Robert Koehler
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) |
The movie completely loses whatever energy it had to begin with when McDormand exits, because she was bringing the thrust and momentum of pure anger to the drama. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Nope (2022) |
This final confrontation is truly a spectacle... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Dual (2022) |
Riley Stearns’ clone-in-existential-crisis drama Dual suffers from both lazy storytelling and having been beaten to the punch on its high concept by the Mahershala Ali-starring Swan Song. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 02, 2022
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All That Breathes (2022) |
Sen takes the chaotic world on its own terms, and quietly uncovers a rich metaphor in the bird's tenacity: somehow, even in this place, life can thrive. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Riotsville, USA (2022) |
The film's chronicle acts as a severe indictment of the country and what it owes the people it enslaved—in one form or another—since 1619... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 02, 2022
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The Cathedral (2022) |
The viewer is asked to be as observant to details, to furtive gestures and to shades of meaning, as D’Ambrose is in adapting his own family story, making The Cathedral a genuinely radical act. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Living (2022) |
Living is above all a work of dramatic writing at the highest level, as well as a master class in how to adapt—and improve!—a fine original screenplay from one cultural setting to another. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Emergency (2022) |
Erratically structured as both thriller and comedy, Carey Williams’ Emergency has all the earmarks of being both a Jordan Peele wannabe and a calling-card project for Hollywood, and pulls off neither. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 01, 2022
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Blood (2022) |
Bradley Rust Gray’s blood surely ranked as the most notable failure of all, a lugubrious slice-of-life... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 01, 2022
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Ikiru (1952) |
Sadness, inside a story of how a single man changes the course of his remaining days, has rarely been expressed with such grace and beauty. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Aug 01, 2022
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The Tsugua Diaries (2021) |
For this viewer, these images of nocturnal dancing are already becoming the iconic ones of the pandemic: silhouetted bodies in motion, resisting entropy and a destructive virus, fighting back the only way they know how. Working it, with joy. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 08, 2021
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Nomadland (2020) |
Nomadland the movie gets lost in its own drift, and, simply, drops off the map. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Jul 13, 2021
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The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez (2007) |
Wide range of interviewed witnesses, legal and investigative experts is impressive, as is the depth of the pic's human portraits. - Variety
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| Posted Oct 19, 2020
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Out Rage '69: The Question of Equality (1995) |
The closeted, forcibly hidden lives of homosexual men and women before the 1960s is briefly but powerfully documented by Arthur Dong. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted Jun 09, 2020
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Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom (2008) |
The blandly staged film misses a great opportunity to draw insightful and memorable character portraits of the kind virtually ignored in mainstream moviemaking. - Variety
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| Posted May 22, 2020
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An Officer and a Spy (2019) |
The results are not just to thrust the past to the present, but to envelop the viewer in the thinking that defined that past. - Cineaste Magazine
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| Posted May 22, 2020
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Forbidden City, USA (1989) |
Dong's film gracefully shows how one semi-underground club brought all manner of American contradictions to the surface. - Los Angeles Times
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| Posted May 01, 2020
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Parasite (2019) |
When the history of this moment in world cinema is written, Parasite will take its place as the movie that got the moment right. - Cineaste Magazine
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| Posted Feb 25, 2020
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The Irishman (2019) |
Zaillian (and most likely Scorsese, in concert with his abiding editor Thelma Schoonmaker) structures The Irishman along three tracks of time that wind in and out of each other. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 07, 2020
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Mariam (2019) |
This is potentially the stuff of a great movie. Mariam, however, isn't even remotely great, and at times it's far less than it should be. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 08, 2019
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Synonymes (2018) |
Mercier projects a feral intensity, a boundless energy that's frightening in its freedom, something that possibly comes from a young artist who doesn't recognize the conventional codes of movie acting, or any kind of acting - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 06, 2019
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Instinct (2019) |
Instinct is a serviceable entry on the actor's resume, but, as a credible psychodrama that pits a therapist against her imprisoned patient, it does a disservice to just about everyone else. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 06, 2019
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Krabi, 2562 (2019) |
In each work, the interwoven layers of storytelling grow more complex, time signatures slip and shift, a Buddhist reality explodes in the viewer's sensibilities, and the quiet tone of the surface belies a puckish humor... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 05, 2019
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The Souvenir (2019) |
Hogg achieves a balance of aggressive stylistic tropes, expert storytelling control, and a careful courting of audience engagement that suggests a way forward for contemporary narrative cinema. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Jul 15, 2019
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The Favourite (2018) |
The movie singlehandedly upends decades of unimaginative habits by British filmmakers who have generally treated history as well-behaved pageants with period-perfect costumes and lavish settings. - Cineaste Magazine
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| Posted Feb 28, 2019
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Sew the Winter to My Skin (2018) |
Qubeka displays instincts for both political allusion and big-screen entertainment. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 12, 2018
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The Old Man & the Gun (2018) |
Redford could've done a whole lot worse than exiting with The Old Man, but it's unlikely he could've done much better. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Loro (2018) |
There's also a proper emphasis on the astounding Toni Servillo, an actor of uniquely theatrical physical and vocal gifts-the closest thing among current movie actors to someone who can be fairly termed a force of nature. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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In Fabric (2018) |
The guiding force here is Italian giallo, in spirit and form. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Beautiful Boy (2018) |
The decision, whether by Davies or van Groeningen, to gloss over the horrors of the addict's life is surely the strangest element of Beautiful Boy, even granting the narrative stress on dad's memories. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Sibel (2018) |
Sibel ticks off so many currently hot-button-category boxes... but in the hands of co-directors Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti and co-screenwriter Ramata Sy, they mould and decay into a musty laundry list of formula items. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 06, 2018
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Phantom Thread (2017) |
What this project does reveal about Anderson is his interest in turning away from isolated obsessives toward the alchemy of collaboration. The course of Phantom Thread traces this narrative with the precision of a couture designer following his pattern. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Feb 22, 2018
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Wasted Youth (2011) |
In all the impressive output of recent Greek cinema, I can't think of a more fully rendered and honest depiction of Athens, which plays a far greater role here than mere backdrop. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 03, 2017
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Black Book (2006) |
... [Director Paul Verhoeven] revels in cinema's powers of deception, to conceal and then reveal reality, to cover subversive ideas inside the armour of genre. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Momma's Man (2008) |
Momma's Man is not a document of an artist making a film as an exorcism, but a memoir of recent things past, when the act of doing away with childish matters was confronted and done. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) |
... Wang Bing's second film, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, proceeds to unfold as a cinematic oral history that tells of the full horrors of the worst of Maoist China. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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The Turin Horse (2011) |
... the images in The Turin Horse become in many ways the inner thoughts of its two characters, even as the characters exist inside the images. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Take Shelter (2011) |
... while Take Shelter doesn't shrink from taking up an audience and playing with it, it's made with an exceptional eye and ear sympathetic to the anxieties that it dramatizes. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Drive (2011) |
... Drive is actually a film in search of romance, zigzagging through an obstacle course of fairy tale and myth... - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Poetry (2010) |
[Writer/Director Lee Chang-dong] has consistently drawn great performances from his actors, and only partly because he writes huge roles for them. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Foreign Parts (2010) |
... a work of salvage anthropology that never insists on any particular kind of political stance until after the full reality of what they've recorded and subsequently edited has settled in. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) |
... a genuine epic is being told. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Revanche (2008) |
Revanche proposes a way out for some of its characters and some of the emerging impasses in European filmmaking. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Birdsong (2008) |
In the current course of films being made around the world that demand new engagement with the essentials of cinema, it is about as important a work as has been made in the past three years. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Between Two Worlds (2009) |
[Director Vimukthi] Jayasundara's war is a monster with no end, no present or past, entrapping its victims in a ceaseless loop. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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It's the Earth Not the Moon (2011) |
... a film constantly dancing between impressions and moments captured in the present. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Lunch Break (2008) |
... Lunch Break marks an entirely new and fascinating direction. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Slow Action (2011) |
... Slow Action (taken from a phrase by Darwin, one of Rivers' heroes and whose centenary was the project's genesis) is a mysterious elegy of a future not yet here which also feels and looks already decayed and collapsed. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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O'er the Land (2009) |
[Writer/Director Deborah] Stratman explores with vibrant energy her own narrative strategy of pondering the ghosts of past events... with the present and certain impulses for destruction for its own sake, with nature as a witness. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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Where Is Where? (2009) |
... scenes in Where Is Where? naturally unfold one by one, with multiple views of a scene... expanding the depth and dimensions of the setting and exchanges instead of frantically bifurcating multiple scenes into a single viewing timeframe. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 02, 2017
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