Richard Combs
Richard Combs's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Sight & Sound
Financial Times
Film Comment Magazine
Monthly Film Bulletin
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Color Purple (1985) |
Overall, what Spielberg has done to The Color Purple combines the spare drive of The Searchers and the gloomy lushness of Doctor Zhivago. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Salvador (1986) |
Of Stone's two recent films, Salvador is the most remarkable, if only for its drive and sense of attack, its willingness to deal in current politics as directly as it does. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Aug 22, 2022
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Platoon (1986) |
Platoon evokes Vietnam more intensely than any previous film, and at the same time drowns it in all the particularities, infused by boredom, exhaustion, terror, of what it meant to fight there. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Aug 22, 2022
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Cockfighter (1974) |
Cockfighter looks as sleek an item - and almost as exploitable - as any of the company's recent work in the girl gang prison revolt cycle, and far less bizarre than the two Westerns which [Roger] Corman allowed [director Monte] Heilman to make. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Apr 02, 2020
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The Last Waltz (1978) |
At its best the style of The Last Waltz, at once kaleidoscopic and concentrated, discursive and fixated, distils more about its subject and its times (and about its maker and his obsessions) than the impressionism of cinema verite. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 31, 2020
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The Last Wave (1978) |
Unfortunately, Weir's deftness with 'atmosphere' seems to have been developing at the expense of any narrative or thematic sense. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 31, 2020
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The Morning After (1986) |
The Morning After is, for a romantic thriller, perhaps over-burdened with possible patterns. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 27, 2020
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The Exorcist (1973) |
The film continually struggles to suggest through atmosphere what it promises but fails to provide in substance. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 27, 2020
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The Day of the Dolphin (1973) |
A glibly sour and sentimental thriller. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 27, 2020
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Winter Kills (1979) |
Richert gives the film a hard, bright surface -- this is not a seductive fantasy, it's more of the sarcastic, take-it-or-leave-it kind. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 24, 2020
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Demon Seed (1977) |
Very uncomfortably directed: the performances are stilted and metallic (whatever is supposed to be assumed about robots taking over), and the perfunctory visuals leave the ramshackle plotdangerously over-exposed. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 19, 2020
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Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1972) |
In the comic context of A Gorgeous Bird Like Me, a good deal of the savour is lost simply because this femme comes over as much less fatale than may have been intended. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 18, 2020
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Woyzeck (1979) |
What Herzog does is to make his own contrary film inside the original, elevating Jonathan Harker from functionary to dual protagonist. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 17, 2020
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Slither (1973) |
Zieff's talent goes further than a skill for packaging sound scripts and performances. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 17, 2020
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Hearts of the West (1975) |
For all that Zieff assembles these solid ingredients with a minimum of fuss, he does have a way of turning the simplest device to quietly expressive use. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 17, 2020
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All the President's Men (1976) |
A story that has been marshalled with dazzling skill and precision, but lacks the imaginative hooks that might have taken it even further in mood and meaning. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 17, 2020
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Hammett (1982) |
The classic element, to give it its due, works in an admirably terse, crisp, humorous vein. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Mar 16, 2020
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Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) |
The saddest failure though is Schaffner's inability to find a real centre for the film, and so achieve the kind of precarious constellation of forces that has formed round his protagonists in the past. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Feb 12, 2020
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A New Leaf (1971) |
The wistful, fierce integrity of these personalities, viewed with a detached amusement, allows the film to bypass the usual agenda of subjects (sex, the System, etc.) of current comedy... and lends a particular vivacity to the comic set-pieces. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Feb 12, 2020
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New York, New York (1977) |
Most rewardingly, [it] seems to have effected a kind of opening-out-allowing Scorsese to tackle material more experimentally than in Alice, the characteristic extremes of emotion without the over-determined mechanisms of Taxi Driver. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Feb 06, 2020
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The Illumination (1972) |
Illumination is an intelligent if unexciting discourse which never quite bridges the gap... between the inevitable and the predictable in the lessons it draws about life. - Financial Times
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| Posted Feb 05, 2020
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The Godfather, Part II (1974) |
In sheer physical terms, however, Godfather Part II displays even more spectacular panache than its predecessor. - Financial Times
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Ordinary People (1980) |
Ordinary People, consequently, has a closeness but not much expressiveness of texture. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Killer Elite (1975) |
The result is a strangely dissonant and compelling entertainment, an unsettling criss-cross of Chinatown Nights' fantasy and dyspeptic meditation on figures set firmly in their contemporary landscape. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 27, 2020
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) |
What Forman achieves with most consistent success in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... are the group portraits -- the scenes of inmates embarking on some joint enterprise of liberating madness. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 27, 2020
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Another Woman (1988) |
Perhaps Allen is now less like Bergman than he is like, say, Clint Eastwood, in the way he makes films to escape the kind of persona he used to have in films. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 17, 2020
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Bird (1988) |
What the film pulls off is the difficult fusion of this kind of accuracy with larger 'truths' which are no respecter of accuracy. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 16, 2020
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Mountains of the Moon (1990) |
The narrative sprawls in the usual epic fashion -- though largely without the usual epic excitements. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 16, 2020
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Being There (1979) |
The result must be one of the boldest of commercial comedies, for the way it turns on passages of dead time, the dreadful pauses while other characters struggle to see the significance in each of Chance's cryptically meaningless remarks. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 16, 2020
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White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) |
It's as if White Hunter, Black Heart had opened up the gap that exists in any Huston film between the playful surfaces and the depths beneath. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 11, 2020
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Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) |
That story counts for less than gimmicks, and characters less than both, might be judged from the lack of resonance in the one narrative revelation, concerning Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Dec 16, 2019
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Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) |
Without the simple spiritual convictions of his predecessors, or the philosophical speculations of his contemporaries, Lucas has rather left his audience out in the cold. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Dec 12, 2019
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Heathers (1989) |
If there's a weakness of motivation in Heathers, it may be because the whole film is rather dream-like, a product of Veronica's fevered writing and imaginings, with a consequent chaos and interchangeability of roles. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Aug 10, 2018
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Saturday Night Fever (1977) |
Most details of character and setting, finally, are reduced to simplistic icons, mingling with such over-emphasised bric-a-brac as posters of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Rocky and Al Pacino. - Monthly Film Bulletin
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| Posted Jan 08, 2018
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The Shining (1980) |
Kubrick again plays off the awesomeness of the internal odyssey and the banality of ordinary human behaviour. - Monthly Film Bulletin
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| Posted Oct 31, 2017
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) |
What the film is 'about', in a way, is its own illusionism, the process by which it creates a world we are invited to share. - Monthly Film Bulletin
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| Posted Sep 14, 2017
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Silence (2016) |
Silence is Scorsese's most expansive historical canvas, but in the tightness with which it plots these torturing relationships that might lead to enlightenment it is his most hermetic, secretively enclosed. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jan 10, 2017
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Evolution (2015) |
The world here - the dark volcanic sand, a tight little village of white houses - is as strangely but as satisfyingly organised as the dank tunnels and lush forest of [Hadzihalilovic's 2004 film] Innocence. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted May 12, 2016
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Jafar Panahi's Taxi (2015) |
[Panahi] presents us with an infinite regression of setups, touching on both his own movies and the difficulties for any filmmaker of addressing Iranian 'reality.' - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 14, 2015
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