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
Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018)
A marvel of concision. The story skips like a stone across time, to devastating effect.
Posted Jan 18, 2019
2
A collection of jagged, fleeting moments and atmospheric longueurs adding up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.
Posted Jan 17, 2019
3
Destroyer (2018)
To be honest I found it all a bit silly and way overdone, wallowing in over-deliberate grotesquerie as some misguided mark of integrity.
Posted Jan 11, 2019
4
A lot of it could pass for a documentary, until upon reflection you realize how carefully Esparza's set up his story beats.
Posted Jan 4, 2019
5
Vice (2018)
6
If Beale Street Could Talk (2019)
It's an achingly beautiful film, and so terribly sad.
Posted Dec 25, 2018
7
The Mule (2018)
8
Ben is Back (2018)
Julia Roberts tells people off the way Steve McQueen drives or Al Pacino yells. Nobody does it better.
Posted Dec 25, 2018
9
Batman Returns (1992)
10
Vox Lux (2018)
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.
Posted Dec 14, 2018
11
Five Fingers for Marseilles (2018)
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.
Posted Dec 7, 2018
12
Roma (2018)
After a while the self-conscious virtuosity becomes overbearing. It feels like taking an aircraft carrier to go around the corner to CVS.
Posted Dec 6, 2018
13
Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) (2018)
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.
Posted Nov 30, 2018
14
Wonder Boys (2000)
This is probably my favorite comedy of the past twenty years.
Posted Nov 27, 2018
15
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
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.
Posted Nov 23, 2018
16
At Eternity's Gate (2018)
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.
Posted Nov 21, 2018
17
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
18
Green Book (2018)
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.
Posted Nov 15, 2018
19
Monrovia, Indiana (2018)
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.
Posted Nov 2, 2018
20
Museum (Museo) (2018)
A slippery meditation on questions of ownership, heritage and history as plunder. It's also very funny.
Posted Nov 1, 2018
21
Wanda (1971)
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.
Posted Oct 25, 2018
22
Mid90s (2018)
Wispy and underwhelming.
Posted Oct 24, 2018
23
Halloween (2018)
It only took them forty years to finally make a decent 'Halloween' sequel.
Posted Oct 19, 2018
24
First Man (2018)
25
A Star Is Born (2018)
This is the kind of movie everybody says they don't make anymore.
Posted Oct 4, 2018
26
I Am Not a Witch (2018)
One of the year's very best films. A blast of absurdist outrage that's seriously funny until all of the sudden it's not anymore.
Posted Sep 28, 2018
27
Blaze (2018)
A richly ambivalent film about artistic expression as its own reward and the bad romance of our most destructive impulses.
Posted Sep 21, 2018
28
Lizzie (2018)
It's a one-note movie and that note is room tone.
Posted Sep 19, 2018
29
Madeline's Madeline (2018)
Fragmented, occasionally frustrating and ultimately ecstatic.
Posted Sep 14, 2018
30
Mandy (2018)
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
31
A Midsummer Night's Dream (2018)
So quick bright things come to confusion.
Posted Aug 29, 2018
32
Support the Girls (2018)
33
Never Goin' Back (2018)
Screamingly funny and unexpectedly quite tender. It's like "Beaches," but with bumps of blow and weed butter.
Posted Aug 21, 2018
34
Showgirls (1995)
A film so exquisitely made can't possibly be this incompetent, or can it?
Posted Aug 18, 2018
35
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
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
36
Nico, 1988 (2018)
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
37
The Outsiders (1983)
Watching it again recently I found all of Coppola's cornball flourishes to be rather endearing, even generous.
Posted Jul 31, 2018
38
Breathtaking on the level of execution, if not inspiration.
Posted Jul 30, 2018
39
If the movie accomplishes anything it will at least make everyone who watches it a better tipper.
Posted Jul 26, 2018
40
Van Sant shuffles around pages from the inspirational biopic playbook into something a bit trickier and a lot more rewarding.
Posted Jul 19, 2018
41
The King (2018)
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
42
Zama (2018)
An absurdist folly pitched somewhere between Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
43
Zodiac (2007)
It's a movie for masochists, and for the most part enthralling.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
44
Summer of Sam (1999)
One of Spike Lee's most dynamic pictures, so electric and overflowing with energy it's damn near exhausting.
Posted Jul 11, 2018
45
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
46
Streets of Fire (1984)
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
47
Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
Neville's documentary isn't so much about a life revisited as it is about a man on a mission.
Posted Jun 7, 2018
48
Ocean's 8 (2018)
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
49
A big, boisterous jumble of mixed metaphors and dizzy positivity.
Posted Jun 1, 2018
50
First Reformed (2018)