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
The Dead Don't Die (2019) Sean Burns This is the first Jarmusch film that feels behind the curve instead of ahead of it. EDIT
Posted Jun 12, 2019
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) Sean Burns A raucous, wildly entertaining collage that spends at least 30% of its screen time pulling your leg. EDIT
Posted Jun 11, 2019
Deadwood: The Movie (2019) Sean Burns The fact that "Deadwood: The Movie" even exists at all is a logistical miracle. That it turned out to be this terrific is cause for celebration. EDIT
Posted May 30, 2019
Purple Rain (1984) Sean Burns At once atrocious and awesome, featuring musical performances so sublime you instantly forgive that the rest is so ridiculous. EDIT
Posted May 30, 2019
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) Sean Burns Teasing their knee-jerk nihilism while taking just as many potshots at the band's detractors, the movie never really figures out if it's come to praise our proto-riot grrrls or to bury them. EDIT
Posted May 30, 2019
Babylon (1980) Sean Burns Rosso's rough-and-tumble portrait of immigrant life in the slums of Thatcher's England arrives in American theaters 39 years late and depressingly right on time. EDIT
Posted May 20, 2019
Double Lives (2018) Sean Burns It's like a TED Talk in which everybody's screwing and I loved it. EDIT
Posted May 16, 2019
Between the Lines (1977) Sean Burns This deceptively breezy comedy has a wistful, end-of-an-era vibe that time has only sweetened. EDIT
Posted May 15, 2019
Rafiki (2018) Sean Burns A boisterous, joyful film about a terribly sad situation. EDIT
Posted May 15, 2019
Her Smell (2018) Sean Burns Moss is miraculous in a go-for-broke performance that leaves her guts smeared all over the floor. EDIT
Posted May 1, 2019
Knock Down the House (2019) Sean Burns Compelling as the other stories may be, you kinda can't help but spend them waiting for Ocasio-Cortez to come back onscreen. EDIT
Posted Apr 29, 2019
The Last Detail (1973) Sean Burns Nicholson is all moustache and bluster. It's a larger-than-life role that grows smaller and sadder as the movie wears on, gradually revealing the limitations of Buddusky's bravado and the fears that churn beneath it. EDIT
Posted Apr 18, 2019
The Passenger (1975) Sean Burns It has all the elements of an action movie but remains stubbornly, intractably static. Antonioni is more interested in emptiness, the vast, barren landscapes an externalization of the void inside our protagonist. EDIT
Posted Apr 18, 2019
Five Easy Pieces (1970) Sean Burns Nicholson gives a galvanizing performance as a drifter who knows no tribe of his own, an updated anti-hero seething with self-loathing and discontent. EDIT
Posted Apr 18, 2019
High Life (2018) Sean Burns An elusive and often shocking movie whose meanings sometimes seem to hover tantalizingly out of reach. EDIT
Posted Apr 12, 2019
Amazing Grace (2018) Sean Burns It's an astounding cinematic experience, elevational and ecstatic even to a wretch like me. EDIT
Posted Apr 10, 2019
Diane (2018) Sean Burns It feels steeped in the kind of real-life experiences and hard-won wisdom we seldom see at the cinema. You can practically smell those casseroles. EDIT
Posted Apr 10, 2019
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) Sean Burns It's a movie about a testy, outsider artist and his gang of misfit collaborators, the John Cassavetes biopic once removed. EDIT
Posted Apr 3, 2019
Dumbo (2019) Sean Burns "A Disney blockbuster ending with celebratory shots of a theme park in flames would seem to be a statement of some sort, and if Tim Burton was still the filmmaker he was back in the 1990s I bet he probably could have pulled it off." EDIT
Posted Apr 1, 2019
Ash Is Purest White (2018) Sean Burns A deeply moving and fiercely ambivalent picture about old loyalties, new beginnings and the damnable passage of time. EDIT
Posted Mar 20, 2019
Gloria Bell (2018) Sean Burns This isn't a movie of large ambitions or self-important themes. It's just about life, and how it goes on. EDIT
Posted Mar 15, 2019
Mapplethorpe (2018) Sean Burns Aren't biopics terrible? EDIT
Posted Mar 15, 2019
Captain Marvel (2019) Sean Burns Hearing a Nirvana song in a Marvel movie on the day Luke Perry died felt like a dire reckoning for this Gen Xer. EDIT
Posted Mar 6, 2019
The Image Book (2018) Sean Burns An 84-minute collage with the sensory impact of an audio-visual apocalypse, it leaves your mind mushy and your synapses sizzling. EDIT
Posted Mar 1, 2019
Greta (2018) Sean Burns It's Neil Jordan's most gonzo fairy tale since his unfairly derided 'In Dreams,' and in Huppert he's found his ideal Big Bad Wolf. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
Todos lo saben (2018) Sean Burns It's what happens when one of our stodgier dramatists teams up with two movie stars who always look like they just finished having sex. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
High Flying Bird (2019) Sean Burns So brisk and propulsively entertaining, only when it's over do you realize Soderbergh has just made one of the all-time great basketball movies without ever showing anyone playing basketball. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) Sean Burns Collapses the gulf between past and present, bringing history to life in one of the most visceral experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. It's extraordinary. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
Cold War (2018) Sean Burns A marvel of concision. The story skips like a stone across time, to devastating effect. EDIT
Posted Jan 18, 2019
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) Sean Burns A collection of jagged, fleeting moments and atmospheric longueurs adding up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. EDIT
Posted Jan 17, 2019
Destroyer (2018) Sean Burns To be honest I found it all a bit silly and way overdone, wallowing in over-deliberate grotesquerie as some misguided mark of integrity. EDIT
Posted Jan 11, 2019
Life and Nothing More (2017) Sean Burns A lot of it could pass for a documentary, until upon reflection you realize how carefully Esparza's set up his story beats. EDIT
Posted Jan 4, 2019
Vice (2018) Sean Burns The movie presents common knowledge with gasps of shock and awe. It's like getting a breathless lecture on something you lived through from someone who just learned about it yesterday. EDIT
Posted Dec 25, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) Sean Burns It's an achingly beautiful film, and so terribly sad. EDIT
Posted Dec 25, 2018
The Mule (2018) Sean Burns Always a more thoughtful filmmaker than his often boneheaded public statements would lead you to believe, Eastwood fashions the picture into a sneaky examination of white privilege. EDIT
Posted Dec 25, 2018
Ben Is Back (2018) Sean Burns Julia Roberts tells people off the way Steve McQueen drives or Al Pacino yells. Nobody does it better. EDIT
Posted Dec 25, 2018
Batman Returns (1992) Sean Burns A perfect Christmas movie for people who hate the holidays, and exactly the kind of film that modern studio executives are paid a small fortune to make sure you will never see the likes of again. EDIT
Posted Dec 25, 2018
Vox Lux (2018) Sean Burns Often horrifically funny and excitingly unencumbered by questions of good taste. This movie is kind of an a-hole and I think I love it. EDIT
Posted Dec 14, 2018
Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017) Sean Burns A craggy, gutbucket epic full of slightly silly, mythopoetic grandeur and a tart taste of regional politics. It's amazing how well some tropes travel. EDIT
Posted Dec 7, 2018
Roma (2018) Sean Burns After a while the self-conscious virtuosity becomes overbearing. It feels like taking an aircraft carrier to go around the corner to CVS. EDIT
Posted Dec 6, 2018
Manbiki kazoku (2018) Sean Burns About an hour in things begin to unravel, undercutting the audience's assumptions and steadily accumulating great weight and moral severity. By the time it ended I was a wreck. EDIT
Posted Nov 30, 2018
Wonder Boys (2000) Sean Burns This is probably my favorite comedy of the past twenty years. EDIT
Posted Nov 27, 2018
The Other Side of the Wind (2018) Sean Burns An astonishment even wilder and more rewardingly confounding than its fabled reputation. I watched this movie twice the day it premiered and haven't shut up about it since. EDIT
Posted Nov 23, 2018
At Eternity's Gate (2018) Sean Burns There's a searching quality to Schnabel's biopics, as if we're watching him try to learn a few tricks from these artists he so admires. EDIT
Posted Nov 21, 2018
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Sean Burns These punchy little tales veer from slapstick to tragedy, all working in service of the Coens' fatalistic, class-clown philosophy, according to which life might be just a cruel, cosmic joke but it's a pretty good one sometimes. EDIT
Posted Nov 16, 2018
Green Book (2018) Sean Burns Another movie that purports to explore racism in America while coddling fragile white viewers at the expense of its characters of color. It'll probably win Best Picture. EDIT
Posted Nov 15, 2018
Monrovia, Indiana (2018) Sean Burns It's not Wiseman's style to overtly editorialize, but the film's frequent visits to a local cemetery draw a line under what's already obvious: This place is dying. EDIT
Posted Nov 2, 2018
Museo (2018) Sean Burns A slippery meditation on questions of ownership, heritage and history as plunder. It's also very funny. EDIT
Posted Nov 1, 2018
Wanda (1970) Sean Burns To watch 'Wanda' today is to be knocked over anew by the film's unsettled emotional terrain, which slips and shifts beneath your feet from scene to scene. EDIT
Posted Oct 25, 2018
Mid90s (2018) Sean Burns Wispy and underwhelming. EDIT
Posted Oct 24, 2018