Variety

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating Title/Year Author
Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache (2019) Dennis Harvey Offers a droll, leisurely, if cryptic journey toward individual enlightenment. EDIT
Posted Apr 9, 2021
Thunder Force (2021) Owen Gleiberman It's basically a Wiffle Ball action comedy studded with middle-drawer Melissa McCarthy gags. EDIT
Posted Apr 9, 2021
Voyagers (2021) Owen Gleiberman "Voyagers" isn't badly made, and a handful of the actors have some flair, yet there's something rote, schematic, and a bit monotonous about it. EDIT
Posted Apr 8, 2021
Giants Being Lonely (2019) Owen Gleiberman The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That's its moody, free-floating allure. EDIT
Posted Apr 7, 2021
Hi, Mom (2021) Richard Kuipers Jia and Zhang and a fine support cast carry out these shenanigans with an appealing energy that helps smooth things over when the screenplay occasionally stumbles into clunky plotting, super-corny dialogue and scenes that drag on for too long. EDIT
Posted Apr 6, 2021
Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition (2019) Owen Gleiberman "Amundsen" has some moments of stately power, but most of it is a muddled and remote experience. EDIT
Posted Apr 4, 2021
The Unholy (2021) Owen Gleiberman "The Unholy" has a religious plot that actually works for it. EDIT
Posted Apr 1, 2021
Roe v. Wade (2021) Tomris Laffly Amounts to a sometimes sexist smear campaign, executed with roughly the competence of a cheaply assembled infomercial as it exploits religious guilt to disgrace a legal medical procedure. EDIT
Posted Apr 1, 2021
Every Breath You Take (2021) Owen Gleiberman The movie carries you along, and it's got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters. EDIT
Posted Mar 31, 2021
Alien on Stage (2020) Peter Debruge While I'm glad Kummer's camera was there to capture it, the movie doesn't reveal enough about the performers' backgrounds or personalities. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2021
Trapped (2021) Jay Weissberg Khaled clearly wants to convey a tactile sense of the city, fitfully captured in various closeups, but given the film's piecemeal nature, it's not enough to hold it all together. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2021
The Things We Say, the Things We Do (2020) Peter Debruge For French and art-house audiences, there's no denying the pleasure of a sapiosexual romance such as this, where the turn-on is to be found in the characters' intelligence. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2021
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) Peter Debruge Wingard has the vision to deliver iconic fight scenes in a movie with multiple surprises up its sleeve, while mercifully clocking in at under two hours. EDIT
Posted Mar 29, 2021
The Oxy Kingpins (2021) Owen Gleiberman A wide-eyed, engrossing, information-packed street-smart tutorial. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
The Spine of Night (2021) Guy Lodge With its fusion of naive, old-school character rotoscoping and lavishly airbrushed world-building, the film's visuals aim squarely for geek nostalgia and hit their target. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
The End Of Us (2021) Guy Lodge Ultimately, "The End of Us" is best seen as an opportunity well taken. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
The Return: Life After ISIS (2021) Jessica Kiang Sotorra's film is put together with remarkable poise and intelligence, considering the fraught territory it traverses. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
Violet (2020) Peter Debruge The fact we can see/hear what Violet is thinking makes this an unusually effective illustration of how microaggressions really land, causing macro damage, despite the poker face she puts on for her peers. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
Recovery (2021) Lisa Kennedy These running gags begin rather flat, then over the span of the misadventure come to life. This reanimating has everything to do with the irrepressible rapport between Everton and Call. EDIT
Posted Mar 28, 2021
B- Bad Trip (2021) Amy Nicholson Sniggering slapstick that's two-parts biological fluids and one-part salute to the innate empathy of mankind, often in the same scene. EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
The Fever (2019) Manuel Betancourt With its recursive structure mirroring Justino's own monotonous days, "The Fever" languidly creates a portrait of a man immobilized by his own inaction. EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
A Week Away (2021) Guy Lodge This innocuous but character-free tuner shamelessly copies and crosses the formulae of "High School Musical" and "Camp Rock" down to the last, sequel-prompting detail. EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
The Vault (2021) Dennis Harvey A caper of this type needs tense set pieces, surprising twists, idiosyncratic characters or charismatic stars - ideally, all the above - to distinguish itself, and this one falls short in all those departments. EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
The Seventh Day (2021) Owen Gleiberman Pearce gets the good lines, which he delivers with a sinister nonchalance that says, "The devil made me do it. Or maybe it was my accountant." EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
Six Minutes to Midnight (2020) Alissa Simon Unfortunately, the school's actual history remains more fascinating than the narrative written by Izzard, Celyn and Goddard. EDIT
Posted Mar 26, 2021
Islands (2021) Owen Gleiberman "Islands" is a feel-good movie that, in an odd way, doesn't try to make us feel too good. That's why there's a little bit of art to it. EDIT
Posted Mar 25, 2021
Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (2021) Courtney Howard It's an astute, entertaining, light-hearted mix of slapstick and self-reflexive humor commingling with enlightened, sharp sentiments about individualism and commercialism. EDIT
Posted Mar 23, 2021
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (2021) Dennis Harvey Jed Rothstein's engrossing documentary charts the saga of one massively overhyped, fiscally overvalued startup. EDIT
Posted Mar 22, 2021
Nobody (2021) Owen Gleiberman Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it's a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in "Straw Dogs." EDIT
Posted Mar 22, 2021
Alone Together (2021) Chris Willman It's a little bit less of a "making of" than it is a love story between a woman and her fan base, with an album project-in-progress as a conduit for real-time romance. EDIT
Posted Mar 22, 2021
Subjects of Desire (2021) Jessica Kiang A nimble, idea-packed doc that acts as an excellent primer on Blackness and the beauty ideal. EDIT
Posted Mar 21, 2021
The Lost Sons (2021) Owen Gleiberman For a while, we're bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we've passed through the looking glass of the story's peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it. EDIT
Posted Mar 21, 2021
Enforcement (2020) Peter Debruge Ølholm and Hviid don't want us to turn our brains off. Amid the excitement, they create morally ambiguous situations by which to challenge their characters - and the audience. EDIT
Posted Mar 20, 2021
Deadly Illusions (2020) Lisa Kennedy It's tricky deciding what kind of cheese "Deadly Illusions," a diverting thriller starring Kristin Davis and Dermot Mulroney streaming on Netflix, is exactly. Soft and overripe, from the look of it. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2021
The Fabulous Filipino Brothers (2021) Joe Leydon Director-star Dante Basco's family affair is an engagingly freeform portmanteau that runs the gamut from joltingly dark to sweetly romantic. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2021
Wojnarowicz (2020) Dennis Harvey There's... considerable beauty and invention on display here, as often there was even in David Wojnarowicz's most enraged work. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2021
Swan Song (2021) Peter Debruge You've never seen Udo Kier like this before. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2021
City of Lies (2018) Peter Debruge "City of Lies" seems interested in the wrong mystery. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break (2021) Guy Lodge It's hard to escape the queasy sense that... points are also being scored at the expense of a vulnerable protagonist's mental frailty, at which stage the laughs rather dry up. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Happily (2021) Nick Schager "Happily" is what happens when a cute conceit goes nowhere intriguing. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Bhaji on the Beach (1993) Deborah Young At times the hypocritical old ladies are a little too easy a target for Chadha's irony, but their Technicolor fantasies about Indian romance, or about the loose morals of the younger women, strike a note of high hilarity. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
As I Want (2021) Jay Weissberg The film's biggest takeaway - that Morsi was the bogeyman and Sisi has set things right - couldn't be further from the truth. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Brother's Keeper (2021) Jay Weissberg Sophomore director Ferit Karahan mines his own unhappy experiences with this well-made yet predictable drama. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
The World After Us (2021) Jessica Kiang Such engaging, well-drawn characters are a pleasure to spend time with, and Salah-Cazanas has a bright future behind the camera... EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Playing with Sharks (2021) Jessica Kiang An enjoyable if by-the-numbers breeze through the remarkable life of Valerie Taylor, an ardent pioneer of marine wildlife conservation. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
The Feast (2021) Jessica Kiang The chilly control of Jones' filmmaking, enhanced by the pristine, deadened soundscape and Samuel Sim's intriguing, atmospheric score, keeps our attention squirming on the hook. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Offseason (2021) Tomris Laffly Though thinly conceived overall with not much philosophy to back its daunting visuals, "Offseason" still offers some genuinely spine-tingling images and sounds that will keep midnight audiences on their toes until the end. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Witch Hunt (2021) Dennis Harvey More a supernatural drama than horror, or even a thriller, "Witch Hunt" is in the end primarily an effective cautionary fable about intolerance, sweetened with genre elements. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free (2021) Owen Gleiberman If the cautiously honed, stage-managed quality of "Somewhere You Feel Free" makes it, in the end, a rather minor rock doc, it's still very worth seeing. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021
Jakob's Wife (2021) Jessica Kiang A thin, half-hearted reworking of the vampire mythos that can't quite decide if it's spoofy or serious, and doesn't have the smarts to be both. EDIT
Posted Mar 18, 2021