Rotten Tomatoes
Movies Tv shows RT App News Showtimes
Publications list

Film of the Week

Film of the Week is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Catherine Bray, Guy Lodge.

Prev Next
Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Beau Is Afraid (2023) Guy Lodge An often sensationally funny black comedy, poetically punctuated by the horror of the human condition. The connecting tissue between all three films is the dread of mortality, which in Beau is Afraid is given a run for its money by the terror of living.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Tiger Stripes (2023) Catherine Bray This latest addition to the monstrous feminine canon is a supple and engaging film that claws at your heart.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Vincent Must Die (2023) Catherine Bray Could you taser a child if they went for your jugular? These are the kinds of questions you’ll find yourself asking as you watch this film, which immediately helps it to stand out from the vast majority of cinema.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
May December (2023) Guy Lodge Both wickedly funny and piercingly sad, Todd Haynes’ new film ponders one such improbable union — the subject of a national tabloid scandal, no less — as it lurches through its third decade
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Guy Lodge What we get instead, over an expansive but consistently riveting two-and-a-half-hour runtime, is a kind of emotional procedural, less concerned with cold facts than with multiple parties’ fluid, permeable ideas of the truth, and the ellipses between them.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) Catherine Bray It’s an honest reflection of how the world works: too many of the people at the top of almost every society, community and industry are a second-rate cast of sub-par talents, while the rightful inheritors of the world are slowly poisoned by mediocrity.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Asteroid City (2023) Catherine Bray The graphic design flourishes, the compositional symmetry, the twinkly score, the arch camerawork, the retro clothing, the monogrammed everything… what does it all add up to? For thousands of people, the answer is: pure heaven.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Chicken for Linda! (2023) Catherine Bray Visually, Chicken For Linda! is a vivid Fauvist dreamscape, but with down-to-earth verité sound design making the most of naturalistic performances by the voice-cast, two contrasting approaches which brush up against each other nicely
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Last Summer (2023) Guy Lodge By Breillat’s standards, this is an unprecedentedly sleek commercial play, alluring and grabby — yet with an innate, considered nastiness, an unspoken intellectualisation of our least explicable instincts, that never feels compromised.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
La Chimera (2023) Catherine Bray Josh O’Connor is on rumpled form playing a man who always looks like he’s not had enough sleep, ambling about with the heavy gait of a guy doing a permanent walk of shame.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
Evil Dead Rise (2023) Catherine Bray Evil Dead Rise is a wonderful horror movie and a fantastic example of doing nothing new in a way that feels satisfyingly original.
Posted Jun 02, 2023  Edit critic review
C'mon C'mon (2021) Guy Lodge Quietly, shamblingly human after the spectacular derangement of Joker, [Phoenix] plays Johnny with an inconsistent complicated history of care and affection woven into his slouchy body language and muted line readings.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Lamb (2021) Catherine Bray The ancient Icelandic bones of the rural territory that the characters inhabit give a robust foundation to a fantastical tale, keeping the story earth-bound, despite its fairytale qualities.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Licorice Pizza (2021) Guy Lodge Licorice Pizza, like Phantom Thread, is a study of magnetic human connection that isn’t necessarily good for either party — but then, magnetic human connection rarely thinks that way, or thinks at all.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Nightmare Alley (2021) Catherine Bray [Blanchett] is so fatale that at times she’s barely femme, and more of a kind of super-charged avatar for duplicity, with shades of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon and Ann Savage in Detour all in the mix.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Parallel Mothers (2021) Catherine Bray A perfect storm of melodramatic plot elements, complex emotional reactions, and wild deceptions, it requires on the part of its director a simultaneous iron grip on tone, together with a certain paradoxical lightness of touch.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) Guy Lodge If you’re a relative newcomer to Hamaguchi’s work, this triptych of gently humane, wistful short stories is an ideal, approachable introduction.
Posted Jun 01, 2022  Edit critic review
Kimi (2022) Guy Lodge A long-overdue starring showcase for the bewitching Zoë Kravitz [...] here taking to the solo spotlight with an agile, unfussed air of can’t-be-bought-or-faked cool.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
The Duke (2020) Catherine Bray It’s an old-school British caper in the Ealing Studios tradition, modestly but glowingly crafted and beautifully acted by old pros — and you leave it both buoyant and a little sad. Making that feel easy is hard.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Don't Look Now (1973) Catherine Bray Don’t Look Now, the story of a couple holidaying in a moody, almost gothic version of Venice, will be fifty years old next year, but in some ways it is so far ahead of its time that it still feels like we’ve yet to catch up to it.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Prayers for the Stolen (2021) Guy Lodge A coming-of-age story of unique urgency and scope, in which day-to-day survival is presented to them as a gift, though it hardly cancels out the girls’ burgeoning hormonal unrest.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
The Northman (2022) Guy Lodge Blood runs, mud flies and bones crack — in crisp, percussive ways you’ve hopefully never heard in real life — throughout The Northman, a grand, gut-spilling Norse epic that feels at once earthily ancient and thrillingly modern.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Happening (2021) Catherine Bray There’s the constant sense of someone poised, ready to run, alert and frightened. But since the battle she is facing is an unwanted pregnancy, there is no possibility of physically removing herself from the situation.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
The Velvet Queen (2021) Catherine Bray Maroons us in a desolate but beautiful part of the world, in a narrative building to a final unforgettable encounter.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Cabaret (1972) Guy Lodge It’s hard to believe it’s half a century since Cabaret first sashayed into cinemas: in look, sound and sensibility, it still feels fresh and daring, expanding the possibilities of what musicals can do and say at every turn.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Vortex (2021) Catherine Bray Vortex is a deeply moving, profoundly powerful, yet unsentimental film about shared old age, the slow approach of death, and the ultimate impossibility of facing said death with anyone other than yourself for company.
Posted May 31, 2022  Edit critic review
R.M.N. (2022) Catherine Bray Catalin Dordea, regular casting director for the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, is doing sterling work here in his latest, essentially a portrait of a fractured Romanian village in its entirety.
Posted May 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Stars at Noon (2022) Catherine Bray Chemistry will creep up and have its way with you; it is porous and sinuous and extends beyond the performances of the actors in a film, seeping into their surroundings, both powering and powered by tone, mood, milieu.
Posted May 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Leila's Brothers (2022) Catherine Bray Leila is something of an Elizabeth Bennett figure to the rest of her family, perpetually surrounded as she is by clueless relatives that she must attempt to save from themselves.
Posted May 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Showing Up (2022) Guy Lodge Reichardt’s cinema is characterised by a specific running interest in the ways we care for each other, both out of love and obligation, and the transactions we make to feel supported in life.
Posted May 28, 2022  Edit critic review
Men (2022) Catherine Bray Is anybody owed pity? Can it be demanded? Does pity create a bond which cannot voluntarily be broken? In Alex Garland’s extraordinary horror film Men, pity is wielded as a terrifying weapon of control.
Posted May 23, 2022  Edit critic review
EO (2022) Catherine Bray Credit must also go to his editor Agnieszka Glinska, who has form in this field (she also cut Valdimar Jóhannsson’s excellent Lamb), and who keep things brisk and pacy
Posted May 23, 2022  Edit critic review
Triangle of Sadness (2022) Catherine Bray It’s Parasite meets Ghost Ship (and that’s a good thing). Triangle of Sadness is a total delight.
Posted May 22, 2022  Edit critic review
The Eight Mountains (2022) Guy Lodge This combined restraint builds to a devastating torrent of feeling, like tears held back and back and back and then no more; an ode to loves taken for granted in life, it makes a case for renewing and reviving our oldest alliances.
Posted May 21, 2022  Edit critic review
One Fine Morning (2022) Catherine Bray Hansen-Løve captures that sense that although a tragedy is unfolding in slow motion, life refuses to stop.
Posted May 21, 2022  Edit critic review
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Catherine Bray Top Gun: Maverick is set in a world where if you want something enough, it will happen. If you want to fly that plane at mach 10, you just have to be enough of a badass. Physics doesn’t come into it. The world is pliable, susceptible to your wishes.
Posted May 21, 2022  Edit critic review
House of Gucci (2021) Guy Lodge What of great acting that looks and feels like acting, that draws on the performer's own outsize persona, that lands on the screen larger, lusher and more lavish than life? That's gone slightly out of fashion, and is all the more delicious for its rarity.
Posted Nov 26, 2021  Edit critic review
Pig (2021) Catherine Bray The pig really is beautiful; a purebred Kunekune with auburn hair and expressive eyes.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
The Servant (1963) Catherine Bray Probably one of the sexiest, sourest and most beautifully photographed British films of all time, The Servant is a masterclass in sadistic power games, thrumming with poisonous erotic energy.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
The Nest (2020) Guy Lodge I watched The Nest in a fixed state of unease, shoulders tense and set forward even in a plush cinema seat, my mouth immediately drying out after each sip of my drink.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Yellow Cat (2020) Guy Lodge Conventional movie mythology is repurposed and remixed throughout Yellow Cat, a delightfully askew caper from prolific, peculiar Kazakh auteur Adhilkan Yerzhanov, which incorporates elements of Bonnie and Clyde, Singin' in the Rain and Badlands
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Help (2021) Catherine Bray All the actors are excellent, including the less starry ensemble cast of older care home residents. This is filmmaking for television at its best: a huge subject, made with supreme watchability.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
The Green Knight (2021) Guy Lodge Sculptural minimalism defines the medieval stonework, clanking armour takes on the sleek, supple forms of fetishwear, light piercing the frame from unnatural places, sometimes saturating entire scenes in acid baths of verdigris green and radium yellow.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Scream (1996) Catherine Bray Watching this old favourite again for its 25th anniversary re-release, I was struck less by the multiple references to other horror movies - although they are still a lot of fun - and more by what a neatly constructed whodunnit it is.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Anne at 13,000 ft (2019) Guy Lodge Made on a shoestring, and clearly indebted to the John Cassavetes school of close-up realism, it's only notionally a 'small' film: this is life writ large, heart-in-mouth riveting as character study, forcing us to jump with its heroine into freefall
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Passing (2021) Guy Lodge Negga is altogether extraordinary, a sort of human mirage of aspirational perfection and psychological delusion, shimmering with warmth and mischief and sex.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Ear for Eye (2021) Catherine Bray Fundamentally, ear for eye simply feels more alive than most stage-to-screen translations, and goes beyond a simple adaptation into a whole new hybrid form of work.
Posted Nov 12, 2021  Edit critic review
Dune (2021) Catherine Bray "It took me a little while to get into this register of storytelling, but luckily Dune gives you a long while. It's a magnificent epic. Breathtaking."
Posted Sep 03, 2021  Edit critic review
Spencer (2021) Guy Lodge At once a work of great sensitivity and high, hilarious camp, less interested in identifying the 'real' Diana than in building a living, breathing character.
Posted Sep 03, 2021  Edit critic review
Zola (2020) Guy Lodge A film that brashly merges traditional and disorientingly new ways of telling stories, and finds both chaos and wisdom in the chasm between them.
Posted Aug 16, 2021  Edit critic review
Prev Next