The Monthly (Australia)

The Monthly (Australia) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Anwen Crawford, Keva York, Lauren Carroll Harris, Luke Goodsell
Rating Title/Year Author
The Dry (2021) Craig Mathieson As he traverses Kiewarra, Aaron occasionally catches a glimpse of red: the glow of a bushfire on the horizon at night, or blood splatter baking under the relentless sun. Maybe, the film suggests, no one can leave this land unscathed. EDIT
Posted Jan 9, 2021
Kajillionaire (2020) Craig Mathieson Kajillionaire is both sublimely funny and deceptively heartfelt. In an end-of-the-road age, Old Dolio is a fitting heroine, an unwitting pawn who intuitively wants something more than a disinformation campaign. EDIT
Posted Jan 9, 2021
Happiest Season (2020) Anwen Crawford Who among a queer viewership will want to watch a comedy in which the leading queer characters spend all their time making each other truly miserable? EDIT
Posted Dec 18, 2020
On the Rocks (2020) Luke Goodsell Murray and Jones, who shared a scene in Coppola's Netflix throwaway A Very Murray Christmas, are swell company, whistling and warbling and cooking up crackpot schemes as they chase Dean across Manhattan like they're in some gumshoe mystery. EDIT
Posted Oct 15, 2020
The Translators (2019) Anwen Crawford A bonkers and very bad film that isn't even willing to be properly silly, and instead skids in and out of patches of spiritless violence. EDIT
Posted Sep 25, 2020
First Cow (2019) Anwen Crawford Nothing here is simple -- alliances are constantly shifting. EDIT
Posted Aug 7, 2020
Monos (2019) Luke Goodsell The fresh thrill of chaos -- of teenage abandon bearing down on a broken system -- courses through this dreamy, violent third feature from Colombian-Ecuadorian writer-director Alejandro Landes. EDIT
Posted Jun 26, 2020
The Trip to Greece (2020) Anwen Crawford All this metatextual cleverness might be unbearable in another, tighter sort of comedy, but one lasting pleasure of the Trip series has been its utter shagginess. EDIT
Posted May 22, 2020
The Lighthouse (2019) Luke Goodsell There's plenty of fun to be had here, to be sure, but at a certain point it feels insufficiently unhinged to conjure the giddy seasickness to which it strives. EDIT
Posted Feb 6, 2020
Uncut Gems (2019) Luke Goodsell Uncut Gems burns itself right to the wire, leading to an astonishingly tense and funny climax... EDIT
Posted Jan 31, 2020
Atlantics (2019) Luke Goodsell Atlantics is transformative, in that true magical sense. EDIT
Posted Dec 5, 2019
The Report (2019) Anwen Crawford [Scott Z. Burns] personalises the villains and, in doing so, diminishes the scope of US power and the extent to which that power has been abused. EDIT
Posted Nov 15, 2019
Blinded by the Light (2019) Anwen Crawford In its devotion, Blinded by the Light does something to convey the sheer desperate quality of obsessive fandom. EDIT
Posted Oct 25, 2019
Judy (2019) Anwen Crawford This is the same old cautionary tale of a woman whose appetite for love exceeds what custom decrees she should settle for, and with the same conclusion: her hunger is its own inevitable punishment. EDIT
Posted Oct 17, 2019
3/5 The Other Side of the Wind (2018) Craig Mathieson But even a compromised Orson Welles film is a welcome release. It's far from exemplary, but nonetheless fascinating in parts and instructive of how Welles saw his career and the movie industry. EDIT
Posted Oct 13, 2019
The Goldfinch (2019) Luke Goodsell Destined to irritate fans of the book and bore those who aren't familiar, The Goldfinch ends up a perplexing, unloveable artefact. EDIT
Posted Sep 26, 2019
Animals (2019) Luke Goodsell This untamed depiction of female friendship moves beyond basic binaries of freedom and control. EDIT
Posted Sep 16, 2019
Amazing Grace (2018) Anwen Crawford The first night has the intimacy, and intensity, of something more or less private that we happen to be fortunate enough to peek in on. But the second night is charged with public expectation... EDIT
Posted Aug 29, 2019
Midsommar (2019) Luke Goodsell Throws enough at the wall to convince that Aster's gestures towards the super-feminine might be real, or at least really well researched. EDIT
Posted Aug 16, 2019
Booksmart (2019) Anwen Crawford If you can deal with its unflagging zest -- for some I suspect it will grate like nails down a blackboard in the classroom of their nightmares -- then you may enjoy watching Booksmart. I did. EDIT
Posted Jul 11, 2019
Celeste (2018) Rebecca Harkins-Cross Celeste is not so much about the artistic process as about desire, performance, the gaze: the conflicting longing to be seen and the discomfort over what's reflected. EDIT
Posted Jun 11, 2019
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) Luke Goodsell There's so much of the filmmaker's soul and craft in the finished product, so many of Gilliam's fascinating, clashing impulses - visionary excess, blundering self-sabotage - bouncing off walls in ways that refuse to be tamed. EDIT
Posted Apr 11, 2019
Destroyer (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Destroyer isn't interested in providing comfortable solutions to spiny problems. Kusama and Kidman lock us into Erin's physical and emotional torment until the end. EDIT
Posted Mar 21, 2019
The Challenge (2016) Keva York The film is meditative rather than informative; it is an aesthetic rather than explicitly critical exercise. EDIT
Posted Mar 15, 2019
Rat Film (2016) Keva York Zigzagging between historical, scientific and philosophical modes, between archival materials, clunky computer-game imagery and interviews with locals, Rat Film shows Baltimore to be a city divided along racial and economic lines. EDIT
Posted Mar 15, 2019
Vox Lux (2018) Luke Goodsell For all its sound and fury, Vox Lux ultimately signifies very little. EDIT
Posted Feb 21, 2019
Let the Sunshine In (2017) Annabel Brady-Brown It could all be rather grim - if only it weren't so funny. EDIT
Posted Feb 21, 2019
3.5/5 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Craig Mathieson The Coens have used the anthology structure to not just tell a spread of stories but also chart a transition from the ridiculous to the sublime: the codes of the Western are first mocked and then dissected. EDIT
Posted Dec 18, 2018
4.5/5 Roma (2018) Craig Mathieson Roma makes the vast feel granular, while allowing an extended family's travails to illustrate a nation's fractious clashes. Its seamlessness is masterful, the resulting vision compelling. EDIT
Posted Dec 18, 2018
Colette (2018) Luke Goodsell Washmoreland has the right kind of deviant sensibility to take the film beyond stuffy historical piece. He gives Knightley range to move outside the period straightjacket. EDIT
Posted Dec 6, 2018
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Luke Goodsell It's refreshingly unusual, to say the least, for a major studio picture to deliver an empathetic portrait of a bitter, middle-aged lesbian that has little interest in a redemptive character arc. EDIT
Posted Dec 6, 2018
I Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story (2018) Anwen Crawford They've been dismissed and patronised, but Beatlemaniacs, Directioners and other fangirls are very self-aware about their boy band "affliction." EDIT
Posted Dec 3, 2018
Strange Colours (1970) Rebecca Harkins-Cross Lodkina isn't much interested in national mythmaking. This naturalistic and softly lyrical film was made through the Venice Biennale College, devised outside of traditional funding models and gatekeeping processes... EDIT
Posted Dec 3, 2018
Widows (2018) Luke Goodsell The film's sense of its own importance also proves to be its undoing. EDIT
Posted Dec 3, 2018
Suspiria (2018) Anwen Crawford "No one is alone" becomes the film's concluding moral, which feels false, in so far as it cuts against a harder truth suggested elsewhere by the pile-up of symbols and subplots. EDIT
Posted Nov 9, 2018
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) Luke Goodsell With such a cultural purview, who's to say that Bohemian Rhapsody - which aspires to little beyond simply entertaining its audience in the most generalist way - isn't successful? EDIT
Posted Nov 2, 2018
Ladies in Black (2018) Rebecca Harkins-Cross Seen through Beresford's eyes, however, the dress is nothing more than a silver puff on a plastic mannequin, deflated by lighting more akin to Kmart fluorescents than anything befitting aspirational wonderland Goode's. EDIT
Posted Sep 26, 2018
3.5/5 A Simple Favor (2018) Craig Mathieson The tone has an elastic quality: it stretches through tart humour, sudden revelations, and camp asides before snapping back into place with a sobering sting. EDIT
Posted Sep 23, 2018
You Were Never Really Here (2017) Joanna Di Mattia It's Phoenix's small gestures - like carefully straightening the bed linen after a mission - and not the explosive ones that show us most clearly who Joe is. EDIT
Posted Sep 6, 2018
Mission: Impossible -- Fallout (2018) Luke Goodsell Even as Fallout marches to a surprisingly generic ticking-clock-and-explosive climax, the action is energised by Cruise's wild zeal. EDIT
Posted Aug 3, 2018
Whitney (2018) Anwen Crawford Musical history is the film's weak spot and the consequence of that, despite Macdonald's clear affection for his subject, is to underplay Houston's impact by depriving her artistry of its proper context. EDIT
Posted Aug 2, 2018
McQueen (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Emerging from the interplay of life story and artistic mission is an intelligent, often deeply moving conversation between McQueen, his garments, and the people who were closest to him and his work. EDIT
Posted Jul 27, 2018
Whitney (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Whitney's form becomes increasingly garish and chaotic once it enters the period when Houston's life spirals downward... What should be sad, uncomfortable viewing instead feels voyeuristic. EDIT
Posted Jul 27, 2018
The Gospel According to André (2017) Joanna Di Mattia The Gospel According to André is a decidedly shy examination of an exuberant life. EDIT
Posted Jul 27, 2018
RBG (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Stylistically it's routine, but the intertwining of Ginsburg's personal and professional lives is deftly handled and given a political context through her experience as a female law graduate in the early 1960s EDIT
Posted Jul 27, 2018
Brother's Nest (2018) Shane Danielsen What it is, refreshingly, is smart - not only in terms of its plotting, the steady drip-feed of information and clarification, but also in the intelligence it extends to its characters. EDIT
Posted Jul 9, 2018
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Luke Goodsell Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom might be the first film in the series that breaks the mould of its predecessors, ditching the tenuous social concern of Michael Crichton's cautionary original in favour of a gleeful contempt for humanity's failings. EDIT
Posted Jun 26, 2018
Ocean's 8 (2018) Anwen Crawford The script is woeful: eight leading parts and not a single memorable character; every actor squandered. EDIT
Posted Jun 8, 2018
Tully (2018) Lauren Carroll Harris The finest moments of Tully play like an insight to this female future of storytelling. EDIT
Posted Jun 8, 2018
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) Luke Goodsell The film is cohesive, zippy and confident to a fault, an interlocking piece of an ever-expanding - or should that be contracting - universe where most of the spontaneity has been relegated to the bad press. EDIT
Posted May 25, 2018