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Ray Pride
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Fair Play (2023) |
Present-day erotic thriller well-versed in matters of gender and the dynamics of corporate byplay, akin to the genre’s intelligent entries of the 1980s and 1990s—Domont’s no Paul Verhoeven, but who is? - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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Flora and Son (2023) |
Carney uplifts his characters through song, and tethers them to earth with voluminous, voluptuous profanity. Carney is one of our most confident directors...Music and its magic is his subject and he could explore [it] for the rest of a career. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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The Creator (2023) |
Richly detailed, punchy...serious subjects in mind, without growing didactic and with substantial heart... Peak pulp poetry and bountifully bat---- until an ending it [resists] with all its might until the film succumbs to it. Yet, all is forgiven
- Newcity
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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Stop Making Sense (1984) |
Its existence is a grace... The simmering, then explosive beauty [lies] in its steady accumulation of bits and pieces, looks and glances. Building a set, assembling a sound: The construction of the equipment onstage: sweet, kooky algebra. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 26, 2023
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The Origin of Evil (2022) |
Sébastien Marnier’s widescreen dark thriller.. is a virtuously acidic sup at the spoiled well of Patrica Highsmith-style trouble... its slow-burn disdain for the upper class is well-aimed. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 26, 2023
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Dumb Money (2023) |
Hope, familial tenderness and opposition to the billionaire class/.. Masking is seen as a class element... and the manipulation of the stock.. is described as “class warfare pure and simple.” If this is lip service, it’s pretty ---ing mouthy. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Scrapper (2023) |
Lovingly, beautifully shot by cinematographer-director Molly Manning Walker. Elemental, graceful, and filled with small joys. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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A Haunting in Venice (2023) |
There are aperçus in Michael Green’s adaptation that made me chuckle, including “Storm waves, not ghosts”; “Color me the gunman” and “Downstairs, there are bees.” Ah, as B-movies in honey drown! - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Rotting in the Sun (2023) |
Withering satire of self-commodification without self-reflection, ranging from naughty to nasty; ambitious and ragged... has its fierce, small rewards in a welter of notions. Laughed a little, groaned big a couple times, cringed a lot. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 11, 2023
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Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) |
Opens with an extended traveling shot...orchestrated dance of figures and camera in a small-town hard-drinking old man’s bar, that... follows the characters as they attempt to describe the creation of the world through the dance of the camera. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 11, 2023
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Between Two Worlds (2021) |
A critique of celebrity activists; a low-key but indignant Binoche performance; the power of a lie...; a sober, documentary-like accounting... of the state of work, the world of exploitation. The heart of the picture turns out to be about friendship. - Newcity
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| Posted Sep 11, 2023
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Perpetrator (2023) |
Seriously bloody and bloody serious coming-of-age dream-drama-comedy that sets its broodiness in motion from the opening montage... Modern horror needs more signatures that succeed through willful, even wanton excess... all the real giallos. - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 25, 2023
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Bobi Wine: The People's President (2022) |
A dynamic, disquieting portrait of what it takes to oppose authoritarianism, even at the risk of your life and that of your family, and in street warfare across the land... a portrait of courage (and outrage). - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 11, 2023
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Afire (2023) |
Petzold is one of a nearly lost tribe: European filmmakers with a signature both specific and elusive who were once counted on to deliver films every year or two that fit both the marketplace and their own recognizable concerns. - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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A Compassionate Spy (2022) |
James always appears to be a straightforward filmmaker, but he knows how to... plumb mysteries we don’t expect to face... elegant... about family dynamics and the secrets that intimate partners hold from the world. (There’s method in the sadness.) - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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KOKOMO CITY (2023) |
A blues with a bruise, the kind that lingers. - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Shortcomings (2023) |
Park's framings are simple, and at their best, evoke the fine line of Tomine's graphic-novel compositions... A ghost sign... evokes... like a cloud in any other movie or a panel from any of Tomine's treasury of heart-tingling urban panels.
- Newcity
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Passages (2023) |
The key couple of sex scenes in <I>Passages</I> are shot in unbroken long takes that are urgent fumble and rush and finish that pin his characters, and their bodies, to the physical world, of acts, facts and intertwined figures. - Newcity
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| Posted Aug 01, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
Dark rapture, historical moments... as crisp lucid beauty, succession of sounds, images and sensations, even in everyday settings—cinematic means... emblems, particles, tumult, dazzling light plays and damning explosions and the bloody terror of it all. - Newcity
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| Posted Jul 20, 2023
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Barbie (2023) |
“Barbie” is “My Barbie Life To Live” and “Two Or Three Things I Know About Barbie” and “Farewell to Language”... blunt politics about objectification, capitalism and “sexualized capitalism” and patriarchy that would not be out of place in “La chinoise.” - Newcity
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| Posted Jul 20, 2023
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Welcome to L.A. (1977) |
Everything right and wrong with Rudolph's later filmography is present... Rudolph's variation on "La Ronde" is bed-happy and behaviorally tone-deaf, but... the lustrous and trashy [L.A.] captured by David Myers provides a bittersweet time capsule. - Newcity
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| Posted Jul 13, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023) |
Prophesying Armageddon as if it were written; the film’s great whatsit is sentient AI but meaning—theme, dramatic, conflict, wry by-play—plays out in orbit-wrecking stunts, sometimes just one footfall after the other. - Newcity
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| Posted Jul 13, 2023
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The Lesson (2023) |
Stellar Richard E. Grant... is at his most wicked... within the suited carapace of the wit’s-end writer, taking a taste—and literal sniffs—of everything around him. Even soup is a meal. Look at those two sup at table: Grant and Delpy work with precision. - Newcity
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| Posted Jul 06, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
It’s a job of work. But it’s so far from 1936, and 1969, and first inspiration. It’s less a continuation than a vestigial tail. - Newcity
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| Posted Jun 29, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
A sly concordance of [Anderson's] fixations... how do we frame our lives, what stories do we tell, what stories do we tell about the stories, how do we accommodate the aliens from within and above and nuclear detonations on the storyboard of the horizon? - Newcity
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| Posted Jun 24, 2023
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The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) |
Roeg, a time-slipping editor who began as a cinematographer, knows red from blue, red sand from blue sky from green water from red blood, knows the difference between Bowie’s milk torso and Rip Torn’s fishbelly-white gut. - Newcity
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Padre Pio (2022) |
Ferrara is making stranger, looser, even shambling films. [This] is one of the shambling pictures, a consideration of faith... and it feels precisely like a priceless Abel riff even when it evaporates onscreen... Demons descend. Hope challenges. - Newcity
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Twilight (1990) |
Moves like a memory of itself, like a charcoal drawing of nightmare... Fehér’s film is a serene experience: we are made as much of mist as we are of mysteries... <I>Twilight</I> feels familiar yet also elementally strange: it is happening again. - Newcity
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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32 Sounds (2022) |
Immersive and singular... head trip of a special kind, taking the audience on thirty-two separate sound voyages. It rocks and rollicks: this is cinematic (and sonic) imagination at top form, sound with vision. - Newcity
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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Kandahar (2023) |
Director Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman, frames and cuts with vigor and Butler’s lug mug is always a captivating presence atop his masterful slab of stillness and motion. - Newcity
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
Albert Brooks-like minimalism and Elaine May-style fillips and Holofcener petulance and hope tingles and tickles through its characters’ testiness and their readily sparked rudeness. You know any selves like that? - Newcity
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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Millennium Mambo (2001) |
The opening shot... A lifetime, lifetimes, packed into a single long take of a woman in her youth, smiling, smoking, laughing, skipping, disappearing. Vicky flies away even in the first moments of her journey. - Newcity
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| Posted May 19, 2023
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Master Gardener (2022) |
A trilogy of terroir; the dirt of earth, the filth of Abu Ghraib, the garden of inherited wealth that pretends to the Edenic/ - Newcity
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| Posted May 19, 2023
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Joyland (2022) |
An accomplished visualist even in his first picture, Sadiq conveys a world in a way that doesn’t require a raft of exposition.. directly into the sensations...the longings of his characters. Life is lived, despite tradition, despite patriarchy’s hold. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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Carmen (2022) |
Britell’s score soars, selling much of the deeply eccentric performance and visual style in lush, peculiar fever dream. Fine arts photography meets Malick meets stylized choreography: the world is a dance, we are all observers but we are all also dancers. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) |
A joyous sweetheart of a movie; even better is that it plays like a movie, not a Marvel product... What’s it about? Raccoons and kindness. And gleefully bad gags. Gunn’s sheer competence soars alongside his customary monumental goofiness. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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The Eight Mountains (2022) |
Te filmmakers (including cinematographer Ruben Impens) deliver with grace: sweeping if sometimes grandiloquent, “The Eight Mountains” is a patient, uncommonly tender triumph. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023) |
Tmphatically captures that vivid, peculiar energy that has always been present in the 1980s-bred star’s performances: restlessness coupled with a bracing agitation... Funny, heartfelt, sometimes harrowing, and whiz-bang entertaining. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022) |
The latest vital project from Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab... ” is an unflinching voyage into the human body, [of] “excisions and eviscerations." - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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The Conformist (1970) |
Lush, even drenching 1970 masterpiece... A cinematic confection of near-perfection at high velocity, its stylistic prowess and textural largesse is often cited as a major influence by [may major] directors including Steven Spielberg. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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Mother (2009) |
Approaches the intensity of... <I>Vengeance is Mine</I>, but Bong’s mix of bumptious humor and strong plotting [leads] to a musical climax that’s the cinematic equivalent of acupuncture, releasing all the knots, gliding into a glorious sunset. - Newcity
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| Posted May 14, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
Madly, teemingly ambitious third feature... unabashedly Freud for thought, a full-bore, slow-tilt freakout, an interior mom-a-logue that advances as ponderous fable in distinct chunks, attenuated, animated, extenuated, exsanguinated. - Newcity
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| Posted Apr 21, 2023
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Showing Up (2022) |
A sneaky, funny little masterpiece, beautifully measured, tender-yet-irritable telling of the daily life and low-level strife of a mid-career working artist, a ceramics sculptor in modern-day Portland, played by a formidably distracted Michelle Williams. - Newcity
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| Posted Apr 16, 2023
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John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) |
It’s not only a Keanunami, it’s a tidal wave of assault, with kill after overkill in balletic attack.;. This grim fairytale is relentless... Wick has offended the arcane rules of a reigning society that cannot bear the odor of any form of resistance. - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 23, 2023
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The Magic Flute (2022) |
It’s an odd concoction, a sleek modern world mixed with a pasteboard fantasy dimension. - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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To Leslie (2022) |
it’s the moment-to-moment capture of Riseborough’s features that counts: the camerawork by Larkin Seiple... does a dance of rare and haunted intimacy, measuring Leslie’s vulnerability, but patient in capturing hurt... - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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The Trial (1962) |
What grubby filth! Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is an office man, an ambitious junior bureaucrat, long and thin as a blade in knife-sharp suits... exacting haircut, encased in timeless tailoring, a trim suit... slim pants with pleats crisp as glass. - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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Artists and Models (1955) |
Cinematically chaotic and fruitfully loony... a gaudy, grabby, bold, beautiful explosion of possibilities... the possibilities of composition and blocking, post-Looney Tunes-style human behavior and the physical expression of neurosis from head to toe. - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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Return to Seoul (2022) |
Moments materialize and advance. Surprises and reversals mount. <I>Return to Seoul</I> is a hyperrealistic, beautiful dream, heartwarming and heartbreaking, electric, one warm or chilly sensation after another. This is the magic of great movies. - Newcity
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| Posted Mar 04, 2023
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) |
Characters... pick up swords or machetes, pirouette in air, fly across rooftops, tumble and counter-tumble in battle with those who might stunt their learning; dip toes like pebbles skimming across placid ponds... further into this impossible past. - Newcity
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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