, but is wide open for identification. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Belle Toujours (2006) |
Belle toujours, though, is hinged on the slightest, and more sordid, of provocations. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Summer Hours (2008) |
In crafting his own objet d'art, Assayas has paid careful consideration to the fine aesthetic practiced in Taiwan, particularly that of Hou Hsiao-hsie. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Humpday (2009) |
To director Lynne Shelton's considerable credit, Humpday delineates that perennially privileged, and thus imperiled, domain of male intimacy with a subtlety that echoes the ambivalence of sexual self-realization. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (2007) |
Modestly scaled, La Trinchera scores a minor conceptual coup for occupying politically charged territory with the levity of, well, highly evolved karaoke video. Call it a party favour. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Papirosen (2011) |
Papirosen transcends the home-movie genre by being ordinary; this is a look into the abyss that never strays from the surface of its chosen milieu. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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The Selfish Giant (2013) |
In the absence of any apparent formal conceit, Barnard's parable is still raw enough to wound while its emotional impact could wring tears from metal. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Labor Day (2013) |
Too much sugar ruins the pie! Jason Reitman's shamelessly saccharine adaptation of Joyce Maynard's novel could not have resisted such a bromide, as it was baked into the dough. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Under the Skin (2013) |
There's an under-explored sociological insight to be gleaned from the encounters that follow. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Manakamana (2013) |
Manakamana is a record of this circuitry, an index of faces seen in the act of seeing, thrust into the vacancy of a nature that scrolls by like some uncanny rear projection from an old Hollywood film. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Ida (2013) |
Ida is an exquisitely rendered artifact that nonetheless becomes truer for holding its diminutive shape against such weighted material, something like finding a lost Zbigniew Herbert poem scrawled on a kielbasa wrapper. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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The Unknown Known (2013) |
As a history lesson in digest form, it's eminently valuable for cracking Rumsfeld's cheshire grin without employing unsound interrogation methods. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Sheep (2013) |
There's something appropriately memorial about the film's handling of a disappearance, of the immeasurable weight of absence. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) |
More than the sum of its avowed influences, Stop the Pounding Heart evidences a supplicant style of filmmaking. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Bethlehem (2013) |
Bethlehem is compelling for its regional exposure, but a tendency for narrative velocity and plot machinations gives away the film's ultimate agenda as genre-dependent. Credit to Adler though for the necessarily unhappy ending. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Madame Bovary (2014) |
Most crucially and delectably, it is language-Flaubert's mots précises-that sways with seductive power and portent, which Barthes taps for all its symbolic suggestion. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Rosewater (2014) |
Credit Rosewater for troubling itself over just what makes the axis, evil or otherwise, spin. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) |
The film is less about this prodigy than the spell he unwittingly exerts upon those sensitized to hear music where there is only noise... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Beasts of No Nation (2015) |
Beasts of No Nation holds sway with cogent, putrid effect, at once terrifying and sickly seductive. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Spotlight (2015) |
Less compelling in its moralizing, Spotlight is propelled by the dictates of the procedural genre, which director Tom McCarthy nails with reportorial efficiency. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Ixcanul (2015) |
Ixcanul eludes the kind of drama that ceremoniously, if all too inevitably, attends the bucolic strands of narrative suggested by Bustamante's chosen milieu, instead opting for a more earthy but no less exigent denouement. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016) |
The takeaway-that emotional avarice is indeed an expense, that when it comes to indebting ourselves, we are all anonymous donors-is an affiliation we can't afford to ignore. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Mister Universo (2016) |
Mister Universo seemingly descended from the stock mythology of Fellini but quite contrarily possesses its own bracingly modest realism. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Mimosas (2016) |
Don't be afraid. Strengthen your faith. Mimosas takes a rather circuitous route to a concisely unassuming but radical proposition. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Maliglutit (2016) |
Shot on location near Igloolik, Nunavut, the film is foremost faithful to place; there are no stand-ins, no surrogates, upon which the drama unfolds. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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The Ivory Game (2016) |
It doesn't take an ethnography lab to unpack the vested power of a tusk, but perhaps a more rigorous empiricism (e.g., Farocki), while compromising box-office appeal, could better serve a more enduring agenda. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Austerlitz (2016) |
The film's visual and spatial incongruities impose tacit condemnation-a kind of guilt-by-participation determination-but, more plaintively, the contrasts allow for a sustained contemplation of the elegiac, of memorialization. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) |
To call what happens in By the Time It Gets Dark a "plot" is to do it a disservice of sorts, such is the beguilingly self-reflexive nature of Anocha Suwichakornpong's becalmed, trippy, historically conscious fungus of a film. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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The Shape of Water (2017) |
Del Toro has conceivably fashioned in his beautiful beast a 21st-century iteration of Carmen Miranda's fruit suit, a shimmering shell that attends a host of fantasies. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Lean on Pete (2017) |
As for vérité, there are shades of social realism in Charley's inexorable drift to the margins of America, but damnation and salvation are cinematically situated in a cramped trailer and a well-lit public library, respectively. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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First They Killed My Father (2017) |
Too emotionally engrossed in the dramatic fate of this child to notice the camerawork? It's conceivable too that an excess of production precludes one from feeling more intimately what this child is experiencing, in the absence of grand scaffolding. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Lady Bird (2017) |
It's as if Gerwig was retroactively auditioning for the school talent show, exorcising necessary demons in the process, and remembering the details with acute attention. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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Darkest Hour (2017) |
How better to locate such counterintuitive heroics than through a retroactive contextualizing of Churchill as a least-likely-to-succeed buffoon (albeit with a gift for rhetoric)? Cue Gary Oldman as Oscar bait. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 10, 2017
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