Steve Erickson
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Joyland (2022) |
The most powerful elements of Joyland are pictorial. Director Sadiq has a great eye for framing. His characters are strikingly posed in alleys, doorways, and other spaces within spaces. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 24, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
You Hurt My Feelings’ topical touches are witty but a little shallow. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 24, 2023
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Master Gardener (2022) |
Master Gardener is more Pinterest mood board than story. It offers an aesthetic rather than believable characters. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 17, 2023
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Monica (2022) |
While the style opens up a bit near the end, the deliberate drabness isn’t nearly as powerful as the film wants it to be. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 08, 2023
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You Can Live Forever (2022) |
The passion that led Watts and Slutsky to make the kind of lesbian film that barely existed in her youth bleeds through the smooth surfaces. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 03, 2023
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Dry Ground Burning (2022) |
Dry Ground Burning treats marginalized people as glamorous heroes. It’s an outlaw ballad. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 24, 2023
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The Elderly (2022) |
The film looks fairly straightforward, but its strengths lie in re-telling Little Richard’s life story while reflecting on its cultural significance. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 18, 2023
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Showing Up (2022) |
This is a gentler kind of independent film. Still, it manages to dodge nostalgia by suggesting that we have something to learn from the past, artistically and otherwise. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Apr 13, 2023
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Army of Darkness (1992) |
Because a movie that starts in the pitch of manic has nowhere to go except frantic and then frenzied, the air goes out of Army of Darkness about 20 minutes before the movie ends. But the first hour is a hell of a lot of fun. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 31, 2023
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The Five Devils (2022) |
It finds a new way to depict the turbulence of adolescence, where an explosion always seems just a step away. - Gay City News
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| Posted Mar 23, 2023
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Inside (2023) |
Inside’s visceral demonstration of the alienating capacity of technology and the reduction of art to rich people’s toys may be a bit pat, but the film finds the space within these clichés to stage a compelling human drama. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Mar 15, 2023
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God's Time (2022) |
Even at 82 minutes, it’s a heavily padded out concept, more demo... than a film with a life of its own.
- Gay City News
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| Posted Feb 21, 2023
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Pacifiction (2022) |
More than any film I’ve seen in years, Pacifiction yearns for something impossible to sum up in words, and it arrives there. - Gay City News
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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No Bears (2022) |
As a character, Panahi is mostly silent; he has little desire to explain himself. No Bears might have benefited from the light touch of 2006’s Offside, although the reasons behind the film’s heavier tone are understandable. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
The narrative lives up to its sunny title, even if it’s a bit less optimistic than you might expect. Denis Lenoir’s cinematography casts Paris in a digital pallor that still manages to let the sun in. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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Knock at the Cabin (2023) |
The religious apocalypse of Knock at the Cabin plays as a cool concept rather than a demonstration of actual faith and concern, but it highlights the stiff price gay men are expected to pay for full access to American life. - Gay City News
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| Posted Feb 07, 2023
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You People (2023) |
A comedy that plays like a two-hour lecture. It’s didactic rather than funny, treating its characters as avatars for discourse about racism. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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Saint Omer (2022) |
Saint Omer suggests that reducing the complexities of a woman’s life to a single violent act is itself a form of violence. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jan 12, 2023
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The Conformist (1970) |
The Conformist builds a world of great beauty as a staging ground for nightmares. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jan 03, 2023
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The Whale (2022) |
The script is clunky, doling out background information about the characters at regular intervals, while the parallels between “Moby Dick” and Charlie’s life would make any real English teacher ask for a second draft. - Gay City News
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| Posted Dec 08, 2022
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Spoiler Alert (2022) |
A warm, touching rom-com, but a strangely impersonal one. - Gay City News
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| Posted Dec 01, 2022
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) |
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” does not entirely shake off the tropes of the documentary biopic... But it lets the subject’s frankness set its tone. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 28, 2022
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Bones and All (2022) |
"Bones and All” offers complicated representation rather than simplistic notions of good and evil. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 21, 2022
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Something In The Dirt (2022) |
The ideas aren’t new, but the film’s liberation from commercial constraints and refusal to settle firmly into the groove of one genre, while still working within pop culture, are exciting. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 07, 2022
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Breaking (2022) |
There’s a lot here, but by its conclusion the film itself feels as trapped as its characters. - Nashville Scene
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) |
The most distinctive thing about this one is that it took place in New York, but the film’s references to the impact of 9/11 and gentrification never dig below the most obvious level. - Nashville Scene
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Follow Her (2022) |
Follow Her can’t decide whether it’s a throwback erotic thriller, a #MeToo-inspired tale of misogyny in the film industry or a dark, twisty vision of influencers’ manipulations being cast back at them. - Nashville Scene
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Call Jane (2022) |
Call Jane does its best to be accessible and entertaining, - Gay City News
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Armageddon Time (2022) |
Armageddon Time embraces liberal guilt and shame but supplies no ideas about what to do with them -- beyond confessing that they are there. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Oct 27, 2022
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My Policeman (2022) |
Its vision of grand tragedy actually plays more like cheap melodrama. - Gay City News
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| Posted Oct 11, 2022
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Bros (2022) |
Few movies are as painfully self-conscious about their cultural status as Bros. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Oct 10, 2022
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Summer of 85 (2020) |
For all its emphasis on teenage love, Summer of 85 never shows many signs it has a beating heart. - Gay City News
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| Posted Sep 30, 2022
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Moonage Daydream (2022) |
Bowie had no center, the film suggests, even if David Jones, the person who created him, did. It’s an exciting roller coaster ride around his work. - Gay City News
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| Posted Sep 16, 2022
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Loving Highsmith (2022) |
It sanitizes [Highsmith] in order to put her on a pedestal as a queer icon, emphasizing the optimism of The Price of Salt at the expense of the darkness of most of her other novels, when her art was far more complicated (and richer for it.) - Gay City News
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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They/Them (2022) |
They/Them keeps a fairly light tone, but unlike Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader, it’s incapable of treating this subject with a sense of humor... - Gay City News
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Anything's Possible (2022) |
Anything’s Possible is too eager to please to wholly explore these themes. For a film that tries so hard to be positive and upbeat, it never conveys those emotions in anything except its plotting. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 22, 2022
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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) |
Many critics have noted the bloodlessness and sexlessness of the MCU. Thor: Love and Thunder seems self-conscious about the latter, while doing little to change it. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 22, 2022
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My Old School (2022) |
My Old School feels slightly stretched out, but McLeod finds a balance of tones. A film that starts out as a nostalgic comedy winds up becoming a story of a man who never grew up. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone (2000) |
Lam shows that love of cinema need not lead us into a hall of mirrors. If only he could teach other filmmakers that secret. - Chicago Reader
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| Posted Jun 22, 2022
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After Blue (2021) |
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) plays like a film one slowly falls asleep while watching, wondering just what one saw the next day. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 09, 2022
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Benediction (2021) |
Sassoon never progresses beyond the final shot, in which his young incarnation weeps with an agonized expression, but Benediction makes something profoundly moving from his loop of inescapable pain. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 09, 2022
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Neptune Frost (2021) |
Neptune Frost brings the shock of the new. How many African sci-fi musicals celebrating non-binary heroes have been made? It’s a difficult film to do justice with words: my usual paragraph of plot summary seems beside the point. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 09, 2022
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North by Current (2021) |
North by Current could’ve easily descended into the burgeoning world of true crime vultures, with Minax’s own troubled family serving as carrion. But it’s far more concerned with exploration than exploitation. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 12, 2022
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Montana Story (2021) |
The film’s wins outweigh its stumbles. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 11, 2022
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Crush (2022) |
Its heart is in the right place, and its optimism about queer relationships -- hell, the future of America’s teenagers -- is refreshing. But it’s so joyous that it succumbs to blandness, feeling like an episode of a middling sitcom. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 05, 2022
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Memory (2022) |
Memory espouses a black-and-white morality wherein violence is justified as long as it’s aimed at the right people. - Nashville Scene
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| Posted May 04, 2022
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Petite Maman (2021) |
Petite Maman suggests a children’s version of certain landmark films about female friendship, especially Jacques Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 21, 2022
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Poppy Field (2020) |
It holds out empathy for a violent, extremely flawed man rather than going for cheap sympathy. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Feast (2022) |
Feast points out the difficult but inescapable fact that our libidos can put us in danger and we live with ambiguous desires that may not guide us in our best interests. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 14, 2022
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The Lost City (2022) |
The Lost City is a featherweight comedy that resists larger meaning. But it speaks to our cultural moment, wherein the present and future look so awful that we can only find pleasure by turning to the past. - Nashville Scene
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| Posted Apr 05, 2022
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