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Sarah Ward
Tomatometer-approved critic
Australia
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Damage (2020) |
Each line feels genuine, as does each loaded silence, even when the chatter is at its most lyrical, discussion unspooling almost as a freeform spoken-word duet. - Screen International
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| Posted Dec 02, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
Wading through yearning, mourning, disappointments and the unknown, Schwartzman and Johansson in particular are astronomically spectacular. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Aug 09, 2023
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Meg 2: The Trench (2023) |
Not that anyone is required to try, but no one can stop Meg 2: The Trench's most apt line from proving oh-so-true: "this is some dumb shit". - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Aug 09, 2023
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Chevalier (2022) |
While it's the tale, reclamation and portrayals that shine brightest — even if detailing significant parts of Bologne's later story in the text-on-screen post-script is a curious move — reaching ample high notes comes easily. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Aug 09, 2023
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Sisu (2022) |
Sisu is many things, just like the term itself in its native Finland — and impossible to stop watching is one of them.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 30, 2023
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Talk to Me (2023) |
It's constantly clicking, snapping and ensuring that viewers are paying attention — with terror-inducing imagery, a savvy sense of humour, both nerve and the keenness to unnerve, and a helluva scary-movie premise that's exceptionally well-executed. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
Murphy is spectacular, and has never been better as Nolan stares so intimately and contemplatively at his revealing face. How joyous it is to see Downey Jr, also never better, actually act again. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Barbie (2023) |
Gerwig has directed a lively, zany, oh-so witty and pretty Barbie flick that's perfectly cast, a costuming showcase and, in Barbie Land, a production-design dream. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Carmen (2022) |
Sumptuous and a swirl of feelings... pirouettes with swoon-inducing strength with help from its stunningly cast leads. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023) |
The kind of movie spectacle that always looks best on the biggest and brightest of silver screens. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Insidious: The Red Door (2023) |
This isn't a meaningful exploration of trauma's lingering impact, the current genre go-to, as much as it wants to be. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Joy Ride (2023) |
At their best when Joy Ride is either at its most manic and outrageous, or its weightiest and intelligent, Park, Cola, Hsu and Wu are a dream cast. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The New Boy (2023) |
With his oh-so-perceptive eye, Thornton's visuals stunningly do what New Boy does: expresses everything with little speaking necessary. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Reality (2023) |
With gripping chills and dripping dread, it puts viewers in Winner's shoes as her world turns — and ours — but the world keeps turning. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
Watching Ford flashing his crooked smile again, plus his bantering with Waller-Bridge, is almost enough to keep this new instalment whirring.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) |
As dull as a smashed headlight. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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No Hard Feelings (2023) |
Lawrence is a comic dream... she's such a natural here that wanting No Hard Feelings to constantly ramp up the OTT antics stems wholly from her performance. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Red, White & Brass (2023) |
An affectionate and joyous film that doesn't just pay tribute to events that clearly begged for the big-screen treatment from the moment that they happened... but to the community and culture goes all-in when it comes to national pride.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Flash (2023) |
Feeling like disparate pieces that don't stitch together to make the best whole isn't what The Flash was aiming for, but it's what's been zapped into cinemas. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
Louis-Dreyfus is at her best, and a true sensation, whenever she's in leading-lady mode in front of writer/director Nicole Holofcener's lens. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Elemental (2023) |
Elemental feels like Pixar is taking its titular term to heart in the worst way, making for rudimentary rather than particularly ravishing or resonant viewing.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Boogeyman (2023) |
A feature can be as layered as strings upon strings of fairy lights and equally as conventional as a regular incandescent bulb... The Boogeyman, with its generic title, swings between both extremes. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) |
All the money in the world can't make people in tights standing against green screens as visually spectacular and emotionally expressive as the Spider-Verse films. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Sweet As (2022) |
As set to all-Indigenous soundtrack, the film is happiest surveying, contemplating and being in the moment; like protagonist, like movie. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Saint Omer (2022) |
Diop will never forget Kabou, and audiences won't be able to get her film, its extraordinary story or its exceptional lead actors out of their heads, either. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Renfield (2023) |
Renfield is at full power when Cage is front and centre, and feels like its blood is slowly being drained when he's out of the frame. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Little Mermaid (2023) |
When 'Under the Sea' echoes against a literal sea of colour, movement, creatures and energy, it's a dazzling Golden Age Hollywood-esque spectacular. There's no escaping the movie's bloat when it's not merrily floating, however. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Limbo (2023) |
This is another rich, impassioned and affecting feature about the vast chasm between being Black and white in Australia, and it refuses to see hurt, pain and unspeakable loss with anything but the clearest of eyes. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Fast X (2023) |
Living on-screen life a quarter mile at a time now seems more like a variety show than a movie, at least where all that recognisable talent is involved. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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John Farnham: Finding the Voice (2023) |
Reinforces two core contrasts: that great music is eternal, but even superstars are only flesh and blood; and that the tunes that last seem like easy hits, but so often spring from a lifetime of hard work. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Infinity Pool (2023) |
If Goth couldn't flip from enticing to merciless so suddenly and seamlessly, Infinity Pool wouldn't be the entrancing nightmare about soulless sound, fury, sex, bodies, life and death signifying nothing that it so deeply and intoxicatingly is. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Survival of Kindness (2022) |
Not merely because the title says so, Hussein's is a face of kindness, giving the movie a warm and lively focal point amid its rampant suffering and atrocities. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Inspection (2022) |
Bratton stares head-on at his protagonist's distressing ordeal... his feature is all the better because it refuses to make obvious and unchallenging choices, even when it's at its most arduous and depicting one of cinema's most well-documented routines. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) |
This farewell to part of the MCU always feels like a zippy, self-contained Guardians of the Galaxy movie, rather than a placeholder for more and more future franchise instalments.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Polite Society (2023) |
Anarchic and eye-popping... whatever this high-energy charmer throws at the screen, it always serves the narrative. It also showcases Manzoor's lively and bold filmmaking eye. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Giants (2023) |
Showing all the green splendour it possibly can is equally a must and a masterstroke.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
Smart, dark, cerebral, gut-punching, hope-crushing, relatable, hilarious and horrific... it'd be the film's biggest surprise if Aster wasn't chuckling — and having the ultimate fever dream. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Evil Dead Rise (2023) |
While Evil Dead Rise definitely knows the series it's in, it's no mere exercise in blasting expected targets. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Innocent (2022) |
The Innocent's French pop-synth soundtrack gifts the already fast-paced film with a marvellous sense of bounce, but also reflects exactly what the movie is: a supremely finessed, funny, endearing and engaging flick that echoes for everyone. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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Suzume (2022) |
Suzume is as sweet and swoonworthy as Shinkai's work comes, and as earnest, intricate, intelligent, involving and enchanting.
- Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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EO (2022) |
The effect is otherworldly, as is the entirety of this haunting and touching film as it peers at life so often ignored, undervalued and exploited on this very earth. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Jul 22, 2023
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The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) |
If 2023's The Super Mario Bros Movie is a response to its predecessor, it's a happily dutiful one, doing its utmost to copy the video game. The strongest feeling it inspires: making viewers want to bust out their old NES or SNES or Game Boy. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 08, 2023
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Air (2023) |
Affleck turns the quest to sign a then just-drafted Jordan by a struggling shoe company into infectiously entertaining viewing. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 08, 2023
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Broker (2022) |
This is vintage Kore-eda, and it's warm, wise, wonderful, canny and complex. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) |
Mostly, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is enough of a romp — a romp with clear franchise-starting ambitions, even though there's already been three D&D movies dating back to 2000, but a romp nonetheless. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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Of an Age (2022) |
A keenly felt romance that swells and swirls with lingering emotions. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) |
No matter how a John Wick movie finishes, it ends with viewers wanting more — and this is no exception, including more of Yen as Caine alongside Keanu. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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Living (2022) |
Conveying the difference between being and relishing so effortlessly and also so heartbreakingly, Nighy is a marvel, and one that the movie around him lives for. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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Till (2022) |
Chukwu and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski can barely bring themselves to peer away from Deadwyler, who stuns in frame after frame. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Apr 07, 2023
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Pearl (2022) |
A savvy deepening and recontextualising of a must-see scary-movie franchise that's as much about desire, dreams and determination as notching up deaths. - Concrete Playground
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| Posted Mar 19, 2023
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