Rotten Tomatoes

Movies / TV

    Celebrity

      No Results Found

       View All       Movies Tv shows Movie Trivia News Showtimes

      Groucho Reviews

      Groucho Reviews is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Peter Canavese.

      Prev Next
      Rating Title | Year Author Quote
      2.5/4
      		Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) Peter Canavese Offers too much sensational spectacle, melodrama, and high-stakes sci-fi adventure ever to bore its audience, but its echoes of exhausted blockbuster tropes ring hollow.
      Posted Feb 14, 2023
      2.5/4
      		You People (2023) Peter Canavese A tightrope act to have a conversation about race when your priority is to get laughs. Great cast, but by its climax you feel like the movie's the hammer and you're the nail.
      Posted Feb 03, 2023
      3/4
      		Cairo Conspiracy (2022) Peter Canavese A political movie of religious intrigue, well-acted and directed with a good script and great visual appeal.
      Posted Feb 03, 2023
      3.5/4
      		Retrograde (2022) Peter Canavese History on film. Well edited, bleak...vital journalism.
      Posted Nov 18, 2022
      3/4
      		My Best Friend's Exorcism (2022) Peter Canavese Charmingly and frighteningly nostalgic, touching on feminist social satire.
      Posted Oct 13, 2022
      2.5/4
      		The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) Peter Canavese Tonally shifty, overlong, repetitive and as history simplistic, but well-made and an interesting effort to reach across the aisle from the socially liberal to the socially conservative.
      Posted Oct 13, 2022
      2.5/4
      		God's Creatures (2022) Peter Canavese A deliberately paced, bleak, and unsettling morality play that never really gets much traction, spins its heels, and ultimately fails to find a way to make its material interesting.
      Posted Oct 12, 2022
      3/4
      		Hellraiser (2022) Peter Canavese Not as hardcore as the in-your-face, bloody, gory, sweaty, dirty, puss-y, oozing, festering, nightmarish 1987 original, but still honors Clive Barker's concept with a stronger, more-interested-in-world-building narrative.
      Posted Oct 12, 2022
      3/4
      		Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) Peter Canavese The most ambitious of all the Star Trek films—philosophical and metaphysical on a grand scale.
      Posted Oct 09, 2022
      3.5/4
      		Blow Out (1981) Peter Canavese Brian DePalma's 'earwitness' thriller may just be his best film—strong direction, a good script and self-reflexive in clever meta ways that were before its time. [Criterion 4K]
      Posted Oct 03, 2022
      3/4
      		Catherine Called Birdy (2022) Peter Canavese Pretty low-key but enjoyable enough medieval coming-of-age comedy boasts a cheeky, naughty sense of humor and a period story complicated by class and the limited mobility of gender.
      Posted Oct 03, 2022
      3/4
      		Meet Cute (2022) Peter Canavese A sci-fi romantic light comedy anchored by two charming lead performances which is less interested in laughs than it is in presenting an allegory of damaged people trying to hold on to love and happiness.
      Posted Oct 03, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) Peter Canavese Marginally improved...and Midler, Parker and Najimy still play their characters with the hammy gusto of 1966 Batman villains.
      Posted Oct 03, 2022
      3.5/4
      		The Story of Film: A New Generation (2022) Peter Canavese If you love movies, you definitely want to be in this discussion.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      3/4
      		See How They Run (2022) Peter Canavese A spirited, meta, frothy and amusingly arch mystery comedy for theater nerds with a snappy script and a smashing cast.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      3.5/4
      		The Silent Twins (2022) Peter Canavese Effective in its refusal to spell out diagnoses or adopt a specific analytic take. Instead, it invites interpretation.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      3.5/4
      		God's Country (2022) Peter Canavese A dark, timely and endlessly fascinating mood piece. Thandiwe Newton is perfection in a deep-dive character study that explores several interesting triangular conflicts.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      3/4
      		Sidney (2022) Peter Canavese Perhaps the definitive documentary on Sidney Poitier, touching upon his cultural significance and challenging position as a transitional and transformative cultural figure.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      3/4
      		Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche (2021) Peter Canavese A highly interesting document of a pretty potent story told in its entirety.
      Posted Sep 29, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Goodnight Mommy (2022) Peter Canavese A mixed bag, but there are definitely moments where the performances, direction and photography sync up for an effectively moody atmosphere.
      Posted Sep 26, 2022
      3.5/4
      		The Woman King (2022) Peter Canavese The diffuse storytelling somewhat dilutes the film's themes but Viola Davis, a Terence Blanchard score and an inherently interesting milieu are all good reasons to see it.
      Posted Sep 26, 2022
      3.5/4
      		Confess, Fletch (2022) Peter Canavese A triumphant re-thinking of the Fletch franchise with a flat-out great script, confident direction and a stand-out star performance.
      Posted Sep 22, 2022
      2/4
      		Clerks III (2022) Peter Canavese The weakest of the three. It fails at taking its own emotional logic that seriously; the drama is embarrassingly schmaltzy and the humor hacky. Feels like a parody of itself.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      3/4
      		Private Desert (2021) Peter Canavese A melancholic and poetic queer romance that teases out some interesting ambiguities about the nature of the story's relationship.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      2.5/4
      		I Came By (2022) Peter Canavese Hugh Bonneville as a posh but psychotic killer with serious daddy issues. So-so script but enjoyable enough as a pulse-pounding thriller.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      3/4
      		Pinocchio (2022) Peter Canavese There's an overabundance of unnecessary concessions to modern taste in this effects-driven, CGI-animated remake, but it moves along pretty nicely—and they haven't broken it.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Out of Office (2022) Peter Canavese Lightweight, flimsy and sitcomedic in the style of The Office, but its cast of funny people being funny is enough for a recommendation.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      3/4
      		Peter von Kant (2022) Peter Canavese Ozon's gender reversal of Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant straddles camp, but it's colorful and makes a bit more of the obsessive relationship between artist & muse.
      Posted Sep 12, 2022
      1/4
      		The Delta Force (1986) Peter Canavese A dated and morally dubious propaganda film. [Blu-ray Special Edition]
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      1.5/4
      		Samaritan (2022) Peter Canavese Well shot, but it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting—a wafer-thin plot, simplistic, and repetitive. It’s all theatrics and no theater.
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      .5/4
      		Me Time (2022) Peter Canavese A very strange mix of family sitcom and R-rated bro-down buddy comedy. A witless string of dumb comic set pieces and an unfunny slog.
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      1/4
      		The Invitation (2022) Peter Canavese Comes on like an old Hammer horror picture, but then becomes full of old-hat psychological horror theatrics lacking a single original or interesting idea or performance.
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Katrina Babies (2022) Peter Canavese A lot of this feels a bit like therapy in front of the camera, but the subject matter is so compelling that, if approached from an emotional rather than intellectual standpoint, it definitely holds one’s interest.
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      3/4
      		Burial (2022) Peter Canavese A tense and compelling World War II thriller and a leisurely shoot-‘em-up made all the more unsettling by its deliberate pace, interesting ideas and timely sociopolitical parallels.
      Posted Sep 03, 2022
      3/4
      		Loving Highsmith (2022) Peter Canavese Highsmith's prose, alternately earthy and soaring, best reveals the breadth of her personality, but the perspectives of her lovers humanize her to a more relatable degree...
      Posted Sep 01, 2022
      3/4
      		The Territory (2022) Peter Canavese In the efficient and consistently engrossing 84 minutes of The Territory...Alex Pritz illuminates the terrible plight of Brazil's Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people, a worrisome situation with implications for all of humanity.
      Posted Sep 01, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. (2022) Peter Canavese Worth seeing through to the bitter end...finds its soul when Ebo allows the satire to curdle into tragedy and the very real pain of its characters.
      Posted Sep 01, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Paradise Highway (2022) Peter Canavese Ambition...effort...well-intentioned...some genuinely affecting grace notes on occasion, but it's also shameless.
      Posted Aug 27, 2022
      1/4
      		Sniper: Rogue Mission (2022) Peter Canavese A chintzy, corny, cheesy men-with-guns movie peppered with low-wattage humor and a lot of action movie cliches.
      Posted Aug 27, 2022
      3.5/4
      		Spin Me Round (2022) Peter Canavese An endangered species—an indie comedy with an original idea, which arrives at an extremely funny comic climax. Great Pino Donaggio score.
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2/4
      		Secret Headquarters (2022) Peter Canavese Basically a less creative and less idiosyncratic Spy Kids produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (that might tell you something).
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2/4
      		Infinite Storm (2022) Peter Canavese The characters and their interdynamics simply aren't that interesting during the rescue, so somehow it all comes off as dull. But there is Watts (and who wouldn't follow her anywhere?)
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      3/4
      		Beast (2022) Peter Canavese The real draw here is actually the photography by Oscar-winning cinematographer Philippe Rousselot.
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Day Shift (2022) Peter Canavese Unpretentious, light, and amusing with a horror-action kick. Ultra violent, but does an enjoyable job of vampire-hunting and vampire-society worldbuilding.
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2/4
      		Orphan: First Kill (2022) Peter Canavese A prequel to 2009's Orphan, but despite a plot twist that perks up the story a bit, it's pretty much more of the same.
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2/4
      		Memory (2022) Peter Canavese You can pretty much forget about it.
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Vivo (2021) Peter Canavese It's fine...the plot is kinda clunky, but it's well cast. [Blu-ray]
      Posted Aug 23, 2022
      2.5/4
      		Breaking (2022) Peter Canavese Serves as a low-key character study and an actor’s showcase for John Boyega.
      Posted Aug 19, 2022
      2/4
      		Last Journey of Paul W.R. (2020) Peter Canavese To put it simply, The Last Journey has enjoyable trappings but doesn't amount to much.
      Posted Aug 19, 2022
      3/4
      		Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Peter Canavese A legit comeback for Raimi...He meets the moment with the good ol' Raimi dynamism and winking movie-love savvy. [4K Blu-ray]
      Posted Aug 19, 2022
      Prev Next