Jesse Cataldo
Jesse Cataldo's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Slant Magazine
Spectrum Culture
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Predator 2 (1990) |
Predator 2 feels like an aimless tangent compared to its predecessor, but rarely do unnecessary remixes exhibit such insane and original verve.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Oct 04, 2022
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The Last Waltz (1978) |
The combination of shagginess and directorial fussbudgetry that marks the final product also functions as a reminder that Scorsese often does his best work while shaping discord into the type of art that retains distinct traces of that turmoil.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Sep 09, 2022
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The Intruder (2004) |
Formulates a chimeric disquisition on the things that divide us - the self-imposed limitations and expectations cultivated by fear and ignorance - which result in their own form of emotional confinement.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted May 20, 2022
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Trouble Every Day (2001) |
A masterful invocation of the gray areas in which pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, can commingle in uncomfortable fashion.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted May 10, 2022
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Saint Jack (1979) |
Shooting halfway around the world, director Peter Bogdanovich manages to reinvent his style in a minor key with Saint Jack, while retaining the love of sparkling dialogue, gag work, and interpretive pastiche that defined his career. - Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Apr 26, 2022
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Losing Ground (1982) |
The inherent tension of this scenario is ratcheted up gradually, across patient, theatrically composed scenes. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 01, 2022
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Duet for Cannibals (1969) |
Susan Sontag's debut film serves as an intriguing cinematic extension of her more well-known written work. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 16, 2019
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At War (2018) |
The film is content to bluntly affirm that corporate attempts at compassion are always secondary to providing profit to shareholders. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 16, 2019
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Dogman (2018) |
The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 07, 2019
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Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) |
It proves that Mekas is still very much awake, contemplating the broad gulfs of the past and future, the little life that, as Shakespeare put it, "is rounded with a sleep." - MUBI
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| Posted Jan 09, 2018
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Tempestad (2016) |
This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 15, 2017
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Funeral Parade (1969) |
The film is caught somewhere between freeform sketch comedy, gonzo documentary, and irony-soaked Warholian melodrama. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 03, 2017
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Free Fire (2016) |
Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 14, 2017
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Les hautes solitudes (1974) |
The limitations of black and white both point to Philippe Garrel's silent-era influences and identify a way forward. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 20, 2017
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Silence (2016) |
Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 15, 2016
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Nocturnal Animals (2016) |
Tom Ford remains too reliant on overwrought imagery, residual prestige affectations, and conventional rhythms to break free of either genre the film experiments with. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 14, 2016
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Dog Eat Dog (2016) |
Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 28, 2016
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Julieta (2016) |
Pedro Almodvar's object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 29, 2016
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Do Not Resist (2016) |
Director Craig Atkinson's film explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 25, 2016
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Morris From America (2016) |
Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 15, 2016
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Under the Sun (2015) |
The film's primary effect is to substantiate gossip, while satisfying the perverse human desire to gander at misery. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 02, 2016
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Cosmos (2015) |
Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 13, 2016
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Dheepan (2015) |
Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 03, 2016
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Back Home (2015) |
Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 04, 2016
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The Witch (2015) |
The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 15, 2016
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Stinking Heaven (2015) |
As in Nathan Silver's previous work, what could have been a rote retread of Pasolini's Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 06, 2015
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James White (2015) |
It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 11, 2015
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Spotlight (2015) |
By modeling its structure so closely after All the President's Men, Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 02, 2015
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The Pearl Button (2015) |
Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 20, 2015
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Journey to the Shore (2015) |
The film remains too pallid and diffuse, the development of its mood and characters suffering as a result. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 25, 2015
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The Assassin (2015) |
The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 18, 2015
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Aferim! (2015) |
The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 20, 2015
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How to Smell a Rose: A Visit With Ricky Leacock in Normandy (2014) |
A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 08, 2015
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The End of the Tour (2015) |
It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tte--tte, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 26, 2015
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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) |
It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 31, 2015
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Far From the Madding Crowd (2015) |
The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 26, 2015
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Aloft (2014) |
The film's worst quality is its underhanded attempt to convey a complex recounting of one family's ordeal while fudging all the pertinent details. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Apr 25, 2015
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Fort Buchanan (2014) |
The film is content to drift free-associatively through a tangle of linked relationships, considering the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 15, 2015
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White God (2014) |
It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 14, 2015
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Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014) |
It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 13, 2015
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The Salvation (2014) |
The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 21, 2015
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Blackhat (2015) |
Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 13, 2015
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Joy of Man's Desiring (2014) |
A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 12, 2015
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Winter Sleep (2014) |
Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 12, 2014
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Why Don't You Play in Hell? (2013) |
Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Nov 03, 2014
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Fury (2014) |
The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 10, 2014
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Two Shots Fired (2014) |
The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2014
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The Drop (2014) |
With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 09, 2014
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Bird People (2014) |
Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 08, 2014
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The Naked Room (2013) |
By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Aug 25, 2014
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