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Tim Robey
Tomatometer-approved critic
The Shining, The Thin Red Line, Le Mepris, Blue Velvet, Sweet Smell of Success
Movies reviews only
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Skywalkers: A Love Story (2024) |
On their own, these two might simply come across as narcissists with a death wish, so the film ruthlessly weds itself to the USP of them being in love -- like a slick Cupid locking down a Netflix deal. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jul 18, 2024
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In A Violent Nature (2024) |
This is the trouble with nihilism as a foundation for horror: it can’t quicken the pulse, drum up scares, or elicit any fruitful response from the viewer at all. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jul 11, 2024
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Longlegs (2024) |
Mind out for many future Halloweens when someone’s lurking, in creamy denim and a hideous wig, because they’ve come as Longlegs. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jul 11, 2024
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Fly Me to the Moon (2024) |
At 132 minutes, with a lumpen hero bogging it down, it sometimes seems to be attempting a tap dance in moon boots. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jul 09, 2024
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The Last Breath (2024) |
Swedish journeyman Joachim Hedén has made something competent, basic and profoundly unsurprising. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jul 05, 2024
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The Exorcism (2024) |
The stakes are just feeble, for all Crowe’s perfectly solid efforts, and the default level of dinge in the film saps all excitement away. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Arcadian (2024) |
Brewer also neglects the mightiest special effects at his disposal, which are Cage’s face, voice and hands. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jun 13, 2024
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The Watchers (2024) |
The tone is earnestly odd, taking folklore dead seriously. We’re captive to rules laid down by Fouéré’s witchily intense Madeleine... But the script’s payoffs are way too feeble to justify our growing impatience, and the pacing’s a trudge. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jun 07, 2024
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Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) |
There’s a refreshing level of loose-cannon silliness throughout, even if Smith has to straight-man his way through it all like a felon in handcuffs. Lawrence, never a world-beater at comic timing, lands more of his business than you might expect. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jun 04, 2024
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Young Woman and the Sea (2024) |
Ederle’s story feels honed at all times for maximum sympathy along the way, but can’t help impressing us, a century down the line, as a study in not giving up. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jun 03, 2024
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All We Imagine as Light (2024) |
Hardly a shot lacks ambient magic, like the bunting agitated by a sea breeze. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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The Present (2024) |
The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 23, 2024
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Parthenope (2024) |
We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 22, 2024
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The Shrouds (2024) |
The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions... makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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The Substance (2024) |
It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 –emotionally, as well as physically– that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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Emilia Perez (2024) |
... The film hurtles towards a gun-toting, explosive finale that will be as polarising as everything else. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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The Surfer (2024) |
Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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Oh Canada (2024) |
Banks made it clear that this big interview was all at Leonard’s instigation, a last-ditch attempt to set the record straight. Schrader’s script fluffs those nuances. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 17, 2024
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Bird (2024) |
It’s hard to know what to make of Bird, and indeed, Bird, which could be described as Arnold with a twist. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 17, 2024
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Strictly Confidential (2024) |
Deadly secrets are spilled with the lackadaisical plop of a daytime soap. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 13, 2024
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Mother of the Bride (2024) |
The film's match-making subtlety, let's say, is some way short of Jane Austen level. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 09, 2024
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Unfrosted (2024) |
Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted May 03, 2024
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Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) |
It's a descent into madness as vertiginous as Heart of Darkness, and a portrait of futility as monumental in its irony as Shelley's Ozymandias. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 30, 2024
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A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) |
A Time for Drunken Horses is the first Iranian feature with entirely Kurdish dialogue. If that doesn't get queues forming around the block, it should be added that it's a dynamic entry in this ever-growing national canon. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 30, 2024
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Planet of the Apes (2001) |
As an action-movie skeleton, it's just about there, but the chief failure of Burton's vision is that it remains just that: a skeleton, never fleshed out with the probing, questioning, proper sci-fi intelligence of Schaffner's movie. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 30, 2024
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Boy Kills World (2023) |
The world-building for this berserk odyssey is accomplished in a frenetic first few minutes you may find hard to keep up with: it’s as if the film kicks off with its own trailer. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 26, 2024
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I.S.S. (2023) |
With a modest budget of $14m applied to a concept bursting with potential, the film bides its time sensibly enough, but then screws up every remaining phase of its mission. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 26, 2024
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Abigail (2024) |
Matilda’s Alisha Weir goes impressively off the deep end in this horror-thriller about six criminals who get more than they bargained for. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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The Book of Clarence (2023) |
Stanfield’s dropout charisma can cushion a role fine, but can’t make this one very interesting. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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Bleeding Love (2023) |
We’ve followed this kind of bicker-and-heal therapeutic arc so many times now, the onus falls on all involved to spike it with truth, or at least novelty. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Back to Black (2024) |
Because of the cautious gloss, the film is perhaps less enlightening or truly tragic than it might have been. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 09, 2024
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Girls State (2024) |
In this thought-provoking documentary, girls get the chance to play politics – and their debates about abortion are startlingly nuanced - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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The First Omen (2024) |
Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Seize Them! (2024) |
At least Paul Kaye and John MacMillan get to do some delightfully daft Scandinavian accents as a pair of visiting Vikings who invade in a canoe. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Scoop (2024) |
The director, Philip Martin, plays everything right to the cusp – where you clamp hand to mouth, aghast at remembering that this trainwreck actually happened, and irresistibly compelled to relive it. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Monkey Man (2024) |
Jeez Louise, is it brutal. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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The Sweet East (2023) |
Lillian’s our Alice, then; America a dark-mirror Wonderland. Pinkerton’s script thrusts her down so many of these rabbit-holes, it’s akin to a squirm-inducing tour of his browser history. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Mothers' Instinct (2024) |
Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “a seriousness that fails”. Where does that leave failed camp? Exhibit A: the duffness of Mothers’ Instinct... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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The Beautiful Game (2024) |
Even if many a plot point feels mechanical, Boyce and Sharrock get away with it for one overriding reason: the star wattage coming off Ward is once-per-generation stuff. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Immaculate (2024) |
In fact, many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Damsel (2024) |
Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Memory (2023) |
Insinuating and bravely acted, Memory is plotted like a play: there are shades of Florian Zeller’s The Father, albeit with the dementia theme as only one side of the coin here. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Janet Planet (2023) |
Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 28, 2024
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Seven Veils (2023) |
It’s an egghead exercise, both scrambled and undercooked. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 22, 2024
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Spaceman (2024) |
We’re missing any real sense of awe – but for all its faults, this lands somewhere between noble failure and endearing oddity. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Sasquatch Sunset (2024) |
Any narrative just meanders, while stabs at pathos are undercut by how ludicrously OTT the scatology is. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 20, 2024
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The Outrun (2024) |
Ronan’s physically convincing, with a tough abrasiveness many people of her age may recognise. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 19, 2024
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Treasure (2024) |
Sombre, sluggish and usually on the right side of respectable, Julia von Heinz’s film eventually bottles its task, coming to mollifying conclusions about the 20th century’s starkest horrors. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 18, 2024
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Cuckoo (2024) |
Mileage will vary, but it’s possible to respond to the whole film like a lab rat that would rather opt out. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 16, 2024
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Small Things Like These (2024) |
Small Things Like These is a tight-lipped Irish drama even more suffused with sadness than the log-line implies, and shouldered with hypnotic grace by a very special Cillian Murphy in his first post-Oppenheimer role. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 16, 2024
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