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
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
2.5/4
Life (2017)

John Beifuss

Handsome and efficient but uninspired, even with its grabby Cthuloid space orchid.
Posted Jun 2, 2017
18
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
19
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
20
1.5/4
The Dinner (2017)

John Beifuss

In this joyless context the professionalism feels like slow suffocation.
Posted May 23, 2017
21
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
22
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
23
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
24
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
25
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
26
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
27
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
28
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
29
2/4
Song to Song (2017)

John Beifuss

After three films, the auteur's habit of employing the most attractive of movie stars as leads while 'real' people and members of ethnic groups are used as exotic props has seriously diluted the impact of the work's promise of transcendence and salvation.
Posted Apr 14, 2017
30
3/4
Julieta (2016)

John Beifuss

Designed, acted and composed with characteristically admirable intention and intelligence, but it doesn't aspire to the pitch of delirium that distinguishes the director's most memorable work.
Posted Mar 29, 2017
31
2.5/4
Kong: Skull Island (2017)

John Beifuss

Jettisons the timeless beauty-and-the-beast tragedy of the 1933 masterpiece for a borrowed Vietnam allegory...
Posted Mar 21, 2017
32
4/4
Get Out (2017)

John Beifuss

Its box office success is a sign that America 2017 -- a place where #TheResistance is a trending Twitter topic -- desperately needed this distillation of satire, cri de guerre and catharsis.
Posted Mar 15, 2017
33
3.5/4
Logan (2017)

John Beifuss

The movie is exhilaratingly vicious (those claws are made to order for R-rated bloodshed) but also elegiac, thanks to Stewart's gravitas, Jackman's weary charisma and the quixotic-quest storyline...
Posted Mar 14, 2017
34
3.5/4
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

John Beifuss

The bounty on Wick's head that turns the hit man's life into a nonstop epic battle gives the story an expressionistic, existential underpinning: Isn't living under a death sentence an extreme metaphor for what all of us do?
Posted Mar 7, 2017
35
3/4
The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

John Beifuss

A dizzying, bouncing batarang of colorful and kaleidoscopic digital animation that lacks the alternate-world Lego-centricity that made the earlier feature distinctive in theme as well as design...
Posted Mar 7, 2017
36
3.5/4
The Salesman (Forushande) (2017)

John Beifuss

As usual, Farhadi constructs a noose of a narrative that tightens the more the characters unravel...
Posted Mar 1, 2017
37
3/4
The Red Turtle (La tortue rouge) (2017)

John Beifuss

Birth, survival, mating, death: The life experience is reduced to its essentials in this stripped-down, dialogue-free fable...
Posted Mar 1, 2017
38
2.5/4
The Great Wall (2017)

John Beifuss

Zhang's enviable eye for color and composition is somewhat occluded by the gargantuan scale; still, he finds beauty in the chaos (a climactic interior action sequence is splashed with rainbow beams from stained-glass windows).
Posted Feb 28, 2017
39
3/4
A Cure For Wellness (2017)

John Beifuss

Gore Verbinski indulges a hitherto undisclosed passion for vintage Eurohorror with this voluptuously shot mystery-shocker.
Posted Feb 28, 2017
40
4/4
I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

John Beifuss

Film clips reveal Baldwin to be an elegantly elfin and velvet-voiced public presence, with a professional raconteur's sense of style, a realist's grim suspicion of authority, a historian's grasp of context and a movie lover's joy of performance.
Posted Feb 24, 2017
41
2.5/4
The Bye Bye Man (2017)

John Beifuss

This shocker carries -- perhaps inevitably, post-11/8/16 -- a definite political pertinency: The hoodie-cloaked title entity owes his power to the repetition of his name (i.e., publicity) and to the fear that oppresses those obsessed with him.
Posted Feb 21, 2017
42
4/4
Toni Erdmann (2016)

John Beifuss

The movie endorses rapprochement over antagonism and reconciliation over alienation as it builds to a climactic confrontation in which the daughter is entirely exposed while the father is entirely concealed...
Posted Feb 20, 2017
43
2.5/4
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

John Beifuss

In the context of America's scary 2017, a story in which the self-proclaimed 'righteous' devise 'a Noah's ark for the rich and powerful' in order to ride out an 'orchestrated apocalypse' no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
Posted Feb 16, 2017
44
2/4
Underworld: Blood Wars (2017)

John Beifuss

If the franchise's first female helmer brings any distaff distinction to the assignment, it may be in the presentation of Lara Pulver as a new vampire villain who flashes enough fang, skin and wit to be more than a match for the humorless Beckinsale.
Posted Feb 16, 2017
45
2/4
xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)

John Beifuss

This story of risk-taking rebels is so afraid of offending moviegoers its plot has been calibrated to fit the theories of federal-government paranoiacs across the political spectrum, whether their concern is fascists or 'libtards.'
Posted Feb 16, 2017
46
1.5/4
The Comedian (2017)

John Beifuss

The movie evinces no understanding of the trends it attempts to satirize (viral videos, reality television, self-absorbed millennials), nor -- and this is fatal -- does it present any evidence that De Niro's vulgar Jackie Burke is actually funny.
Posted Feb 16, 2017
47
3.5/4
Paterson (2016)

John Beifuss

Lensed with a painter's eye by the great Frederick Elmes, the movie conveys an aura of Blakean mysticism through such homely sources as an 8-by-10 mugshot of Lou Costello...
Posted Feb 16, 2017
48
3.5/4
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

John Beifuss

In the first 'Star Wars' film, in 1977, heroism is rewarded (literally, in the form of a medal); but here, heroism requires extreme sacrifice. That (ultimately lethal) distinction is a key to the difference between previous chapters and this sidebar...
Posted Feb 1, 2017
49
2.5/4
Lion (2016)

John Beifuss

The movie's first half is filled with tumult, menace and a vivid sense of place; the second half, which emphasizes the idea that the comfortable and well-educated Saroo is a 'lost' soul (literally), is tedious.
Posted Feb 1, 2017
50
3/4
A Monster Calls (2017)

John Beifuss

Benefits greatly from the sensitive lead performance of Lewis MacDougall, whose exposure to a home-movie-projection screening of the black-and-white 'King Kong' provides a precedent for both the monster's arrival and the tearful ending.
Posted Jan 27, 2017