Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) - Rotten Tomatoes

Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): John Beifuss
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
3.5/4
Upgrade (2018)

John Beifuss

It may be ersatz Verhoeven and Cronenberg lite, but so what? I was smitten by its unpretentious old-school economy and its unexpected visual panache: the digital effects and 'camera' moves are ingenious, simple and fun.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
2
3.5/4
Annihilation (2018)

John Beifuss

Portman's trek might as well be across the landscape of genre history: It begins with a pulp-magazine-worthy attack by a monster alligator and ends with a trippy '2001'-like alien encounter.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
3
3.5/4
Mr. SOUL! (2018)

John Beifuss

Like the more celebrated 'Won't You Be My Neighbor?,' this is a documentary about a public television programs that offered a utopian vision of a community built on love, creativity and respect.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
4
4/4
Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

John Beifuss

A celebration of kindness and acceptance that offers an antidote to the hostility endorsed by much of the current social and political culture.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
5
4/4
Minding the Gap (2018)

John Beifuss

May be a form of therapeutic exorcism for the filmmaker but it's a portrait of all-American despair (economic and otherwise) for us, complete with racial discomfort, cycles of domestic abuse, skateboard acrobatics and Fourth of July fireworks.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
6
3.5/4
Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) (2018)

John Beifuss

Demonstrates that realistic behavior -- self-defeating whims, conversations that go nowhere, distracted small talk, a visit with a psychic that is more banal than dramatic -- is so alien to the moviegoing experience that most viewers cannot recognize it.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
7
3.5/4
Isle of Dogs (2018)

John Beifuss

A delight, thanks to an impressive voice cast, the Japanese-inspired design (a source of some controversy, these appropriations motivate further flattening of Anderson's Cornell-box-like compositions) and the uncanny charm of the stop-motion process.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
8
3.5/4
If Beale Street Could Talk (2019)

John Beifuss

A swoon in motion-picture form: Its lush score, expressive decor and color-coded photography give the Harlem streets and the characters who inhabit them a glamour that historically has been denied to cinematic representations of the black experience.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
9
3.5/4
The Favourite (2018)

John Beifuss

Working for the first time from someone else's script, Lanthimos trades his signature sadism for cutting wit; meanwhile, his jaundiced eye remains evident in the fish-eye lenses that distort the compositions.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
10
3.5/4
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

John Beifuss

The movie's seemingly credible re-creation of 1990s New York as a place of dark, inviting bars and even darker and more inviting used bookstores represents at least one idea of paradise.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
11
4/4
Black Panther (2018)

John Beifuss

An international box-office blockbuster that ignited like a blast of cultural vibranium in the ugly face of resurgent global racism... At this point, 'Wakanda forever!' feels like not just a boast but a prophecy.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
12
4/4
I Am Not a Witch (2018)

John Beifuss

This story of an 8-year-old 'witch' literally tethered into servitude is both political exposé and political satire; the sense of sorrow and anger is enhanced by director Rungano Nyoni's artist's appreciation of the absurdity at the root of tragedy.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
13
3.5/4
Mandy (2018)

John Beifuss

A slow-motion descent into a sludge-rock hell as Nicolas Cage tracks a killer hippie cult across a landscape that seems printed on discarded Mountain and Uriah Heep album covers and painted with tar.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
14
3.5/4
You Were Never Really Here (2018)

John Beifuss

A film of uncompromised, painstaking and delirious style.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
15
3.5/4
First Reformed (2018)

John Beifuss

The movie is filled with conversations that provide something of the satisfaction of sinking into a smart, provocative essay.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
16
4/4
BlacKkKlansman (2018)

John Beifuss

The film's most powerful passages are lengthy digressions that abandon the plot to mourn the role of Lee's beloved chosen art form, cinema, in the stoking of racism; and to condemn the public political encouragement of racial violence.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
17
4/4
Sorry to Bother You (2018)

John Beifuss

Like Sergio Aragones scrawling cartoons in the margins of Mad magazine, Riley fills the frame with more jokes and ideas than can be apprehended in one viewing; the result is a film that teems with and celebrates life, even in the context of a dystopia.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
18
3.5/4
Hereditary (2018)

John Beifuss

This is the rare horror movie with an earned shock so unexpected and horrific that it left this veteran fan -- whose eyeballs have ingested literally thousands of screen dismemberments, decapitations and mutilations -- aghast.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
19
4/4
Faces Places (Visages, villages) (2017)

John Beifuss

Entirely fresh, as the hip JR creates monumental photo portraits of some of the hardworking citizens the collaborators meet while the elfin Varda (now 90) reconciles the memories of her vibrant past with the realities of failing eyesight and curling feet.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
20
4/4
Phantom Thread (2018)

John Beifuss

As meticulously crafted as a Reynolds evening gown...
Posted Jan 7, 2019
21
4/4
Leave No Trace (2018)

John Beifuss

As the father's doomed ideal collapses, the movie's conflict resolves into two competing universal impulses: the desire to be noticed and the desire to disappear.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
22
4/4
Support the Girls (2018)

John Beifuss

The year's most generous film, it ends with a series of screams that express both frustration and determination -- an ideal cri de guerre for a new resistance.
Posted Jan 7, 2019
23
Rodents of Unusual Size (2018)

John Beifuss

... a squirmy, funny, fascinating documentary that mixes history, zoology and social and cultural anthropology to examine the relationship of the giant rat to the bayou Louisianans who hunt, skin and sometimes even eat the dagger-incisored critters.
Posted Aug 29, 2018
24
4/4
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

John Beifuss

A red throne room evokes the Technicolor fantasies of Michael Powell and Vincente Minnelli, while the scratchy surfaces of a sand planet trace the arc of each combatant's footwork like a choreographer's notation, transforming a duel into a dance.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
25
3.5/4
My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de courgette) (2017)

John Beifuss

Never panders or becomes cloying on its way to a well-earned 'we are family' conclusion.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
26
3.5/4
mother! (2017)

John Beifuss

If it's silly as biblical allegory it's potent as a comedic parable about the selfishness and egoism of the process of (male) artistic creation...
Posted Jan 2, 2018
27
3.5/4
Colossal (2017)

John Beifuss

Entirely original, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo's movie scores points about the catastrophes unwitting Americans enable overseas (through their voting choices, among other things), and also says something about sexual harassment and male privilege...
Posted Jan 2, 2018
28
3.5/4
It (2017)

John Beifuss

Unpretentious and scary, with a crack ensemble of kids led by future Amy Adams, Sophia Lillis.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
29
3.5/4
Lady Macbeth (2017)

John Beifuss

Owing more to Brontë and Highsmith than to Shakespeare, this grim moor noir presents its catalog of parricide, mariticide and equine-cide as the consequences of a class and caste system that dehumanizes even those who materially benefit from its design.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
30
3.5/4
The Shape of Water (2017)

John Beifuss

The most elaborate explication to date of del Toro's belief that monsters, like traditional religious martyrs, are 'innocents' whose torments testify to their 'state of grace.'
Posted Jan 2, 2018
31
3.5/4
Dunkirk (2017)

John Beifuss

A tribute to wartime resolve and directorial hubris; it's awe-inspiring in its logistics, scale and achievement.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
32
4/4
A Ghost Story (2017)

John Beifuss

Employs a symbol so simple a child recognizes it to probe issues of life, death, time and rebirth.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
33
3.5/4
Baby Driver (2017)

John Beifuss

Edgar Wright's pedal-to-the-metal plus needle-to-the-vinyl action movie is a love letter to the never obsolete wonders of fast cars, pop music and crafty commercial/personal filmmaking.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
34
4/4
Lady Bird (2017)

John Beifuss

'I guess I pay attention,' says Lady Bird, explaining the loving detail found in one of her essays; from the evidence here, Gerwig does, too.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
35
4/4
The Florida Project (2017)

John Beifuss

Heir to the traditions of Huck Finn, the 'Our Gang' shorts and other tales of feral children, Sean Baker's 'Tangerine' followup transforms the strip malls and short-term motels of Disneyfied Orlando into a magical playground of discovery and peril.
Posted Jan 2, 2018
36
3.5/4
Wonder Woman (2017)

John Beifuss

When Trevor insists on traveling to England to consult with 'the men' he says are in the best position to end the war, Diana's response obliterates the gender gap: 'I am the man who can.'
Posted Jun 13, 2017
37
1.5/4
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

John Beifuss

An exhausting walk down a very long and garish plank.
Posted Jun 6, 2017
38
3/4
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

John Beifuss

The film needs more id and less Ego: Nothing that appears shocking, reckless or impulsive is allowed to disrupt the strategic, storyboarded faux chaos of the project's blockbuster imperative and 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' orthodoxy.
Posted Jun 6, 2017
39
2.5/4
Life (2017)

John Beifuss

Handsome and efficient but uninspired, even with its grabby Cthuloid space orchid.
Posted Jun 2, 2017
40
3/4
Alien: Covenant (2017)

John Beifuss

The splattery violence, which reduces humanity to meat and reproduction to a survival instinct, enacts a blunt rebuttal to the idea that science and art -- 'Ozymandias' and even John Denver are referenced -- offer humankind an opportunity for immorality.
Posted Jun 2, 2017
41
4/4
A Quiet Passion (2017)

John Beifuss

The film employs technology undreamed of in Dickinson's time to evoke a poetic, transcendent sensation: 'The Carriage held but just Ourselves -- And Immortality.'
Posted Jun 2, 2017
42
1.5/4
The Dinner (2017)

John Beifuss

In this joyless context the professionalism feels like slow suffocation.
Posted May 23, 2017
43
2/4
The Fate of the Furious (2017)

John Beifuss

The steroidal bonhomie is less anabolic than exhausted and even the signature reckless-driving lunacy seems more labored than inspired.
Posted May 23, 2017
44
2.5/4
Ghost in the Shell (2017)

John Beifuss

The movie directly tackles the 'whitewashing' controversy that accompanied the casting of Johansson; the science-fiction rationalization of the ethnic rewrite has logic, but also an unsettling clinical ruthlessness.
Posted May 23, 2017
45
2.5/4
Beauty and the Beast (2017)

John Beifuss

The effect is sometimes that of a live-action karaoke of its cartoon source...
Posted May 23, 2017
46
3/4
Personal Shopper (2017)

John Beifuss

A modern-dress ghost story that somehow lacks the mystery and sense of the uncanny that made the ostensibly less supernatural previous Assayas/Stewart collaboration, 'The Clouds of Sils Maria,' an instant classic.
Posted May 3, 2017
47
2.5/4
Frantz (2017)

John Beifuss

More expressive than the impeccable production and costume design are Niney's sharp Daumieresque features, which seem sculpted to cut through tides of warmongering nationalistic cant like a shark's fin through the surf.
Posted May 3, 2017
48
2.5/4
The Lost City of Z (2017)

John Beifuss

It has definite integrity, a painterly beauty and a cumulative emotional power, but it misses the madness of Herzog, the poetry of Malick and the muscle of Coppola, to cite filmmakers who each emerged from the wilds with true treasure: a masterpiece.
Posted May 3, 2017
49
3/4
The Belko Experiment (2017)

John Beifuss

The bloodbath of corporate downsizing within a cutthroat capitalist marketplace is imagined as a literal massacre in the latest thriller from reliable horror shingle Blumhouse Productions.
Posted Apr 18, 2017
50
2.5/4
Land of Mine (Under Sandet) (2017)

John Beifuss

Zandvliet subordinates suspense and even existential metaphor to unilluminating brotherhood-of-man sentiment...
Posted Apr 14, 2017