Jonathan Romney
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
The Big Lebowski (1998) |
The Big Lebowski is at once utterly inconsequential and a blow for a cinematic slacker aesthetic. - Sight & Sound
Read More
| Posted Jun 08, 2023
|
|
|
|
In Our Day (2023) |
Won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 27, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Old Oak (2023) |
[Loach] could hardly have delivered a more resonant, timely or indeed angry swansong than this feature which takes up arms against the decay of national compassion. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
Salem (2023) |
An eccentric but absolutely individual proposition. Young audiences especially should take to a film that mixes familiar genre action with romance and a wild-eyed visionary streak. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
Perfect Days (2023) |
This is a philosophical contemplation that is very much about something – a meaning-of-life film, no less – with an introverted, immensely likeable central performance from Koji Yakusho. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 25, 2023
|
|
|
|
Man in Black (2023) |
It’s a sobering, striking work – as much performance piece as documentary per se, and a notable departure from Wang Bing’s usual objective observational mode. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 23, 2023
|
|
|
|
Fallen Leaves (2023) |
While this one isn’t perhaps quite prime vintage, anyone who loves [Kaurismäki’s] paradoxically joyous melancholia – cinema that is, let’s say, happy on the inside – will take this one to heart. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
Sleep (2023) |
Rings imaginative and sometimes tricksy changes on a simple somnambulism premise. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
Eureka (2023) |
Eureka is executed with undeniable audacity, and the ride is genuinely surprising and unpredictable – and yet it’s a gruellingly extended one, with longueurs where the action goes dead. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
May December (2023) |
[May December] offers sly stylistic play, together with a terrific pairing of two performers on great form – Natalie Portman and long-term Haynes lead Julianne Moore, engaged in brisk mirror play. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Zone of Interest (2023) |
Its portrait of Nazi domesticity in the shadow of the Auschwitz chimneys is executed with an objective, chilly control that eschews false rhetoric, leaving maximum space for the audience’s imaginative and emotional response. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 19, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023) |
Crisply acted all round, with telegraph economy making for the maximum cringe factor, the film very much rides on Arnow’s old no-holds-barred performance as a bespectacled, ever-unimpressed Ann. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 19, 2023
|
|
|
|
Youth (Spring) (2023) |
It makes a demanding watch, in that it is genuinely, even oppressively immersive. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 18, 2023
|
|
|
|
Homecoming (2023) |
What emerges most strongly in this adeptly woven story of race, desire and grief is Corsini’s experience in directing a cast which mixes non-professionals and familiar faces, with her young leads especially exuding energy, naturalness and sensitivity. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 18, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Animal Kingdom (2023) |
A bold, altogether wild-up genre mash-up. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 17, 2023
|
|
|
|
Anselm (2023) |
Whatever the practical challenges faced by 3D cinema in the current climate, the film’s stark beauty and cultural richness should make Anselm a significant niche success theatrically and online. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted May 17, 2023
|
|
|
|
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) |
It’s just a shame that after two enjoyably irreverent anomalies in the canon, Gunn’s finale should be so solemn, over-frenetic and at points, shamelessly sentimental. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted May 04, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Blue Caftan (2022) |
... The unapologetically accessible The Blue Caftan is something of a high-class tear-jerker, but of a mature, insightful kind. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted May 04, 2023
|
|
|
|
Pacifiction (2022) |
Whether or not the film has anything politically serious to say — and there is always the teasing suggestion that it might — Pacifiction is an intoxicating pleasure. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted Apr 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
Sick of Myself (2022) |
If the film succeeds in being so caustic and teeth-grindingly comic, it’s partly because of Kristine Kujath Thorp’s Signe — at once gauche, arrogant and oddly innocent. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted Apr 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) |
Anyone in the target demographic will do a lot of sniffling during the film, and a lot of hugging her friends afterwards. - Independent (UK)
Read More
| Posted Mar 13, 2023
|
|
|
|
Scream VI (2023) |
While not everyone might care about navel-gazing genre minutiae, the film energetically delivers the staples... It benefits enormously from its change of locale, and from shedding the previous film’s sentimental undertow. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted Mar 09, 2023
|
|
|
|
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019) |
This leisurely, quietly euphoric film lets you breathe the visual and sonic fresh air of its setting — yet the Lunana section itself is not without a romanticising streak. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted Mar 09, 2023
|
|
|
|
Sira (2023) |
A punchy, visually potent story of survival and revenge, Apolline Traoré’s Sira offers a female-centred take on current tensions in northern Africa, and shows the Burkinabe writer/director on confident form with her fifth narrative feature. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Mar 03, 2023
|
|
|
|
Till the End of the Night (2023) |
True to its title, German psycho-thriller Till the End Of The Night is a densely nocturnal affair, but there’s a thin line between sombre and murky, and Christoph Hochhäusler’s genre-tweaking film eventually crosses it. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
On the Adamant (2023) |
Engaging and affirmative... - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
Suzume (2022) |
Suzume is hardly a film for all tastes, but is certain to thrill anime buffs across all ages and continents. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
Afire (2023) |
Arguably lighter Petzold than usual, but still bears the unmistakeable stamp of his intellectual and conceptual elegance. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Burdened (2023) |
What’s striking is how extremely spare and to the point Gamal’s storytelling style is: there’s zero fat on the bones of this story, giving the film a taut directness. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Plough (2023) |
You’d have to be a committed Garrelian, or a hardline upholder of the prerogatives of French auteurism, to really appreciate a glum piece which feels like a relic of a European cinema that is no longer really attuned to the times. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 22, 2023
|
|
|
|
Tótem (2023) |
This thematically rich piece offers a set of vivid character studies, while musing on life, death and time – largely from a child’s perspective. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 21, 2023
|
|
|
|
Disco Boy (2023) |
This hugely inventive film finally doesn’t deliver all it promises, but highlights Abbruzzese as a distinctive voice. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 20, 2023
|
|
|
|
The Adults (2023) |
A poignant work that occupies a dramatic space somewhere between Kenneth Lonergan and Whit Stillman – or that might be described as mumblecore Chekhov with a side order of Looney Tunes cartoon vocals. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 19, 2023
|
|
|
|
Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything (2023) |
Atef’s new film, a small-scale drama nevertheless attaining novelistic richness, stands to be her most successful yet, especially given contemporary demand for intelligent stories told from a perspective of female desire. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 18, 2023
|
|
|
|
Superpower (2023) |
Given how much informative, sober coverage the war has so far generated, it’s hard to imagine that viewers will really benefit from this frenetically-paced, awkwardly narcissistic piece. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 18, 2023
|
|
|
|
Perpetrator (2023) |
Feels at once slap-happy and deliriously free-associative, but then it isn’t a horror film per se so much as an energetic piece of conceptual feminist pop art. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Feb 18, 2023
|
|
|
|
Passages (2023) |
Its dramatic heft and its stars’ upfront audacity make it a sexy proposition in every respect. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Jan 24, 2023
|
|
|
|
Girl (2023) |
Even when the narrative loses momentum, the visual richness of this nonetheless spare, economical work has a gorgeously mesmeric quality. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Jan 23, 2023
|
|
|
|
Corsage (2022) |
You sense that as an actor, Krieps’s own imperial phase is just beginning. - Observer (UK)
Read More
| Posted Jan 01, 2023
|
|
|
|
Darkling (2022) |
True to its title, this is a film that works all the better the longer it keeps us in the dark. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Dec 08, 2022
|
|
|
|
Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) |
Flamboyantly mounted and CGI-sprinkled as it is, it feels less a fully reimagined screen adaptation, more like a deluxe souvenir programme with pictures that move. - Financial Times
Read More
| Posted Nov 28, 2022
|
|
|
|
No End (2022) |
As befits its title, Iranian drama No End applies the psychological screws at the start and never lets up. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Oct 12, 2022
|
|
|
|
Walk Up (2022) |
While Hong’s films are often highly comic, albeit in a subtly dry fashion, they can also be intensely melancholy; and few are sadder, or indeed more elaborately perplexing, than this. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Sep 23, 2022
|
|
|
|
A Hundred Flowers (2022) |
Despite an eminent cast and undeniable poetic sensibility, Kawamura’s film is never quite distinctive enough to rise above a certain preciousness. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Sep 22, 2022
|
|
|
|
The Origin of Evil (2022) |
Something light but acidic is just what you want to prime the palate... - Guardian
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2022
|
|
|
|
Tár (2022) |
A singularly strange offering... - Guardian
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2022
|
|
|
|
Bones and All (2022) |
That the film is visually understated only makes it more disturbing ... - Guardian
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2022
|
|
|
|
White Noise (2022) |
It’s pitched as a period piece, a post-postmodernist take on the glacial irony of DeLillo’s style, but its manic ironies are an awkward translation of the chilly detachment of the original. - Guardian
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2022
|
|
|
|
Il Boemo (2022) |
A visually and musically vivid film that, while it undoubtedly labours under some staid period drama conventions, largely transcends them with its ripely conceived backstage and bedroom intrigue. - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Sep 20, 2022
|
|
|
|
Winter Boy (2022) |
A moving but hard-edged story of grief, self-discovery and teenage angst... - Screen International
Read More
| Posted Sep 20, 2022
|