Matt Cipolla
Tomatometer-approved critic
Matt Cipolla is a critic and essayist for hire who has worked with WGN Radio, Bright Wall/Dark Room, RogerEbert.com, The Film Stage, Crooked Marquee, and more. He's also a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, and he firmly believes that ".gif" is pronounced as "jiff."
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Scream VI (2023) |
As a return to form for Scream, this is a sigh of relief––notwithstanding some key issues, VI has a freewheeling sense of lunacy, and it’s way too fun to decry. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Lux Æterna (2019) |
The spontaneous “poetry” of Lux Aeterna—an extrapolation of sorts of his previous film, Climax—lives on a prosaic approach. - The Spool
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| Posted Jun 26, 2022
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Control (2007) |
If suicidality wavers through a spectrum of solipsism and obsequity, Control knows existence as performance. - The Spool
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| Posted May 18, 2022
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Scream (2022) |
Scream takes some risks, some of which are truly daring. It's head-spinning, then, that it could still come off as so unceremonious throughout. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 13, 2022
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Nightmare Alley (2021) |
As a story, there's such little idea of what it truly is, losing its sense of both the class struggle at the heart of its thesis and the America that continues to inform it. - The Spool
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| Posted Dec 13, 2021
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House of Gucci (2021) |
Despite the reasons House of Gucci doesn't work, none are damning enough to make a bad movie. It's forgettable, sometimes playing like the sort of cable-TV fare that displaced these tales from the silver screen over the past decade. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Nov 22, 2021
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Procession (2021) |
Procession, while effective at points, is too thematically and logistically uneven in some of its key discussions. - The Spool
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| Posted Nov 19, 2021
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The Souvenir Part II (2021) |
As experienced, life is hard, misty, and messy. As executed, The Souvenir Part II is similar in order to complement its metatext emotionally and thematically. - The Spool
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| Posted Nov 05, 2021
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Last Night in Soho (2021) |
[I]t's once story becomes paramount in the last quarter that the film suddenly derails into something as misguided as it is out of place. - The Spool
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| Posted Oct 29, 2021
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Halloween Kills (2021) |
Halloween Kills seems to stem from the thought of the system failing the innocent. That doesn't work, however, when David Gordon Green's latest completely fails its audience. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Oct 16, 2021
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No Time to Die (2021) |
The problem is that, both thematically and structurally, it's damn near the same as Skyfall. So those risks are visible from miles away. - The Spool
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| Posted Sep 29, 2021
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The Nowhere Inn (2020) |
Between its more self-satisfied tangents and characterizations that don't do justice to its core, The Nowhere Inn lacks sufficient internal logic to fully work. - The Spool
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| Posted Sep 18, 2021
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Cry Macho (2021) |
It's not a soaring success but a modest one, with Eastwood's work as actor and director respectively grounding and elevating the material. - The Spool
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| Posted Sep 15, 2021
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Candyman (2021) |
The gestalt execution allows its themes to build up, to mutate, to rot. As the film progresses, it falls deeper and deeper into the collective psyche of its characters. - The Spool
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| Posted Aug 25, 2021
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Annette (2021) |
Carax is in on the joke, constantly playing chicken with his and his characters' pretensions in ways that keep its 140-minute runtime fluid. - The Spool
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| Posted Aug 05, 2021
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The Green Knight (2021) |
Here's a story that's so inherently loose and extemporaneous. It doesn't help, then, that [the] approach is hermetic enough that there's not too much of the film from its neck up. - The Spool
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| Posted Jul 26, 2021
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Old (2021) |
[B]eyond the underwritten characters, Shyamalan's approach lacks the philosophy, introspection, or look at ephemerality it needs to pull off what it ultimately attempts. - The Spool
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| Posted Jul 23, 2021
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Pig (2021) |
It is, against all odds, a wider parable about the decay of art in a culture where everything is to be bought and sold. - The Spool
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| Posted Jul 14, 2021
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Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021) |
What it captures is that feeling of the gearshift sliding into neutral, the point later on when openness and acquiescence bleed into one. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jul 14, 2021
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Mama Weed (2020) |
For all the schisms it's actually about, Jean-Paul Salomé's film either doesn't care about or isn't aware of what it depicts. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jul 14, 2021
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Till Death (2021) |
It's a simple enough premise that functions in parts. It's also one Fox elevates. The problem is that . . . Till Death feels like something one wouldn't expect: contrived. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jun 30, 2021
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In the Heights (2021) |
In the Heights works in pieces but not as a whole, ultimately playing like a jumble of tones, themes, and plot threads it doesn't acknowledge or develop until it absolutely has to. - The Spool
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| Posted Jun 08, 2021
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The Carnivores (2020) |
Nothing here is particularly deep or likely to leave a lasting impact. . . . That said, it takes a steady hand to keep this sort of material feeling as modest as it does here. - The Spool
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| Posted Jun 07, 2021
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Port Authority (2019) |
[I]t's about Paul and only Paul. It's about who can help him and how, with no real success at probing the conflicts or systemic issues at hand. - The Spool
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| Posted Jun 04, 2021
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Scream 4 (2011) |
[Craven and Williamson] observe technology as an extension, a funhouse mirror, of the silver screen. . . . [M]eta doesn't even cover it. - The Spool
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| Posted Apr 15, 2021
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Minari (2020) |
Chung's latest wants to balance the specific and the universal, and while it does so at points, it also ends up just too impersonal. - The Spool
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| Posted Feb 09, 2021
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Pleasure (2021) |
Pleasure, while incredibly difficult to watch, repackages [the star-is-born tale] into a look at the cycle of abuse when having boundaries isn't a commodity. - The Spool
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| Posted Feb 03, 2021
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Prime Time (2021) |
[It] has nothing deep to say about pop culture, the turn of the millennium, or its own characters, and the movie plays like a treatment forced into feature-length. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 03, 2021
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Marvelous and the Black Hole (2020) |
It wants to be something cute for the family. It also wants to show how belligerent and vulgar young teenagers can be. The problem is that the two never intersect. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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El Planeta (2021) |
I'd be sad if it didn't have such a droll approach. In some ways, it is. El Planeta isn't the most thematically consistent, but it's clever and brisk enough to be a good time. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) |
Nothing about it is shocking, nor is it meant to be. That's why it feels so real when it reaches its natural conclusion. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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Life in a Day 2020 (2021) |
This gimmick may have worked 10 years ago, but that's because it was a specific time when people recorded a lot, not quite everything. The sliver of novelty is gone now. - The Spool
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| Posted Feb 02, 2021
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The Blazing World (2021) |
[T]he surrealism doesn't feel subversive or even too inventive. It just feels like a put-on, one that doesn't understand its heroine's mental state. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 01, 2021
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All Light, Everywhere (2021) |
Theo Anthony weaves history, film theory, philosophy, and politics to explore the limits of perception in cinema, often while playing with the syntax of documentary filmmaking. - The Spool
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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Coming Home in the Dark (2021) |
The skill is here and it comes to fruition in the first 50 minutes, but it's when it tries to interrogate the motives at hand that it starts to wobble. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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The Cursed (2021) |
For those looking for a slow burn, this werewolf tale is too reliant on cheap jump scares. For those in the mood for gore and a good time, it's far too slow--stagnant, even. - The Spool
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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Cusp (2021) |
The result isn't perfect, but it manages to feel consistent. There's no immediate future on display here. There's also no real hope. . . . Cusp doesn't even try to fake a smile. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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In The Earth (2021) |
In the Earth sees Wheatley aping Andrei Tarkovsky by taking liberally from Stalker, but it also sees him aping himself by rehashing A Field in England much more predictably. - The Spool
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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John and the Hole (2020) |
[I]ts attempts to tie fable into metatext are just overt enough to cement how toothless it all really is. - The Spool
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| Posted Jan 30, 2021
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Cryptozoo (2021) |
To be fair, the plot is by far the least original and most protracted part. The visual ingenuity, on the other hand, is something to witness. - The Spool
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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Homeroom (2021) |
It's a very well done documentary on a technical level . . . It's the pace that truncates some of the details, making Homeroom too brisk to realize all of its moving parts. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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One for the Road (2021) |
While most movies are either innocuous or at the mercy of self-satisfied characters, One for the Road happens to be both--and it is so for 137 minutes. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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Songbird (2020) |
Perhaps it'd be possible in another world to overlook [the concept] if Songbird were any good, but it isn't. It feels like a network TV pilot from 2005 that never got picked up. - The Spool
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| Posted Dec 10, 2020
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Zappa (2020) |
Zappa does a commendable job at echoing that sort of coke-adjacent counter-culture chaos the artist spun together so uniquely. - The Spool
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| Posted Nov 25, 2020
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Mank (2020) |
[S]omething of a surprise is how [David Fincher] and the script from his late father, Jack Fincher, lure audiences into a false sense of nostalgia while negating its most amiable aspects. - The Spool
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| Posted Nov 18, 2020
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Fatman (2020) |
What feels like a Robot Chicken sketch drawn out to 100 minutes doesn't even sound too hopeful in theory, but it didn't have to be this pointless. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Nov 13, 2020
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Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (2020) |
A logical approach runs through Fireball, but the sheer wonder of it all--and its sly balance of tones--is what prevents it from burning up before making impact. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Nov 12, 2020
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Divine Love (2019) |
The material is timeless, but it thinks it's a timely, sociopolitical warning. As weird as the script thinks it is, it's never really that weird. - The Spool
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| Posted Nov 11, 2020
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Come Play (2020) |
Jacob Chase's latest is a low-key chiller with an affinity for long, floating takes and 360-degree pans to punctuate its human core--until it isn't. - The Spool
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| Posted Oct 29, 2020
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Sleep (2020) |
Sleep is so full of ideas that it can be a bit too much. It's certainly ambitious and has its moments, but its dream logic grows numb by the end. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Oct 19, 2020
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