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4/5
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Darkman
(1990)
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Tim Brayton
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That whole origin story is a bundle of clichés, and Raimi and Darkman know it; the whole film has a tongue-in-cheek energy to go along with its dark cinematography by Bill Bope.
Posted Aug 23, 2025
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4/5
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The Return of the Living Dead
(1985)
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Tim Brayton
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It's obvious that a lot of care went into RotLD, which takes place in an unusually well-realised world; but the detail of the mise en scène is never stressed or insisted upon. It just is.
Posted Aug 06, 2025
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4/5
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The Perfume of the Lady in Black
(1974)
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Tim Brayton
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One of the most tense, and delectably unfathomable Italian horror films ever made.
Posted Jun 01, 2025
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2.5/5
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Mickey 17
(2025)
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Tim Brayton
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To give the film its due credit, there is a positive side to this whirlwind of half-formed notions that the film tries to maintain as a structured narrative: it is never boring.
Posted Mar 19, 2025
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4/5
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Hundreds of Beavers
(2022)
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Tim Brayton
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A movie that just has such a good mood, enough to make it feel like one would have to be a real grouch not to laugh along with its ongoing rush of surreal gags, its flair for stagey artifice, its constant mugging.
Posted Mar 19, 2025
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3.5/5
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Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1992)
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Tim Brayton
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No matter how grinding and dull the story gets, we are, genuinely, never more than about 45 seconds away from some eye-popping visual.
Posted Mar 19, 2025
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4/5
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Day of the Outlaw
(1959)
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Tim Brayton
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An unusually demanding and complicated and unsettling film for what isn't technically a B-Western, though it has a family resemblance.
Posted Feb 27, 2025
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4.5/5
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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While we can argue over whether Corbet misses many of the swings he takes, it's not like anybody else right now is even taking those swings in the first place.
Posted Feb 27, 2025
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4.5/5
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Nosferatu
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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If we're going to have a comfortably overfamiliar tale told yet again, the least the storytellers can do is bring a great deal of quality.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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1/5
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Mufasa: The Lion King
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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The prequel to one of the most aesthetically barren major films of the last ten years was always going to have a pretty hard time being anything but aesthetically barren in its own right.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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4/5
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Ticket of No Return
(1979)
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Tim Brayton
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It isn't really about characterization, so much as about Berlin as an aesthetic experience and a drunken bender as a mood rather than a physical event.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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4/5
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A Tale of Two Sisters
(2003)
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Tim Brayton
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A great piece of alchemy, in which everything we learn makes the film much sadder than it seemed when it was a jumpy horror film, but also in a way much more horrific.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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3/5
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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It's still closer to being a real movie than the three Hobbits, I'll give it that much.
Posted Jan 13, 2025
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2.5/5
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The Adventures of the American Rabbit
(1986)
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Tim Brayton
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Feels both undercooked and made from the wrong ingredients in the first place. But it’s very unusual, and unusual in a memorable, intriguing way.
Posted Jan 13, 2025
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2/5
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Wicked
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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The editing is sloppy and the cinematography, lighting, and grading are utterly incomprehensible.
Posted Jan 13, 2025
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3.5/5
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Reservoir Dogs
(1992)
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Tim Brayton
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The film's biggest single problem is that the director learned so much from making it that he went on to keep making things that were better.
Posted Jan 13, 2025
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4.5/5
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Bird
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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Exceptionally deft control of mood and the erratic psychology of one of God's most unpredictable creatures, a twelve-year-old girl.
Posted Dec 29, 2024
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4/5
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Odd Obsession
(1959)
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Tim Brayton
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It's a bit exhausting to watch, and if the point of the movie is to bring our attention to our aging bodies' inability to keep up, it succeeds.
Posted Dec 29, 2024
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2/5
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Moana 2
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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There is at no point any real reason to care about what's happening or what the stakes are.
Posted Dec 29, 2024
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3/5
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Barbarella
(1968)
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Tim Brayton
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Barbarella is a weird missive from the deep dark depths of the '60s era, with a villain that amounts to a villainous, evil-eating lava lamp, and the inside of a spaceship in which literally every single surface is covered in brown shag.
Posted Dec 12, 2024
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0.5/5
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C Me Dance
(2009)
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Tim Brayton
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This is <i>The Room</i> of evangelical Christian movies. This is what it would look like if legendary anti-filmmaker Neil Breen was a man of faith and not a Las Vegas real estate investor.
Posted Nov 23, 2024
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3.5/5
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Italian Spiderman
(2007)
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Tim Brayton
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Just as likely to be good at serving as a gateway drug to enjoying the film's it's parodying as it requires that you already enjoy them before going into it.
Posted Nov 23, 2024
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3.5/5
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Valmont
(1989)
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Tim Brayton
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A humane movie about some of the most inhumane people in literary history; in its own way, that's a pretty remarkable achievement, though it never quite manages to argue why it's taking this approach.
Posted Nov 23, 2024
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4.5/5
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The Substance
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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The movie is a huge spectacle, and it keeps getting bigger as it goes along, but what's great is that it's never just indulging for the sake of it.
Posted Nov 23, 2024
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4/5
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The Tree of Wooden Clogs
(1978)
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Tim Brayton
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[Not] as good as the sum total of its best moments, but those moments are really nothing less than sublime.
Posted Nov 23, 2024
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2/5
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Alien: Romulus
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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[Not] the worst movie in this unfortunately inconsistent franchise. Just the worst movie that doesn't have any Predators in it.
Posted Aug 21, 2024
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2.5/5
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Twisters
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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It would be nice if the film gave us much of anything worth paying attention to between the setpieces.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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3/5
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Inside Out 2
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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Mostly painless and often funny.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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4.5/5
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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One of the main ways that Furiosa is an unpredictable zig-zag for the Mad Max series is that it's actually much closer to a direct evolution from Miller's last film, 2022's Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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1/5
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Xanadu
(1980)
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Tim Brayton
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It is one of the dumbest movies of the 1980s, and one of the most joyful movies of the 1980s.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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3.5/5
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
(2006)
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Tim Brayton
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A movie that is much, much more nuts than it lets on.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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2/5
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Kung Fu Panda 4
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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The series has finally produced its first lousy entry.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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3.5/5
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Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows
(1998)
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Tim Brayton
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To a certain extent, Paul Jay literally needed to do nothing at all but stand out of the way of reality while it crafted for him one of the most substantial character arcs I have ever heard of in any sports documentary.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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3.5/5
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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There's a genuine sense of wonder here that is frankly not expected at all for the deeply pessimistic franchise it's a part of.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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2.5/5
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Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night
(1987)
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Tim Brayton
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Despite all of its elements that are individually deranged and visionary and feel like they were wrenched out of the pitch-black recesses of some underground animator's brain, the thing as a whole feels like such yawning, uninspired hackwork.
Posted Apr 14, 2024
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4/5
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Tumbbad
(2018)
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Tim Brayton
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The film creeps into your bones and gives you a little shiver of discomfort at how very unknowable the world is.
Posted Apr 14, 2024
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2/5
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Madame Web
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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The thing that's definitely true of Madame Web is that it was absolutely butchered, just hacked apart by a screaming maniac with a cleaver, in post-production.
Posted Apr 14, 2024
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3/5
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Tremors II: Aftershocks
(1996)
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Tim Brayton
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A whole lot more thoughtful than it had the slightest reason to be.
Posted Apr 14, 2024
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3.5/5
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Drive-Away Dolls
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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It's easy to call this "just a lark", but it's not just a lark, really; it's rare and wonderful for a lark to be this self-assured and swaggering.
Posted Apr 14, 2024
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4/5
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The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
(1953)
|
Tim Brayton
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Lively and peculiar enough to feel like a worthy experiment in trying to make Seuss-style visuals work in live-action.
Posted Mar 09, 2024
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4/5
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Dune: Part Two
(2024)
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Tim Brayton
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Where it really comes into its own as a hugely satisfying Hollywood sci-fi epic is in the action-adventure material, which is also backloaded, so the very long film seems to keep getting bigger and richer as it goes along.
Posted Mar 09, 2024
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2/5
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Wonka
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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Irritatingly free of the "pure imagination" that it presumes to be its most sacred value.
Posted Feb 20, 2024
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4.5/5
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The Zone of Interest
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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It works brilliantly, it's just that the thing it works brilliantly at is being an off-putting slog.
Posted Feb 20, 2024
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10/10
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
(1975)
|
Tim Brayton
|
A brilliantly ambiguous film about ambiguity.
Posted Dec 24, 2023
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4/5
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The Boy and the Heron
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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Despite all of the heavy imagery, this is still a fundamentally generous depiction of a sad little kid who needs to learn that it's okay that other people want to love him.
Posted Dec 24, 2023
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4/5
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Godzilla Minus One
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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The technical quality of the effects is great. So, happily, is the artistic quality.
Posted Dec 16, 2023
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1.5/5
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Journey to Bethlehem
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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It's kind of hair-raising how just tacky this all is.
Posted Dec 01, 2023
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1.5/5
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Wish
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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The animation is ugly, the story is confusing, the characters are an unappealing jumble of badly-expressed traits, the voice acting is meager, the songs are an affront.
Posted Dec 01, 2023
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3.5/5
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Thanksgiving
(2023)
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Tim Brayton
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Performing the requisite duties of a slasher film with the most sincerity and highest level of quality it can manage.
Posted Nov 24, 2023
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3/5
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Trolls Band Together
(2023)
|
Tim Brayton
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The whole movie feels a bit like a laboratory for playing with new examples of the series' defined aesthetic.
Posted Nov 23, 2023
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