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Stuart Klawans
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Critics' Group:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Matrix (1999) |
It's not just that The Matrix is to overblown silliness as Mount Rushmore is to big stone heads. To demonstrate their power, the makers of this trailer/video game/theatrical come-on have taken something precious to me... and tossed it onto the fire. - The Nation
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| Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) |
As transparent as its title artifact, and just as obviously made from plastic, Crystal Skull conforms to type by offering a new version of old trash pleasures, only without the novelty. - The Nation
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| Posted Apr 12, 2023
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Girlfight (2000) |
The liveliest moments that follow are those in which you see Diana training. Kusama has a sure instinct in these scenes for camera placement and editing... and she knows she's got two great subjects in the craft of boxing and Rodriguez. - The Nation
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| Posted Mar 24, 2021
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Atlantis (2019) |
This is male cinema, in capital letters-but as written, directed, photographed, and edited by Valentyn Vasyanovych, it's also real cinema, made by an artist who has thought about why and how he's showing whatever you see. - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 27, 2021
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Sin (2019) |
This is how you make a film about artistic heroism without a hero. - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 27, 2021
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Dear Comrades! (2020) |
It's a fascinating subject for Konchalovsky to take up late in life... - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 27, 2021
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A Glitch in the Matrix (2020) |
Horrifying, but also funny... - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 27, 2021
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Minari (2020) |
Out of an experience that's as alien for his characters as it is for you, [director Lee Isaac Chung] quietly builds something that can serve as home. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Mank (2020) |
Why was this vaporous stuff pulled out of the ether in the first place, and which movie brat's interests does it really serve? - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Let Them All Talk (2020) |
I held on through thick but mostly thin for the fun of watching Streep and Hedges play busily off each other and for Dianne Wiest's imperturbable performance as the surer, more simmering friend. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
Boseman's got the tragic lead and is running with it for all his magnificent skills are worth, though it's Viola Davis who plays the formidable title role... using enough of her own awe-inspiring gravity to bend the passing light of stars. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Collective (2019) |
Bad spirals down toward a seemingly bottomless worse, while you, appalled moviegoer, get to watch this helix of death from a front-row seat. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Gunda (2020) |
In Gunda, a remarkably fine meat-is-murder documentary, director Victor Kossakovsky studiously avoids color, music, and quick editing and so pulls you into a world that seems found rather than made. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 30, 2020
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Attack the Block (2011) |
Attack the Block makes the most of its budget while creating a near-exemplary study in pace, humor, and spurts of gore. - The Nation
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| Posted Sep 19, 2020
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Tesla (2020) |
Hawke gives an inward-looking performance that emphasizes the alliance in Tesla of spiritual delicacy with globe-spanning ambition -- an uneasy combination, which led to what might be called, at a minimum, eccentricity and isolation. - The Nation
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| Posted Sep 19, 2020
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On the Record (2020) |
It gives you more than enough intense portraiture, narrative drive, and thoughtful commentary to justify the decisions the filmmakers made. - The Nation
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| Posted May 27, 2020
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Beanpole (2019) |
Moral judgments are possible in Beanpole-you make them in every scene -- but are as slippery as the lies the characters continually tell one another and as disorienting as Balagov's occasionally dizzying shots. - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 07, 2020
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The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) |
The Cordillera of Dreams is ultimately a movie about the path not taken and the history that cannot be undone. - The Nation
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| Posted Feb 07, 2020
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) |
Flimsiness betrays flimsiness; the gaps in direction read almost like Heller's confession of the falsehood of the scene's emotional breakthrough, its essence as wish fulfillment. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 06, 2019
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Ford v Ferrari (2019) |
Ford v Ferrari features Christian Bale doing wonders as race-car driver Ken Miles. You get the lean, hollow-cheeked Bale this time, who just by tilting his head one way or the other can seem amused, curious, satirical, or royally pissed off. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 06, 2019
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The Report (2019) |
More is needed. Burns really grabs you only when the horror becomes vivid... - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 06, 2019
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Dark Waters (2019) |
Dark Waters [is] a direct, compelling, and damning procedural drama, one that respects the emotional ordeal of Rob Bilott as much as it builds the case against the managers of DuPont. - The Nation
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| Posted Dec 06, 2019
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Wasp Network (2019) |
[Assayas] gives you impeccably crisp direction, a wide scope of action, an exceptional cast -- Edgar Ramírez, Wagner Moura, Penélope Cruz, Gael García Bernal --and some enjoyable misdirection. This is, after all, a tale about liars. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Synonymes (2018) |
Challenging and unpredictable, when not outright daring you to punch it in the face, Nadav Lapid's extraordinary Synonyms offers an alarming new take on the themes of drifting youth and soured identity. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Pain and Glory (2019) |
After too long a fallow period, Pedro Almodóvar has returned to form, or even improved on it, with Pain and Glory, the most candidly autobiographical film he's ever ventured. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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The Whistlers (2019) |
The landscape of the Canaries makes a lovely change from Bucharest, and the scenes of the cop learning to whistle are little masterpieces of deadpan comedy. That said, I thought the movie was mostly hot air. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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The Traitor (2019) |
You might call these scenes highly theatrical for the way the gangsters dramatize themselves and fabulate, but they're actually about the dangerous moment when someone insists that playacting come to an end. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Marriage Story (2019) |
Noah Baumbach's excellent Marriage Story -- which is actually the story of a divorce -- revisits territory this filmmaker has explored before, notably in 2005's The Squid and the Whale. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Vitalina Varela (2019) |
Vitalina Varela begins with a procession leaving a funeral, ends in a graveyard, and in the middle puts you in touch with something absolute in its main character's experience. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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The Irishman (2019) |
Sometimes all the brooding over actors and motifs from past films makes you feel as if Scorsese is engaged in a conscience-stricken meditation on his career. At other times, you wonder what happened to his famed momentum. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Joker (2019) |
Todd Phillips can dump two cups of Taxi Driver into a bowl and slop in a cup and a half of The King of Comedy, but that doesn't make him Scorsese. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Oh Mercy! (Roubaix, Une Lumière) (2019) |
Oh Mercy! is less concerned with discovering who committed a crime than in establishing precisely how it happened and understanding why. You've heard of a pitiless gaze? Desplechin's is the opposite. - The Nation
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| Posted Nov 08, 2019
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Ad Astra (2019) |
As a James Gray fan, I'm disappointed, not just in him but in the alarmingly enthusiastic reception this hot air balloon has received. - The Nation
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| Posted Oct 17, 2019
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Parasite (2019) |
Having dramatized the struggle of rich versus poor in wildly lurid terms, he brings the conflict to its dreadful conclusion with the simplest, smallest, most everyday gesture possible. - The Nation
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| Posted Oct 17, 2019
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Midnight Traveler (2019) |
Like Ad Astra, the film concentrates on relationships and emotional states as much as on outward action. Unlike Ad Astra, Midnight Traveler tells a story that actually happened. - The Nation
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| Posted Oct 17, 2019
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019) |
You'll laugh. You'll be reassured. You'll even shed a happy tear. Thank God Cate Blanchett did the movie with him. - The Nation
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| Posted Sep 16, 2019
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Give Me Liberty (2019) |
It's the perspective of a thoroughly acculturated Russian immigrant who has nothing in life but his work and a crate of old vinyl. - The Nation
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| Posted Sep 16, 2019
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The Miracle of the Little Prince (2018) |
It's worth listening to-in Tamazight, Sámi, Nawat, Tibetan, or any tongue you can name. - The Nation
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| Posted Sep 16, 2019
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Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019) |
What [Tarantino] created is a genuinely enthusiastic tribute to American entertainment in 1969, as well as a sad and moving farewell to those who never made it in the business. - The Nation
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| Posted Aug 12, 2019
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The Dead Don't Die (2019) |
If Jarmusch is bringing together the people he loves, it's evidently to say goodbye. The world comes to an end in this zombie-movie mash-up, and so does his filmmaking, which disappears up its own meta. - The Nation
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| Posted Aug 01, 2019
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Honeyland (2019) |
[A] gorgeous, fascinating, continually problematic documentary. - The Nation
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| Posted Aug 01, 2019
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Toy Story 4 (2019) |
It would be frivolous to pretend that this fourth Toy Story has anything to add to the previous three or exists because of anything other than a commercial imperative. - The Nation
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| Posted Aug 01, 2019
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Late Night (2019) |
Late Night is charming enough but could have been more. - The Nation
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| Posted Aug 01, 2019
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) |
Joe Talbot's lovely, quasi-Dickensian film boasts no absolute truths, instead leaning into its ambiguity, humanity and a quizzical moodiness. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jul 17, 2019
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The Souvenir (2019) |
At once artfully coy and unabashedly confessional, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir is a memory film about all-consuming, disastrous first love, set in the England of the early 1980s. - The Nation
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| Posted Jun 07, 2019
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The Silence of Others (2018) |
The Silence of Others is clear-eyed, clear-headed, and artful without advertising its own skill. It has made a difference in the world. - The Nation
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| Posted May 21, 2019
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Amazing Grace (2018) |
Surely the first and most overwhelming emotion that ought to be felt by anyone with ears in working order-ears, and a heart-is gratitude. - The Nation
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| Posted May 21, 2019
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Pulp Fiction (1994) |
Soon enough you come down off its high, with that druggie feeling of your bones being hollow and your skin encrusted with dirt; but you can't deny that the movie delivers... or that it somehow elevates craft and cleverness to the level of art. - The Nation
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| Posted Apr 15, 2019
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Dogman (2018) |
Dark, absorbing, [and] beautifully acted. - The Nation
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| Posted Mar 29, 2019
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The Brink (2019) |
In The Brink, [director Alison] Klayman gives us something even more disturbing: copious on-the-fly glimpses of the man in action. - The Nation
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| Posted Mar 29, 2019
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