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Connor Lightbody
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Diego Maradona (2019) |
We see the rise, fall, the seediness and the heart of Maradona, captured meticulously as a tortured love story between a man, a ball and his own mortality - Live & Breathe Media (Substack)
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| Posted Jul 19, 2024
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The Batman (2022) |
For a film set deep in the depths of Gotham’s gritty underbelly, the script slowly descends into the chaotic silliness of the characters that it feels so desperate to shed - Live & Breathe Media (Substack)
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| Posted Jul 18, 2024
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The Greatest Hits (2024) |
with two magnetic leads...in Boynton and Min, [The Greatest Hits] is such a pleasant delight, that even if it doesn’t quite nail the harmony, it’s melody is rousing enough - Live & Breathe Media (Substack)
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| Posted Jul 18, 2024
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Copyright Infringement (2023) |
a sweet, jubilant film on the merits of community in a world separated by discourse, a pandemic and inaccessibility to art - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 09, 2024
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Arzé (2024) |
Shaib’s astute, lean direction and vibrant, lived-in characters make Arzé a very rewarding experience - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 09, 2024
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The Beasts (2022) |
a gnarly, barbarous thriller that keeps its audiences’ nerves in a perpetual state of fervour. - WhyNow (UK)
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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Corsage (2022) |
A devilishly entertaining, tangibly textured, provocative film on a self-destructive woman hellbent on not conforming to societal strictures - InSession Film
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
That the film’s allegorical excavation of queer trauma is so precise and so acute marks Schoenbrun as a once-in-a-lifetime filmmaker, and I Saw The TV Glow as the best film of 2024, if not the decade. - Movie Marker
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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Jackdaw (2023) |
[this] Smoggie crime thriller doesn’t quite do enough to accommodate for the retreading of familiar action beats but delivers a steady stream of satisfying thrills - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Small Things Like These (2024) |
A quiet implosion of religious morality, masculinity, and societal complicity that never feels overwrought, but one can’t help but feel the film is framed from a perspective that lends itself to the very complicity it wants to challenge - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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All Shall Be Well (2024) |
For all the tenderness that Yeung imbues his film with, the film has a powerful inflammatory voice underneath its pregnant pauses and meticulous craft - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024) |
a film that is as alluring as it is bruising, as ruthless as it is romantic. A provocative and potent Molotov cocktail of brawn, lust, and rage that is as intoxicating as the chartreuse drug injected throughout - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Riddle Of Fire (2023) |
[Riddle of Fire] is gleefully impertinent, capturing the perspective of children needing to escape, and the off-kilter amateurism of the film lends itself to coming from the shoddy malleability of juvenile brains - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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A Different Man (2024) |
the script crackles when it’s not purporting to be intelligent [and] for a film that challenges societal ideas of beauty and champions our inner selves over aesthetics, doing this through cynically bleak methods feels counter-intuitive to the moral - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
its evocative imagery purposefully and naively negates its own ideas on our consumption of media, and it refuses to defile itself with the idea of war photography as propaganda. - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) |
...takes on the task of showing how the message of one revered as a deity, one with wholly good intentions, can be corrupted in a world of hearsay and unreliable communication methods - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Griffin in Summer (2024) |
an unremarkable and awkward comedy that is tonally inverted on itself, with a lead character that is almost unbearable. For what charm the cast can muster, the character of Griffin is at war with the script as well as his impending puberty - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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White Noise (2022) |
It is never completely all together, but allows itself to be so free and playful about the bindings of its genres that when the end-credits sequence appears, you’re absolutely convinced that [White Noise] is worthy of such a credits sequence - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Linda Perry: Let It Die Here (2024) |
[an] immeasurably moving documentary that stuns with raw, unabridged emotion and splendid animation work - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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All That We Love (2024) |
a lovely soft dramedy whose saccharine, familiar beats never come across as cloying thanks to Tan’s deft hand keeping the tone grounded in reality. It is delicately handled, while perhaps too dramatically restrained to leave a stronger emotional presence - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
impossible not to be awed by the sheer audacity of Miller, who provides action of a quality not often seen on this scale, but the narrative skeleton is too flimsy for a film this sprawling - Movies We Texted About
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Blue Jean (2022) |
Oakley’s incredible debut expertly manages to hold a mirror up to society’s continued failings through the lens of a victim falling prey to the internalised homophobia that is prevalent in the very fabric of our lives - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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BlackBerry (2023) |
Howerton almost rescues this uneven, chaotic film in a performance that will make you wonder where this has been his entire career, but this is the BlackBerry of techy biopics. It’s nothing new anymore. - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Femme (2023) |
there’s no simple binary in this exceptional heart-pounding thriller of broken queer men trying to exist in a broken society - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Past Lives (2023) |
Song composes this lyrical, melancholic film with the confidence of a director at the height of their career...[finding] pathos in the potentially mundane creases of a marital bed and a poor internet connection. - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Skin Deep (2022) |
There’s an unfortunate scarcity of finesse to this analogy. SKIN DEEP has high ambitions but...a lack of attention in navigating the finer elements of body dysmorphia squanders the film’s intriguing premise. - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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The Blue Caftan (2022) |
an achingly rich tale of conquering love [that is] sewn together with great care and attention as Touzani refuses to let the film descend into melodrama - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Reality (2023) |
a fantastic, stranger-than-fiction diorama of surrealist fact [that is] symbolic of the political fragments of the American populace - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Medusa Deluxe (2022) |
For all its flashy, overt style and the intriguing ideas behind a thematic rendition of the Gorgonite story, MEDUSA DELUXE too often has dull blades on its scissors - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Stay Awake (2022) |
it plays the endearing brotherly bond for much-needed warmth[but is] a film that doesn’t quite have enough drive or rage for the American opioid situation many find themselves in - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Ferrari (2023) |
Mann’s film is not a car crash by any means, but the rousing romp it could have been has ended up more of a minor ‘inchident’ within the grand history of the Ferrari legacy - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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The Royal Hotel (2023) |
with two narrative features under her belt, both as striking and as sharp as a shattered whisky bottle, Green is a filmmaker one should take notice of...a thriller where respect is more scarce than water in the drought-ridden town - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
A competent, intriguing drama like this gaining award traction feels more symptomatic of it being the kind of good film that is now a rare occurrence within the film zeitgeist, rather than one that feels like it will be remembered after the award cycle - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
ugly, prosaic and dull DIAL OF DESTINY..panders to an audience willing to be spoon-fed lines that they once recognised and moves as gracefully as its geriatric lead - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Last Swim (2024) |
swirls with a sense of unrestrained and unflinching beauty, and the joy and heartbreak of being a teenager...as the film finds pathos in that finite, liminal space in adolescence where you don’t know if the life you’ve lived was worth anything - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Elaha (2024) |
Aboyan’s directorial debut...pulls no punches in indicting antiquated practices and traditions around policing women’s sexuality - TAKE ONE Magazine
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Your Fat Friend (2023) |
helps shed light on certain aspects of life as a fat person but it then becomes more of a hagiography than an inspection of anti-fat culture, which are the more compelling elements - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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The Future (2023) |
the scattered monotony of The Future’s delivery robs the film of any intriguing power it might have - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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The Lesson (2023) |
Bolstered -saved, perhaps- by incredible performances who chew up a script that needed a little silly camp to turn this into something more than a diverting, half-watched late night thriller stuck in the 1am slot on terrestrial TV - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Afire (2023) |
While its comedic amusement lands with a bemused incredulity, Afire’s discussion around the fragility of male writers is rich with layers, none that feel compelled to untangle themselves from a film that on the surface seems suffocatingly simple. - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Thank You Very Much (2023) |
For those who have already been subject to the Kaufman mythology, this perfectly adequate and straightforward documentary presents very little new material other than some previously unseen footage - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Long December (2023) |
For all that you wish it had more notes to it’s symphony, Long December is a breezy, pleasant tale, even if it’s a film done before - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Monica (2022) |
a [Trace] Lysette performance that we should be considering as one of the greatest performances put to film in recent years - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Utama (2022) |
a beguiling, beautiful movie, which Grisi’s passion for this subject makes ache with authenticity, but this passion never translates to anger. He just seems disappointed. - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Marmalade (2024) |
while the screenplay is desperate for another pass to help Marmalade make sense of itself, the entire film has this unapologetic and unrelenting sense of confident gusto - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Suncoast (2024) |
While there’s nothing particularly new in the framework...writer-director Laura Chinn brings Suncoast together with the strength and confidence of someone highly engaged with the story - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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The Burning Season (2023) |
even though the construction of the movie does it no dramatic favours, that it even attempts to do something structurally fresh is worth applauding - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Lousy Carter (2023) |
the character is so frustratingly morose that none of the comedic beats, all of which are played in the same parched way, land - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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American Dreamer (2022) |
Dinklage plays the curdled failure of a protagonist well, and his presence in the film means it has at least some personality, but he’s unable to save the film from a script that is unsubtle and dull - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Falling Into Place (2023) |
A hopeful film about the necessity of closure and one that finds beauty in the sadness of its characters, in the luscious landscape of Scotland, in the frenzy of London, and in how fate intervenes and intertwines around our relationships - Loud and Clear Reviews
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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