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Steve Macfarlane
Steve Macfarlane's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
Slant Magazine
Brooklyn Magazine
Cinema Scope
Hyperallergic
Screen Slate
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Neptune Frost (2021) |
Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s new film performs a radical intervention upon the science fiction genre. - Hyperallergic
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| Posted Jun 28, 2022
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Transit (2018) |
Christian Petzold's white-hot existentialist noir Transit is perhaps the best World War II film since Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, even if it hinges on a suspension of disbelief that'll be too far a stretch for some. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 20, 2019
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This Is Not a Movie (2019) |
Even if This is Not a Movie appears to be yet another magazine profile-style hagiography in doc form, it also uses Fisk as a litmus test for the last quarter-century's crisis of journalistic integrity. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 09, 2019
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Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018) |
Somehow, Bi Gan's film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 24, 2018
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The Land of Steady Habits (2018) |
While Nicole Holofcener (adapting a 2014 novel by Ted Thompson) uses sometimes pat templates to explore the heart of bourgeois darkness, it must be said the end product is far less neutered than one would expect. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 20, 2018
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Killing (2018) |
Killing becomes a bloody rumination on the inevitability of its namesake, whether as cruel punishment or as necessary self-defense. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) |
There's no denying the images are stunning. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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The Chambermaid (2018) |
[A] deft, insinuating film. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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High Life (2018) |
The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 11, 2018
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Two Plains & A Fancy (2018) |
No verbal or written description can do justice to the film's best moments, which seamlessly render the absurd and sublime one and the same. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 03, 2018
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The Big Blue (1988) |
Besson's deep-diving melodrama stresses its own depth-emotional, artistic, oceanic-while ping-ponging between its two lead frenemies. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 30, 2018
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Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) |
The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted May 15, 2018
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Infinite Football (2018) |
Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Mar 01, 2018
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7 Days in Entebbe (2018) |
The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 23, 2018
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Unsane (2018) |
Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 21, 2018
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Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) |
The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 20, 2018
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Damsel (2018) |
Damsel ends up feeling like a festival-land breakout comedy short dragged out for two interminable hours. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 20, 2018
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Isle of Dogs (2018) |
Isle of Dogs's invocations of corruption and militarism should leave a sour taste in the mouth of anyone unable to abandon the thought of the world outside of the film's perimeters. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Feb 16, 2018
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I Am Not a Witch (2017) |
It's arguable that Nyoni is stretching a thin premise, but this film is one of the obvious breakouts of the year: exactly the kind of young work-brash, committed, and narratively unpredictable-that film festivals are supposed to champion. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jan 10, 2018
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In the Last Days of the City (2016) |
But the din that erupts from the logjam-creative, psychic, historical, national-is nothing if not honest. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Dec 18, 2017
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Our Brand Is Crisis (2015) |
Our Brand is Crisis would have an uphill battle on its hands even if it were a masterpiece, which it most certainly is not. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Lace Crater (2015) |
A queasy demise is the best-case scenario on the other side of a one-night stand in Harrison Atkins' Lace Crater, a s-s-s-s-s-s-spooky and inventive indie debut that's best seen, if possible, in a packed theatre. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Sunset Song (2015) |
There is no such thing as a minor Terence Davies. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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It All Started at the End (2015) |
While a number of Ospina's filmmaking decisions are kooky as all get out, highbrow formal considerations take a backseat to the urgency, the personality, and the sheer richness of the filmmaker's excavations. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Sand Storm (2016) |
Despite a startlingly barbed send-off, the film's strongest virtues simply evaporate; as ever, it's hard to escape the sense that the more radical filmmaking is happening elsewhere. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Daughters of the Dust (1991) |
Daughters damns precedent altogether, sidestepping the broad strokes of African-American history familiar from so many textbook historical dramas set during the era of antebellum slavery or the '60s Civil Rights Movement. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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I am not your negro (2016) |
If I Am Not Your Negro lacks subtlety as an objet d'art, then, all I can say is America continues to live in hostile times. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Blessed Benefit (2016) |
Anchoring the film to his Candide-like protagonist, al Massad keeps the narrative trajectory off-kilter, allowing Blessed Benefit to be diagnostic while avoiding prescriptivism. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Birth of the Dragon (2016) |
McKee isn't just a hapless bystander: the concoction of his character points to the cold market reality of this motion picture's US-Chinese co-financing ploy. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Kings (2017) |
Deniz Gamze Ergven's nightmarishly terrible Kings has a long career ahead of it as an object lesson in how not to exploit current events for festival acclaim. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Disappearance (2017) |
Disappearance is an unassuming but exact dissection of a modern medical system still indebted to patriarchal power structures, and thus a cry for secularism that's probably pitched exactly where it's landing-at a major world film festival. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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The Death of Stalin (2017) |
Taken strictly as a workout in elastic ensemble performance and rapid-fire verbal pugilism, The Death of Stalin is consistently entertaining. But enjoying Iannucci's film means depoliticizing the source material. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) |
Blame Zahler: for all the success of this execution, Brawl can't help but resemble too many older and better movies. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Angels Wear White (2017) |
Nevertheless: this Marilyn is awe-inspiring at first, especially seen from Xioami's pint-sized point of view, but she eventually becomes an impossible-to-misinterpret symbolic motif at the core of a movie whose slow-boiled indictment doesn't need one. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Oct 17, 2017
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Wonderstruck (2017) |
The film is a paean to the 20th century's moving image as well the invisible, Oz-like figure of the collector-as-curator. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 07, 2017
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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) |
This is a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 07, 2017
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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) |
The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 14, 2017
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The Beguiled (2017) |
The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola's dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 22, 2017
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All Eyez on Me (2017) |
The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jun 16, 2017
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Patriots Day (2016) |
uses the tragedy-procedural mode to, rather conspicuously, reassert pivotal cliches of our no-end-in-sight War on Terror moment, from the banal to the bizarre - Brooklyn Magazine
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| Posted Dec 21, 2016
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Tricked (2013) |
It's the most anonymous-feeling thing Verhoeven has made, and easily the tawdriest. - Brooklyn Magazine
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| Posted Nov 29, 2016
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Shin Godzilla (2016) |
The filmmakers' decision to focus less on goofy shenanigans and more on the political costs of a Godzilla attack in 2016 is both surprise and a revelation. - Brooklyn Magazine
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| Posted Oct 21, 2016
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The White Reindeer (1952) |
There is little else out there like The White Reindeer. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Oct 18, 2016
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20th Century Women (2016) |
Mike Mills's 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 13, 2016
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My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016) |
The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Oct 06, 2016
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13TH (2016) |
As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 29, 2016
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American Honey (2016) |
This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 26, 2016
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Colossal (2016) |
When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2016
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The Bad Batch (2016) |
A grab bag of visual punchlines and topical references capped with interchangeable music tracks. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Sep 11, 2016
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Smithereens (1982) |
It's as unsparing a sketch of twentysomething life in New York City as American independent cinema has yet offered. - Slant Magazine
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| Posted Jul 27, 2016
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