The Monthly (Australia) - Rotten Tomatoes

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, Lauren Carroll Harris, Luke Goodsell
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
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.
Posted Sep 23, 2018
2
You Were Never Really Here (2018)

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.
Posted Sep 6, 2018
3
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.
Posted Aug 3, 2018
4
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.
Posted Aug 2, 2018
5
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.
Posted Jul 27, 2018
6
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.
Posted Jul 27, 2018
7
The Gospel According to André (2018)

Joanna Di Mattia

The Gospel According to André is a decidedly shy examination of an exuberant life.
Posted Jul 27, 2018
8
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
Posted Jul 27, 2018
9
Brothers' 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.
Posted Jul 9, 2018
10
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.
Posted Jun 26, 2018
11
Ocean's 8 (2018)

Anwen Crawford

The script is woeful: eight leading parts and not a single memorable character; every actor squandered.
Posted Jun 8, 2018
12
Tully (2018)

Lauren Carroll Harris

The finest moments of Tully play like an insight to this female future of storytelling.
Posted Jun 8, 2018
13
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.
Posted May 25, 2018
14
I, Tonya (2018)

Lauren Carroll Harris

Neither Gillespie nor writer Steven Rogers has the sensibility to lucidly, subtly navigate the black comedic tone for which they reach.
Posted May 11, 2018
15
Breath (2018)

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Baker clearly sees grace in these lost boys, in their inchoate longings for something more.
Posted May 4, 2018
16
Human Flow (2017)

Lauren Carroll Harris

An ambitious amalgam of artist's film and political documentary, Human Flow is a grand meditation on how to cut through political apathy with solidarity and visual metaphor.
Posted Mar 30, 2018
17
Ready Player One (2018)

Luke Goodsell

It hums with Spielberg's unmatched formal elasticity. But it's also a shrill, soulless piece, lacking the sense of wonder - or even an interrogation of such - essential to its director's best work.
Posted Mar 30, 2018
18
The Square (2017)

Luke Goodsell

As intelligent and well assembled as The Square is, it lets its audience off the hook with a wink at every turn.
Posted Mar 30, 2018
19
Lady Bird (2017)

Luke Goodsell

...an unexpectedly tender coming of age piece.
Posted Feb 22, 2018
20
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Luke Goodsell

It's a heady cocktail, and yet the film arrives at an impasse.
Posted Nov 21, 2017
21
Bill Cunningham New York (2011)

Anwen Crawford

New Yorkers love nothing more than a story about themselves.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
22
Spotlight (2015)

Anwen Crawford

If there is any heroism in Spotlight then it's a very humble one: the heroism of getting the facts right, which seems, today, almost too much to ask of mainstream newspapers.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
23
Suffragette (2015)

Anwen Crawford

The bravery and the radicalism was real. I wish, though, that the film itself was a little braver, a little more visceral.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
24
Spectre (2015)

Anwen Crawford

Spectre is an elaborate justification for the relevance of the gun-toting, martini-drinking spy in a post-Snowden world.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
25
What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

Anwen Crawford

Though it is doubtful that [Nina] Simone, were she still alive, would be much impressed with [Kanye] West's music - she once said that she didn't like rap at 'all' - she might recognise in him a fellow spirit.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
26
While We're Young (2015)

Anwen Crawford

It's a worthwhile field of enquiry, made into a strangely self-satisfied film.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
27
Listen Up Philip (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Listen Up Philip [is] an uneven mixture of satire and homage.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
28
Dior and I (2015)

Anwen Crawford

It celebrates Simons' vision, but, more interestingly, also reveals to viewers the busy, hierarchical world of the atelier, where dozens of highly skilled craftspeople, headed by a workshop première, labour for long hours on a collection.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
29
Pride (2014)

Anwen Crawford

The film hits some obvious notes, and some sentimental ones, but it also surprises
Posted Sep 12, 2017
30
Two Days, One Night (2014)

Anwen Crawford

What the film and its characters convey to us, cumulatively, is a struggle for and towards dignity.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
31
Gone Girl (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Gone Girl fails as a crime thriller in part because it is far too long - none of Fincher's major feature films have clocked in at less than two hours, and several run closer to three - but mostly because the distribution of its sympathies are so uneven.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
32
Locke (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Tom Hardy gives a bravura performance.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
33
Felony (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Felony is too close to generic; another story about gruff Australian coppers, and god knows we've had plenty of those. As the moral stakes increased for Mal and his colleagues I found it difficult to care, because I felt as if I'd seen it all before
Posted Sep 12, 2017
34
Boyhood (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Boyhood never allows itself to be trivial - we never see anyone buying groceries, or picking their nose, or spending their days tied to a job they don't enjoy. It's a film that's being celebrated as a triumph of realism, but it isn't like real life at all
Posted Sep 12, 2017
35
Snowpiercer (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Violence always involves moral questions, and the decision whether to take up armed struggle lies at the heart of revolutionary movements, but the film does not take these concerns at all seriously.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
36
All Is Lost (2013)

Anwen Crawford

All Is Lost is a testament to the possibilities of digital cinema: a film like this, shot in such close confines, simply couldn't be made with anything other than lightweight, handheld cameras.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
37
Noah (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Why craft a subtle emotional cue when, with overpowering string instruments and the ubiquitous sonic boom, you can prevent an audience from thinking at all?
Posted Sep 12, 2017
38
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Anwen Crawford

[Wes Anderson's] nostalgia, like his set design, is so contrived that I don't believe he really believes in it as anything other than a visual style. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a perfect miniature world, but it left me cold.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
39
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)

Anwen Crawford

Kermit [the Frog] embodies the strange magic of puppetry. He's human and animal; real and make-believe; an avatar for the joyous, unfettered imagination that [Jim] Henson brought into the world.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
40
Sing Street (2016)

Anwen Crawford

Scenes transparently designed to sweep an audience away with the power of music falter, because the songs are weak. But the young cast do look the part.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
41
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years (2016)

Anwen Crawford

The achievement of [Ron] Howard's documentary is to make the familiar feel new again, placing the viewer inside that moment - even if you never lived it - when to witness The Beatles was to watch the horizon of your world brighten before you like the dawn
Posted Sep 12, 2017
42
I, Daniel Blake (2017)

Anwen Crawford

Newcastle-born stand-up comedian Dave Johns plays this largely non-comedic part with understated warmth.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
43
Moonlight (2016)

Anwen Crawford

It is tempting to call it a universal story, a timeless story, but this is too comforting, too glib.It is a specific story, of being queer, black and poor in America - still a story that is little told onscreen.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
44
O.J.: Made in America (2016)

Anwen Crawford

It will stand alongside the similarly epic Hoop Dreams as a documentary that, with sport as its ostensible subject, also serves as an examination of race in America, and of fame's perverse and distorting effects.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
45
Certain Women (2016)

Anwen Crawford

[Kelly] Reichardt's characters are not taken from comic books; they are not easy heroes or outsize villains. [They] are the kind who drive second-hand cars or catch the bus. Their lives seem beyond their own ability to command, but they are not meaningles
Posted Sep 12, 2017
46
The Trip to Spain (2017)

Anwen Crawford

As a whole it's worth savouring.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
47
Berlin Syndrome (2017)

Luke Goodsell

The film is at its most convincing when evoking the horrifying ordeal of domestic entrapment and it gives its protaganist at least some surface dues in developing what passes for agency here.
Posted May 30, 2017
48
Personal Shopper (2017)

Luke Goodsell

[Personal Shopper] displays a conversely intuitive, almost millennial understanding of the changing European landscape and the New World citizens who populate it.
Posted May 30, 2017