The ARTery - Rotten Tomatoes

The ARTery

The ARTery is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Sean Burns, Tom Meek
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
Madeline's Madeline (2018)

Sean Burns

Fragmented, occasionally frustrating and ultimately ecstatic.
Posted Sep 14, 2018
2
Mandy (2018)

Sean Burns

The movie isn't just set in 1983, it feels like a memory of something you might have watched that year on late night cable after your parents fell asleep.
Posted Sep 11, 2018
3
A Midsummer Night's Dream (2018)

Sean Burns

So quick bright things come to confusion.
Posted Aug 29, 2018
4
Support the Girls (2018)

Sean Burns

It's a curiously muted affair, with the large, artificial setups and phony plot hooks of a conventional studio comedy petering out into the disappointments and anti-climaxes of a mopey indie drama.
Posted Aug 21, 2018
5
Never Goin' Back (2018)

Sean Burns

Screamingly funny and unexpectedly quite tender. It's like "Beaches," but with bumps of blow and weed butter.
Posted Aug 21, 2018
6
Showgirls (1995)

Sean Burns

A film so exquisitely made can't possibly be this incompetent, or can it?
Posted Aug 18, 2018
7
BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Sean Burns

This summer's most brashly entertaining movie is also the most terrifying film of the year. It leaves your sides aching from laughter and your stomach twisted in knots.
Posted Aug 10, 2018
8
Nico, 1988 (2018)

Sean Burns

It mostly plays as a gentle human comedy about life on the road with a high-maintenance former legend, like a slowed-down My Favorite Year on smack.
Posted Aug 7, 2018
9
The Outsiders (1983)

Sean Burns

Watching it again recently I found all of Coppola's cornball flourishes to be rather endearing, even generous.
Posted Jul 31, 2018
10
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Sean Burns

Breathtaking on the level of execution, if not inspiration.
Posted Jul 30, 2018
11
On the Seventh Day (En el Séptimo Día) (2018)

Sean Burns

If the movie accomplishes anything it will at least make everyone who watches it a better tipper.
Posted Jul 26, 2018
12
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018)

Sean Burns

Van Sant shuffles around pages from the inspirational biopic playbook into something a bit trickier and a lot more rewarding.
Posted Jul 19, 2018
13
The King (2018)

Sean Burns

A metaphor in search of a movie, it's an incoherent chop suey of big ideas and overfamiliar biography, positioning Elvis as a representation of everything and nothing all at once.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
14
Zama (2018)

Sean Burns

An absurdist folly pitched somewhere between Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
15
Zodiac (2007)

Sean Burns

It's a movie for masochists, and for the most part enthralling.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
16
Summer of Sam (1999)

Sean Burns

One of Spike Lee's most dynamic pictures, so electric and overflowing with energy it's damn near exhausting.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
17
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Sean Burns

Feels more like one of those off-brand, cheapo sequels from the 1980s than a modern franchise behemoth. This might be the shoddiest-looking $170 million movie I've ever seen.
Posted Jun 22, 2018
18
Streets of Fire (1984)

Sean Burns

An extravagantly stylized pulp burlesque that is at once an objectively lousy picture and just about the coolest damn thing I've ever seen.
Posted Jun 22, 2018
19
Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

Tom Meek

Neville's documentary isn't so much about a life revisited as it is about a man on a mission.
Posted Jun 7, 2018
20
Ocean's 8 (2018)

Sean Burns

One of those pleasant, Sunday afternoon diversions you leave playing on cable TV in the background while you're doing something else.
Posted Jun 7, 2018
21
How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2018)

Sean Burns

A big, boisterous jumble of mixed metaphors and dizzy positivity.
Posted Jun 1, 2018
22
First Reformed (2018)

Sean Burns

A major work by a cinema giant, urgently reckoning with issues both current and eternal.
Posted May 24, 2018
23
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Sean Burns

A breezy summer entertainment that benefits from high spirits and low expectations.
Posted May 23, 2018
24
Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Sean Burns

It's a movie of wall-to-wall depravity and profound spiritual longing, at once one of the dirtiest and most deeply religious pictures I've ever seen.
Posted May 17, 2018
25
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2018)

Sean Burns

It's a prismatic portrait, albeit an occasionally confusing one. Some of the footage feels revelatory and some of it just seems random.
Posted Apr 19, 2018
26
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Tom Meek

In the end, Miller has done it and done it righteously - reimagining a sturdy franchise and living up to the original, while kicking the tired reboot to the curb. Fury Road is rife with activity and fertile with ideas.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
27
The Look of Silence (2015)

Tom Meek

The Look of Silence is a much more somber and telling work, and while it lacks "Killing's" lurid enigmatic allure, it's no less dark and registers wholly, one hundred times, more human.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
28
The Martian (2015)

Tom Meek

Scott only gets it half right, but the science lecture up to the go-for-broke finale, is scintillating in its own cerebral right.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
29
Steve Jobs (2015)

Tom Meek

[Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle] freely compress and embellish and bite into something piquant and tart.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
30
The Peacemaker (2018)

Tom Meek

One of the essential keys to the film's slow, entwining charm, beyond O'Malley's intoxicatingly idiosyncratic personality, is the effusive patience demonstrated by Demo.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
31
The Hateful Eight (2015)

Tom Meek

[The Hateful Eight] is what you'd expect and hope for in a Tarantino film, but by the edgy auteur's barometer, it's a lesser cut.
Posted Apr 16, 2018
32
The Witch (2016)

Tom Meek

There's plenty that beguiles in Robert Eggers' moody film The Witch.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
33
Patriots Day (2017)

Tom Meek

Ultimately Patriots Day becomes a Berg and Wahlberg branding of our misery. They probably set out with the best intentions, but turning a tragedy into a fictional fantasy only creates a fragmented sense of reality that likely won't suture any wounds.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
34
Live By Night (2017)

Tom Meek

All the pieces are there. But if another thespian tackled the role of Joe, as when Ben let younger brother Casey take the lead in Gone Baby Gone, perhaps Affleck would have been free to focus more effectively on the complex narrative arc.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
35
I Am Jane Doe (2017)

Tom Meek

[I Am Jane Doe] covers a lot of terrain competently and comprehensively.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
36
Free Fire (2017)

Tom Meek

Wheatley has always had a nose for unsavory sorts. And with his embarrassment of riches in "Free Fire," we all get to cash in.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
37
Alien: Covenant (2017)

Tom Meek

Covenant on the other hand tries too hard to go back to its origins. It's successful in that all the boxes get checked, and we do get the fun of Fassbender going against Fassbender, but other than that, what's old doesn't necessarily feel new again.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
38
mother! (2017)

Tom Meek

Part horror story, part existential ponderance and ever doing cinematic backflips, mother! is a movie that certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea. But those who see it will be held rapt from the very first frame to the film's fiery crescendo.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
39
Stronger (2017)

Tom Meek

Stronger is everything Patriots Day swung for and missed.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
40
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Tom Meek

[The Killing of a Sacred Deer] confidently finds its off-kilter gait early and stirringly so.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
41
By The Gun (2014)

Tom Meek

It's a confident composition impressively made for a paltry $3 million and it takes place in Boston's North End, where, among the outbreak of yuppie gentrification, the vestiges of the old school Mafia somehow still rage.
Posted Apr 13, 2018
42
You Were Never Really Here (2018)

Sean Burns

It's like a Charles Bronson movie directed by Alain Resnais.
Posted Apr 12, 2018
43
Ready Player One (2018)

Sean Burns

This is fanboy fellatio and I found it all almost unbearably depressing.
Posted Mar 29, 2018
44
Isle of Dogs (2018)

Sean Burns

While I do believe that all the kitano drums, haikus, sumo wrestlers and Akira Kurosawa homages in fall on the side of cultural appreciation rather than appropriation, some of Anderson's flourishes still feel a bit ill-considered.
Posted Mar 29, 2018
45
Unsane (2018)

Sean Burns

A deliciously nasty little thriller with a ragged, low-budget edge.
Posted Mar 29, 2018
46
Strange Days (1995)

Sean Burns

The movie went off like a landmine in Lincoln Center, traumatizing upscale audiences with its pulp semiotics and Bigelow's blunt-force filmmaking.
Posted Mar 17, 2018
47
Demonlover (2003)

Sean Burns

Assayas sometimes seems to make movies just to indulge his fetishes, which I suppose is a big reason why people become filmmakers in the first place.
Posted Mar 17, 2018
48
Existenz (1999)

Sean Burns

This is a David Cronenberg movie, so everything looks vaguely like a vagina.
Posted Mar 17, 2018
49
A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica) (2018)

Sean Burns

Compelling on a human level but dramatically monotonous. There aren't exactly a lot of surprises here.
Posted Feb 24, 2018
50
The Party (2018)

Sean Burns

Mordantly funny and mercifully brief. It's a pleasure to watch these performers ping-ponging off one another.
Posted Feb 24, 2018