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Steven D. Greydanus
Tomatometer-approved critic
SDG has been writing about film since 2000, when he created Decent Films. SDG has contributed to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, and the T&T Clark Handbook of Jesus and Film. For ten years he co-hosted the Gabriel Award–winning cable TV show “Reel Faith” for New Evangelization Television, and he has appeared frequently on Catholic radio. SDG is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and a deacon in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark.
Steven D. Greydanus' all-time favorites include The Big Sleep, Brooklyn, Drunken Master II, Fantasia, Into Great Silence, The Kid Brother, The Kid With a Bike, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Spirited Away, The Tree of Wooden Clogs and The Wrong Man.
New Jersey, 20 minutes outside Manhattan
https://decentfilms.com
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Lourdes (2019) |
Demaizière and Teurlai are nonbelievers, but their observational method is respectful and open-minded. - Decent Films
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| Posted Jul 15, 2023
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Elemental (2023) |
When a significant part of the conflict in a cartoon about talking elemental beings turns on urban infrastructure problems, building code violations, and city bureaucracy, something has gone off the rails. - Decent Films
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| Posted Jun 16, 2023
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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) |
Full of the joy of discovery and the emotional generosity that is the soul of Into the Spider-Verse. It’s inventive, thrilling, funny, ridiculous, heartwarming, frenetic, and sad. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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The Little Mermaid (2023) |
Suffers from the murky, underlit look common in Disney tentpoles. In underwater sequences the dimness ostensibly approximates realism, but the real function is to camouflage CGI quality issues. Too much fails at a basic level: It’s not worth looking at. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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Creed III (2023) |
With his unnervingly nonchalant gaze and jaw jutting forward, Majors radiates hidden, explosive danger, and his formidably brawny physique makes an understatement of Dame’s boast to have kept in shape in prison. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Mar 03, 2023
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
The scenes of Jake and Neytiri’s forest-dwelling family learning to adapt to marine life are full of a kind of joy that it seems Hollywood blockbusters have all but forgotten: that of seeing something unprecedented and wondrous. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Thirteen Lives (2022) |
I’m glad I saw both films, though ‘The Rescue’ is by far the more essential, and ‘Thirteen Lives’ covers a lot of the same ground. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Jul 31, 2022
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Lightyear (2022) |
If Lightyear is Andy’s Star Wars, what an impoverished childhood Andy had. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Jun 15, 2022
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Jurassic World Dominion (2022) |
For a while it seems ‘Dominion’ wants to be the franchise’s ‘Mission: Impossible.’ Instead, it’s the anti–‘Top Gun: Maverick’. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Jun 11, 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick (2022) |
More than a nostalgia sequel or legacyquel; it is almost more than a movie. It is a manifesto and a monument, a defiant time capsule and a swaggering IMAX spectacle without precedent or peer. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted May 25, 2022
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) |
I’m thinking of a moment in the original movie in which Stephen looks skeptically at a deeply corrupted individual nattering about the greater good and retorts, “No. I mean, come on—look at your face.” Nobody says that in the sequel—but they should. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted May 06, 2022
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Petite Maman (2021) |
There's no place in a film like Petite Maman for world-bending sorcery or flux capacitors, but the elegant simplicity of what Sciamma does with an unexplained wrinkle in the fabric of reality speaks as eloquently to those longings as any film I've seen. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Apr 23, 2022
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Father Stu (2022) |
Wahlberg compellingly inhabits his character's struggles, and the screenplay is decently structured even when it sometimes lacks persuasive depth or context. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Apr 14, 2022
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The Godfather (1972) |
Now half a century old, Francis Ford Coppola's revered New Hollywood masterpiece has one of the best-known final shots in film history - but it almost had a much more Catholic ending. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Apr 08, 2022
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Turning Red (2022) |
Switching up the familiar parental overbearing or understanding roles can have humanizing implications for both fathers and mothers. Moms, like dads, are only human, and dads are, in a different sense, no less human than moms. - Decent Films
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| Posted Mar 11, 2022
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Cyrano (2021) |
Dinklage swaggers and glowers magnificently and sings decently, but he's at his best in quiet, intimate moments, especially with Roxanne and with his confidante Le Bret, the only one who sees his pain. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Feb 24, 2022
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Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) |
Crossover comfort food with a redemptive twist. - Catholic World Report
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| Posted Jan 07, 2022
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The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) |
Fog and mist, translucent pavilion sidewalls, blowing curtains, dark water, shadows, reflections: the film is full of motifs evoking the murkiness in which Macbeth's last days play out. - Our Sunday Visitor
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| Posted Dec 13, 2021
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Eternals (2021) |
There is plenty to criticize in Eternals-and some things that I might praise, in another story set in another universe-but I'm not sure any story set in this universe could possibly offer anything to care about one way or the other. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Nov 05, 2021
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The Green Knight (2021) |
What ultimately puts The Green Knight beyond the pale, for me, is the posthumanism of Lady Bertilak's monologue and how her speech helps to shape and determine the meaning of the ending in what I can only consider a nihilistic direction. - Bright Wall/Dark Room
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| Posted Sep 26, 2021
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Black Widow (2021) |
Almost completely lacking in Black Widow is any sense of outrage over the grotesque violations of human rights and human dignity at the root of the whole premise of the film. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Aug 28, 2021
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Jungle Cruise (2021) |
Plays like fan fiction for, like, all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies combined...If you're tempted to go easy on the slipshod plot, just recall what a well-oiled machine the original Pirates is. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Jul 29, 2021
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Luca (2021) |
A gentle, overtly Miyazaki-esque coming-of-age period piece struggles under the heavy weight of iron-clad Disney/Pixar formula requirements and story beats. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Jun 17, 2021
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A Quiet Place Part II (2021) |
Like its predecessor, the kind of horror film in which the ordinariness of normal human life is highlighted rather than subverted by extremely abnormal circumstances. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted May 21, 2021
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The Decalogue (1989) |
Far from being morality tales, these short stories are closer to parables — at least, they are as confounding and strange as Jesus' parables were to his first hearers. - Decent Films
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| Posted May 01, 2021
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Resurrection (2021) |
Not unlike a movie about Shakespeare in which you hear lines like "To be or not to be, that is the question"...but everyone seems to have heard them already. There's no sense of revelation or discovery; no one is struck by them or finds them intriguing. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Mar 25, 2021
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Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) |
A story about the importance of trust that spends nearly all its running time establishing that trust is for chumps... It's about redemption without work and reconciliation without reckoning. - Catholic Herald
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| Posted Mar 04, 2021
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Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) |
Bonkers in a way that superhero movies these days don't have the nerve to be. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Dec 23, 2020
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Soul (2020) |
The sharpest Pixar screenplay in years, with a screwball vibe and consistently witty use of cutaway gags. So much of it works at such a high level. What keeps it from achieving greatness? - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Dec 22, 2020
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Mulan (2020) |
I enjoyed Mulan, but I couldn't avoid the sense of disconnect inherent in watching a wuxia-style period piece with Chinese actors speaking accented English dialogue. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Sep 04, 2020
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Fatima (2020) |
Easily the most compelling dramatization of the Fátima story to date. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Aug 27, 2020
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Words on Bathroom Walls (2020) |
Halfway through I found myself rooting for the film to be the best version of itself, a sign that a film is working even when it's not completely successful. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Aug 21, 2020
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I Still Believe (2020) |
As earnestly as the spiritual conflict is handled, opportunities to flesh out the humanity of the characters through other forms of conflict or struggle are overlooked. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Mar 13, 2020
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The Way Back (2020) |
Blends the beats of two familiar genres, the underdog sports movie and the addiction and recovery movie, in the process finding a rhythm that feels at once familiar and not quite like anything I've seen before. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Mar 06, 2020
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Onward (2020) |
Works more than it doesn't. Scanlon hits the dramatic and emotional beats effectively enough, and there are nice touches that elevate the film. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Mar 04, 2020
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Wendy (2020) |
A film that shouldn't exist. It's a style of moviemaking that seems to have no place in today's cookie-cutter film market - that seems to have no audience, even, unless the audience is you. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Feb 28, 2020
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Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002) |
Not a remake of the 1939 classic but a new adaptation of Hilton's sentimental novella... couldn't be more different from the 1939 film, and that's all to the good. - Decent Films
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| Posted Feb 26, 2020
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) |
They could play John Williams' ominous "Imperial March" over scenes of Uncle Deadly from the Muppets lobbing Green Goblin pumpkin-bombs at Scrat the saber-squirrel (I mean, they literally could, legally...), and many of us would still feel emotions stir. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Dec 19, 2019
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A Hidden Life (2019) |
An ecstatic, anguished three-hour cinematic hymn ... I am awed by parts of The New World, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder; A Hidden Life overwhelms me in its totality. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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The Two Popes (2019) |
Undermined by the same penchant for Wikipedia-like biography and oversimplified caricature marking McCarten's other biopic screenplays, The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Nov 27, 2019
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) |
Wisely and gently subversive in blurring the barrier between the as-it-ought-to-be world of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the as-it-is world of adult conflict and complications. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Nov 22, 2019
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Frozen II (2019) |
Despite this warmer tone, Frozen II is pretty much a mess - from the mostly unmemorable songs to the jumble of half-baked to outright bad ideas making up the muddled, complicated plot. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Nov 15, 2019
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Light From Light (2019) |
I'm tempted to call 'Light from Light' the first ghost story I've ever seen that I completely believe. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Nov 01, 2019
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By the Grace of God (2018) |
What makes the portrait of Preynat so effective is that while he's a monster, you also see how this guy won the confidence and respect of parents and parishioners, how he groomed not only children but a whole community. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Oct 25, 2019
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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) |
'Maleficent' at least felt like a fairy tale, if a recycled, darkly subversive one, with something to say. This sequel feels like a set of attitudes and themes in search of material to recycle. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Oct 18, 2019
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Joker (2019) |
Is it possible, in the world of 'Joker,' to believe in real heroism? Do the filmmakers even care about that question? - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Oct 11, 2019
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The Elephant Queen (2018) |
Anthropomorphism is generally kept to reasonable levels, and the total effect conveys real respect for nature. - Salt Lake City Weekly
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| Posted Sep 19, 2019
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Ad Astra (2019) |
At once attractive and frustrating. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Sep 19, 2019
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One Child Nation (2019) |
The filmmakers' politics aside, 'One Child Nation' is overwhelmingly, and on multiple levels, a pro-life film. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Aug 30, 2019
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The Lion King (2019) |
Favreau wasn't hired as a creative, but as a taxidermist. - National Catholic Register
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| Posted Jul 17, 2019
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