Slate

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating Title/Year Author
Downhill (2020) Sam Adams Downhill too often plays like a cringe comedy that's all cringe. It's not just uncomfortable; it's unpleasant. EDIT
Posted Feb 14, 2020
To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020) Heather Schwedel P.S. I ... don't know if I'm still into this? EDIT
Posted Feb 12, 2020
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020) Sam Adams For a movie that touts its protagonist's emancipation, Birds of Prey still feels very much in chains. EDIT
Posted Feb 6, 2020
() Sam Adams Drawing on interviews with cultural commentators, academics, and activists, the movie addresses head-on the place, or lack of one, that women of color-especially black women assaulted by black men-have been accorded in the #MeToo movement. EDIT
Posted Jan 25, 2020
Weathering With You (2019) Dan Kois I loved Your Name, even as I recognized I was not the ideal target audience for it, and that's why I watched Weathering With You with that ideal target audience: a gaggle of teens. EDIT
Posted Jan 16, 2020
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (2004) Rebecca Onion Plagues and Pleasures has a different style for a reason: It's a movie about the environment that isn't content with the good-bad dynamic of your average gloomy enviropic. EDIT
Posted Dec 19, 2019
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) Sam Adams Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don't feel much of anything at all. EDIT
Posted Dec 18, 2019
Just Mercy (2019) Inkoo Kang The clear-cut morality of the plot necessitates dramatic tension or righteous fury, and Cretton delivers neither. EDIT
Posted Dec 11, 2019
Uncut Gems (2019) Dana Stevens Certainly Uncut Gems is the product of an uncompromising vision. But I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull... EDIT
Posted Dec 10, 2019
Richard Jewell (2019) Inkoo Kang Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns. EDIT
Posted Dec 9, 2019
Bombshell (2019) Dana Stevens Whatever beliefs they may hold about other people's humanity, I'm glad these women finally received justice from the network that wronged them. I'm just not sure that translates into wanting to spend two hours in their company. EDIT
Posted Dec 9, 2019
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) Dana Stevens Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that rare movie in which every choice feels thought through, meaningful, and right, from the costumes by Dorothée Guiraud to the cinematography by Claire Mathon. EDIT
Posted Dec 2, 2019
In Fabric (2018) Inkoo Kang In Fabric is long on freaky atmospherics and short on explanations, which is probably all the better-nothing is going to make a "killer dress" seem less dopey. EDIT
Posted Dec 2, 2019
King Lear (2018) Isaac Butler Yet the film is such a cracking good entertainment I barely even noticed that its world makes no sense. EDIT
Posted Nov 26, 2019
The Two Popes (2019) Inkoo Kang See The Two Popes for its fine performances, but don't be tempted by its naïveté. EDIT
Posted Nov 25, 2019
Dark Waters (2019) Dana Stevens While I hope, for his next project, that he's back on the less conventional, more stylish Haynes train, I'm glad we got to see what a Todd Haynes courtroom drama looked like. EDIT
Posted Nov 20, 2019
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) Dana Stevens The ever-present potential for bathos in a movie about accessing one's own inner child is offset by a dedication to visual whimsy and playfulness that can recall Michel Gondry. EDIT
Posted Nov 20, 2019
Frozen II (2019) Sam Adams Frozen was built around an anthem to letting your emotions take control because no matter how flawed the results might be, it was preferable to sterile perfection. Maybe the people who made the new movie should watch it again. EDIT
Posted Nov 20, 2019
Knives Out (2019) Dana Stevens There's no one on earth, or even in the movies, who talks quite the way the people in Knives Out do, but we become conversant in their idiosyncratic patois by listening to it and learning the rules of this stylized fictional world. EDIT
Posted Nov 14, 2019
Charlie's Angels (2019) Inkoo Kang The film is stuffed with noble intentions... But Banks' vision of women-empowerment heaven plays more like a checklist of topics from the feminist discourse of the past few years than a coherent movie, let alone a crowd-pleasing one. EDIT
Posted Nov 14, 2019
Honey Boy (2019) Inkoo Kang LaBeouf is so revelatory as both writer and actor that the film defies cynicism about its second purpose as celebrity image management. It just makes you excited about the work. EDIT
Posted Nov 9, 2019
Doctor Sleep (2019) Sam Adams [Flanagan's] become a horror director who gives in to happy endings, who wants to slam the lid shut and assure us that the ghosts are gone for good. EDIT
Posted Nov 6, 2019
Marriage Story (2019) Dana Stevens Baumbach's most mature and generous work to date. EDIT
Posted Oct 30, 2019
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) Dana Stevens Terminator: Dark Fate seems uninterested in questions of technology, dystopia, gender, race, or even the logic puzzles of time travel. It's all about the wham-bam with barely a thank you to the three ma'ams at its center. EDIT
Posted Oct 24, 2019
The Lighthouse (2019) Dana Stevens This at first fascinating and never less than bonkers movie is eventually sunk by its own theological overreach. EDIT
Posted Oct 16, 2019
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) Willa Paskin El Camino is a sumptuously shot, totally entertaining, somewhat needless, but sure-why-not elaboration of what has come before. EDIT
Posted Oct 11, 2019
Parasite (2019) Dana Stevens Maybe the best film Bong has yet made... EDIT
Posted Oct 10, 2019
Gemini Man (2019) Sam Adams The closer we get to the actors mouthing their clunky, mock-allegorical dialogue, the phonier they seem. EDIT
Posted Oct 9, 2019
Dolemite Is My Name (2019) Inkoo Kang Dolemite Is My Name gleefully-and thankfully-tosses the tropes of the tortured-artist biopic out the window. EDIT
Posted Oct 3, 2019
Joker (2019) Dana Stevens Joker is a bad movie, yes: It's predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody. EDIT
Posted Oct 3, 2019
The King (2019) Isaac Butler The King takes Chalamet's charisma for granted, letting him lean into a self-pity so profound that you wonder why Falstaff-or anyone else-would follow him at all. EDIT
Posted Oct 2, 2019
The Irishman (2019) Dana Stevens I'd be hard-pressed to say that the three-plus hours of The Irishman fly by, but it's also tough to think of a single individual scene I'd want to lose. EDIT
Posted Sep 30, 2019
Rambo: Last Blood (2019) Sam Adams You might not think an 89-minute movie could drag, but boy does this one. EDIT
Posted Sep 19, 2019
Ad Astra (2019) Dana Stevens A movie that, for the bulk of its two-hour-and-two-minute running time, I watched in a state of hypnotized delight. EDIT
Posted Sep 18, 2019
Hustlers (2019) Inkoo Kang An immediate entrant into the pantheon of female friendship movies, Hustlers-a pretty much perfect film-makes plain the hollowness of so many other iterations of girl power in studio projects. You can feel its heart beat. EDIT
Posted Sep 13, 2019
Camp Rock (2008) Troy Patterson A workaday professionalism that's never too slick to alienate anyone. EDIT
Posted Sep 11, 2019
Downton Abbey (2019) June Thomas The movie has two romances, and neither is particularly well developed. But that's OK. The thrill of the film lies in seeing everyone again. At least for a couple of hours. EDIT
Posted Sep 9, 2019
Jojo Rabbit (2019) Sam Adams Waititi isn't making light of Nazis; he's mocking them, denying them and their present-day analogues the dignity of taking them-as distinct from the very real threat they pose-seriously. EDIT
Posted Sep 9, 2019
It: Chapter Two (2019) Jack Hamilton Not unlike the town in which it's set, Muschietti's It only sees what it wants to. EDIT
Posted Sep 9, 2019
It: Chapter Two (2019) Jeffrey Bloomer It's obvious that the filmmakers failed to fully reckon with what they've put on the screen, and the results are grim. EDIT
Posted Sep 6, 2019
Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones (2019) Inkoo Kang Like dropping in on a rascally uncle who doesn't know, or doesn't care, how much he's disappointing you. EDIT
Posted Aug 27, 2019
Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019) Dana Stevens For all this movie's faults, I can't wait to take my own middle-school-aged daughter to see it; it's rare to find a movie about mothers and daughters that neither sentimentalizes nor oversimplifies that too often idealized relationship. EDIT
Posted Aug 14, 2019
Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) Joshua Keating Of all the new questions raised by this film, the hardest to answer may be "What was the point?" EDIT
Posted Aug 14, 2019
Blinded by the Light (2019) Inkoo Kang An old-fashioned blast in the best way: a smart crowd-pleaser that embraces both sweetness and complexity. EDIT
Posted Aug 13, 2019
One Child Nation (2019) Inkoo Kang Its directness and intimacy lend an indelibility that encyclopedic framing could never approximate. The one-child policy haunts Wang, and she wants it to haunt the viewer, too. EDIT
Posted Aug 9, 2019
The Kitchen (2019) Inkoo Kang A joyless and exhausting movie that squanders the talents of a dream trio: McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss. EDIT
Posted Aug 8, 2019
Ferrell Takes The Field (2015) Jeremy Stahl The HBO special has more laugh lines per joke than the mediocre-but-beloved Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, more heart than the funny-but-formulaic Blades of Glory, and more potential staying power than the crude and forgettable Semi Pro. EDIT
Posted Aug 6, 2019
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019) Keith Phipps A bittersweet, complex, conversation-starting look back at the film business at the close of a tumultuous decade, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also works as a strong argument for why it's too soon for Tarantino to pack it in. EDIT
Posted Aug 5, 2019
The Nightingale (2018) Inkoo Kang It may not always be easy to sit through, but we're nonetheless lucky to witness it. EDIT
Posted Aug 1, 2019
Amy Schumer: Live From the Apollo (2015) Willa Paskin A pretty good set that, in this Schumer-saturated year, feels disappointing: decent, funny, inessential. EDIT
Posted Jul 31, 2019