East Bay Express - Rotten Tomatoes

East Bay Express

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Kelly Vance

BlacKkKlansman is a true-crime story with a happy ending, plus a warning that happiness is not guaranteed. It's one of Lee's finest, and decisively one of the year's best.
Posted Aug 8, 2018
2
Nico, 1988 (2018)

Kelly Vance

The story of Nico would be intriguing even without references to the Velvet Underground and Warhol, but with that ever-present backdrop, bolstered by Dyrholm's presence and her mesmerizing performances with the band, the effect is irresistible.
Posted Aug 8, 2018
3
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

Kelly Vance

The screenplay by director Susanna Fogel and David Iserson (both TV vets) contains mountains of flab.
Posted Aug 1, 2018
4
Night Comes On (2018)

Kelly Vance

But just below the surface, Night Comes On is a careful, layered portrait of a person navigating her uncertain way through a sea of trouble, and we come to care about her and admire her spirit.
Posted Aug 1, 2018
5
Dark Money (2018)

Kelly Vance

Dark Money brings us up to speed on the issues in a hurry - in this midterm election year there is no time to lose.
Posted Jul 25, 2018
6
Generation Wealth (2018)

Kelly Vance

The doc actually makes it to the 25-minute mark before showing a glimpse of Donald Trump's face - considering the cheapness of Greenfield's approach to sociology, that has to count as admirable restraint.
Posted Jul 25, 2018
7
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

Kelly Vance

This Sicario may have more talking points than it can comfortably hold. It's often confusing, and its political irony is thick enough to slow the story down in spots. But it'll make you squirm.
Posted Jul 18, 2018
8
Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

Kelly Vance

Unfriended: Dark Web is a captivating, intricate - and we might as well go ahead and say it: ingenious - summer thriller that presupposes the nagging fears of those of us who can't do without our cell phones and other little electronic pacifiers.
Posted Jul 18, 2018
9
Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Kelly Vance

Sorry to Bother You is that rarest of satires - a nimble, imaginative, non-clichéd bucket of socially aware indignation that doubles as a street-level panorama of the 21st-century urban experience, Oakland style.
Posted Jul 18, 2018
10
Blindspotting (2018)

Kelly Vance

Audiences looking for a film that expresses all the vitality - and everyday struggle - of life in contemporary Oakland, search no more. Blindspotting, one of the most important movies of the year, is the one.
Posted Jul 18, 2018
11
The Misandrists (2018)

Kelly Vance

For LaBruce fans and fearless curiosity seekers only.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
12
Whitney (2018)

Kelly Vance

Houston's fans will eat it up with a spoon, of course, but even the most skeptical viewer may come away with a better understanding of the perils of fame.
Posted Jul 5, 2018
13
The Most Unknown (2018)

Kelly Vance

In the meantime, this is the most intelligent package of cultural-scientific information of the year 2018, wherever you catch it.
Posted Jun 27, 2018
14
Damsel (2018)

Kelly Vance

Damsel is one of those nouveau westerns that looks vaguely inspired by the Coen brothers... That type of genre tinkering can be refreshing as long as the writing is sharp. Damsel's writing is not sharp.
Posted Jun 27, 2018
15
Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018)

Kelly Vance

From the evidence of director Lorna Tucker's generally underwhelming profile, designer Westwood thinks the reason she's been overlooked is because she's a punk rocker, and always has been.
Posted Jun 20, 2018
16
Chung Kuo Cina (1972)

Kelly Vance

It's a magnificent piece of cinéma-vérité... The four hours pass very quickly.
Posted Jun 13, 2018
17
Superfly (2018)

Kelly Vance

But every now and then what passes for an original idea emerges from screenwriter Alex Tse (Sucker Free City) and Director X.
Posted Jun 13, 2018
18
Hereditary (2018)

Kelly Vance

Despite the electronic-belch music track and Pawel Pogorzelski's gorgeous cinematography, Hereditary is a dry husk of a story, more of an exercise in mood than an involving narrative.
Posted Jun 6, 2018
19
Filmworker (2018)

Kelly Vance

Tony Zierra's documentary Filmworker, made with the full cooperation of Vitali, is a curious but fascinating tale, as much an inside portrait of the notoriously private Kubrick as it is a profile of his devoted disciple.
Posted Jun 6, 2018
20
Mountain (2018)

Daniel Barnes

It's like bad Herzog.
Posted Jun 1, 2018
21
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Daniel Barnes

Solo is essentially a 135-minute version of the River Phoenix sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - only it looks like complete garbage and is no fun at all.
Posted Jun 1, 2018
22
The House of Tomorrow (2018)

Daniel Barnes

Put in its proper context... first-time writer-director Peter Livolsi's story of punk rock meeting R. Buckminster Fuller in small-town Minnesota feels like just another hopelessly musty and dreadfully quirk-heavy, Sundance-style mope-fest.
Posted May 23, 2018
23
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2018)

Daniel Barnes

In fact, the parts of Boom for Real that most tangentially relate to Basquiat, such as the crossover between graffiti art, punk, and hip-hop, are the most developed and coherent sections, but that's not the bill of goods that this movie tries to sell.
Posted May 16, 2018
24
Tully (2018)

Kelly Vance

Tully is a serendipitous treasure.
Posted May 2, 2018
25
RBG (2018)

Kelly Vance

Ginsburg is a woman we instinctively want to know more about, and RBG gives us that chance.
Posted May 2, 2018
26
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2018)

Kelly Vance

The doc is padded out shamelessly. Worse, when it's not dwelling on random incidents, it's worshipful to a fault.
Posted Apr 25, 2018
27
The Rider (2018)

Kelly Vance

[Director Chloe] Zhao and her films are worth discovering, and The Rider is a welcome surprise.
Posted Apr 25, 2018
28
Blumhouse's Truth or Dare (2018)

Kelly Vance

Truth or Dare stops being dumb fun somewhere around the halfway mark, and the filmmakers quickly run out of ways to prolong the action - until they run out of players.
Posted Apr 19, 2018
29
Little Pink House (2018)

Kelly Vance

In the footsteps of Silkwood and countless other underdog sagas, the unfailingly cogent and gratifyingly pertinent Little Pink House tells the true story of one woman's courageous struggle against powerful forces...
Posted Apr 19, 2018
30
Beirut (2018)

Kelly Vance

Beirut is essentially a war movie trying to re-create a 1980s frame of mind, James Bond-ian spies and all.
Posted Apr 11, 2018
31
A Bag of Marbles (Un sac de billes) (2018)

Kelly Vance

[The Joffro brothers'] story is worth seeing, especially for Holocaust-movie completists.
Posted Apr 11, 2018
32
Isle of Dogs (2018)

Kelly Vance

Isle of Dogs is absolutely irresistible.
Posted Mar 26, 2018
33
Foxtrot (2018)

Kelly Vance

Foxtrot is recommended.
Posted Mar 21, 2018
34
The Death of Stalin (2018)

Kelly Vance

The hint that he and the writers are dropping is that if we can guffaw at these monsters, we can deal with anything. See The Death of Stalin and face the future unafraid.
Posted Mar 21, 2018
35
Gringo (2018)

Kelly Vance

... Gringo is a nasty piece of sub-Breaking Bad junk.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
36
Oh Lucy! (2018)

Kelly Vance

Oh Lucy! adopts the bold strategy of taking away, as opposed to piling on, and it works.
Posted Mar 14, 2018
37
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017)

Kelly Vance

What a bombshell.
Posted Mar 7, 2018
38
Submission (2018)

Kelly Vance

The archly titled Submission is an equal-opportunity panorama of folly, a fictional quagmire to help keep our minds off the real one all around us.
Posted Mar 7, 2018
39
Loveless (Nelyubov) (2018)

Kelly Vance

It's a cherished cinematic cliché that Russian films tend to dwell on the gloomy side, but filmmaker [Andrey] Zvyagintsev... gladly picks up that handy stereotype and bends it to his own purposes.
Posted Feb 28, 2018
40
Annihilation (2018)

Kelly Vance

When Lena ventures into that hole in the floor of the lighthouse, the worlds she opens up are truly astounding. We might even say they're worth the trip.
Posted Feb 28, 2018
41
The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

Kelly Vance

We get to know how the three men think, from boyhood pranks to career disappointments to the moment of truth, but we can't say we fully understand them. In fact, we almost feel sorry for them.
Posted Feb 21, 2018
42
A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica) (2018)

Kelly Vance

A Fantastic Woman is highly recommended.
Posted Feb 14, 2018
43
Double Lover (L'amant double) (2018)

Kelly Vance

Double Lover, an unintentionally funny trip down the therapeutic rabbit hole, may be the clumsiest scenario Ozon has ever been connected with.
Posted Feb 14, 2018
44
Bilal: A New Breed of Hero (2018)

Kelly Vance

... a refreshing change from some animated trips to "exotic" places - they too often seem to end up being variations on life in a sanitized preteen suburban America.
Posted Jan 31, 2018
45
The Insult (L'insulte) (2018)

Kelly Vance

The Insult brings that familiar tension home to Beirut, with a roster of intense performances to add the human dimension to what is essentially a courtroom drama...
Posted Jan 26, 2018
46
Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

Kelly Vance

... the wonderfully artificial-looking sets have a charm of their own.
Posted Jan 24, 2018
47
Hostiles (2018)

Kelly Vance

When Blocker and his military colleagues refer ruefully to the way it is "out here," they're talking about the place we recognize as home. That realization helps lift up Hostiles from a routine violent genre piece to op-ed status.
Posted Jan 24, 2018
48
Phantom Thread (2018)

Kelly Vance

Phantom Thread is as puzzling and tantalizing as the subject of beauty itself, a movie quite unlike anything else we'll see this year.
Posted Jan 17, 2018
49
The Final Year (2018)

Kelly Vance

Obama is gone, and yet is still among us.
Posted Jan 17, 2018
50
Happy End (2017)

Kelly Vance

Haneke veterans Huppert and Trintignant handle their roles with skill. The filmmaker filigrees his point of view into every crack and crevice.
Posted Jan 10, 2018