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Todd McCarthy
Tomatometer-approved critic
(Photo Credit: Jesse Grant/ Contributor/ WireImage /Getty Images)
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Planet of the Apes (2001) |
Largely listless and witless, this extensive reworking of the 1968 sci-fi favorite simply isn’t very exciting or imaginative; most surprisingly, given the material, it’s also Burton’s most conventional and literal-minded film. - Variety
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| Posted May 01, 2024
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Almost Famous (2000) |
[Almost Famous] is eager to please and does just that, but it’s neither as outright funny nor as resonant as it seems to want to be. - Variety
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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Smoke Signals (1998) |
A light, entertaining treatment of serious themes that speaks with a distinctive, unusual voice and instinctively pulls back from the temptation to be solemn and pretentious. - Variety
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| Posted Nov 08, 2023
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Old Dads (2023) |
A boorish and obnoxiously vulgar comedy that, since it can’t claim any other great distinction, might well have been expressly written to break the all-time record for use of the f-word in the major studio movie. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Oct 20, 2023
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Fast Charlie (2023) |
[Fast Charlie] puts you in a position to either embrace it as fun or discard it as foolish. What tilts you in the former direction is the energy Noyce injects into the silliness as well as the kick that results from pushing the material so far. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Oct 09, 2023
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Janet Planet (2023) |
Both disarming and odd, a film both lovely for its observational aptitude and at times mildly annoying in its smarty-pants conversational cleverness. Whatever else you can say, it’s an absolute original. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Oct 02, 2023
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Expend4bles (2023) |
Expendabes 4 is ambushed by its own utter lack of new ideas or better ways to use the talents of the many charismatic actors who did turn up to work for various lengths of time. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 21, 2023
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Fingernails (2023) |
Yes, the director has obvious gifts that we’ve seen before and which surface momentarily even in this miscalculation. Still, why he chose this off-putting material for his American debut, especially with its grotesque climax, is a real head-scratcher. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 13, 2023
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Traffic (2000) |
Enormously ambitious and masterfully made, Traffic represents docudrama-style storytelling at a very high level. - Variety
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| Posted Sep 08, 2023
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Daddio (2023) |
Sean Penn is at his absolute best here in a tremendously engaging performance as a salty working-class guy with an endless supply of opinions and ways of drawing out his passengers, while Dakota Johnson more than holds her own. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 05, 2023
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Wildcat (2023) |
O’Connor’s personality and the filmmakers’ attentiveness to detail make this oddball character study worthwhile for literati looking for new angles from which to make observations about perennial subjects for biographical analyses. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 02, 2023
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Rustin (2023) |
Colman Domingo blows through the title role like a force of nature in Rustin, an exhilarating biographical drama about the highly significant but not widely known civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 02, 2023
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Saltburn (2023) |
[Emerald Fennell] reveals a strong hand behind the camera, even if the trajectory of the story feels rather overwrought and familiar. Nonetheless, the writing is alive and often amusing, giving the fine cast a lot to play with. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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El Conde (2023) |
The film strikes a remarkable balance among elements that are potently dramatic, darkly amusing wistfully streaked and, at every moment, brilliantly accomplished. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story (2023) |
The film touches on many aspects of life, big and small, and Blomkamp keeps things running at a brisk clip. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Aug 08, 2023
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Meg 2: The Trench (2023) |
Meg 2 rather wears out its welcome very early on as it begins feeling like a tedious, repetitive joke. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Aug 03, 2023
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They Cloned Tyrone (2023) |
If not well balanced or fully achieved, They Cloned Tyrone is provocative in its mix of sci-fi and contemporary political elements; it’s unusual, gutsy and entirely welcome as something different and unexpected in the genre. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jul 14, 2023
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The Matrix (1999) |
An eye-popping but incoherent extravaganza of morphing and superhuman martial arts. Ultra-cool visuals that truly deliver something new to the sci-fi action lexicon will make this time-jumping thriller a must-see among genre fans. - Variety
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| Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) |
This is a serious, sharp-minded and top-tier action film by any standard, and many fans will no doubt mollify themselves by seeing it more than once before Part Two opens a year from now. This is Hollywood action filmmaking at its peak. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jul 05, 2023
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No Hard Feelings (2023) |
The film is funny, gross, ballsy, lame, daring and uncertain, more or less in equal measure. The leading lady is all of the above, definitely all in and yet always ingratiating... - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Extraction 2 (2023) |
Even seasoned pros and cinephiles will gape and wonder how they pulled off any number of the shots and sequences here... This may not be a particularly good film, but you’ll definitely see things here in a way that you’ve never seen them before. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jun 15, 2023
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The Machine (2023) |
The Machine is loud, gross, obnoxious and overbearing. It’s also disarming, quick-witted, fast moving and becomes increasingly funny. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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About My Father (2023) |
So unfunny it’s embarrassing, this is an over-the-top, under-achieving generational comedy that feels like it was written in the mid- to late-1960s and has been moldering in a drawer ever since. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
A madly quirky surprise that oozes creativity at every turn. At the same time, however, it sometimes seems to be reaching for serious creative epiphanies that aren’t forthcoming and which foster puzzlement rather than insight. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted May 23, 2023
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Fast X (2023) |
With its seemingly inexhaustible supply of madly amusing action, this high-octane extravaganza attempts, and not infrequently succeeds, in obliterating any resistance with its disarming, outrageous and self-aware injections of often-hilarious camp. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted May 17, 2023
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The Mother (2023) |
Lopez and Caro seem very much in sync as they relate the sprawling tale in a disciplined manner that maintains interest and curiosity, if not high levels of downright excitement. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted May 15, 2023
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Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World (2023) |
Eventually, if you like boxing and are willing to accept this as a sanitized and truncated version of the full story, it’s not hard to sit back and enjoy the eventful aspects of the big man’s life and his engaging personality. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Apr 27, 2023
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A Good Person (2023) |
Zach Braff’s latest feature excels at taking the measure of how people cope with personal tragedy and does so in a vital and engaging way that’s far more invigorating than depressing. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Mar 22, 2023
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Champions (2023) |
In a very modest way this goofball minor-league basketball yarn throws off enough amiable and vaguely raucous charm to keep a smile on sports fans’ faces much of time. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Joan Baez I Am a Noise (2023) |
This elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Feb 27, 2023
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80 for Brady (2023) |
A fitfully amusing, if entirely innocuous account of a cute little sidebar to a major sporting event, and it’s the ladies who carry the day, or at least will for its intended audience. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Feb 01, 2023
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Drift (2023) |
Not only has Singapore director Anthony Chen set himself a tough task in this ambitious adaptation, he has also notably succeeded in making viewers see the world through very different eyes. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 28, 2023
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The Accidental Getaway Driver (2023) |
This is a film that draws you in and offers sufficient satisfactions to attract genre aficionados and others keen to partake of some good new brew in an old bottle. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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Bad Behaviour (2023) |
The filmmaking itself compels attention simply from its unusual and well-designed settings, characters and thematic preoccupations; despite its shortcomings, it sticks in the mind as something fresh and personal. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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Cat Person (2023) |
A disarmingly creepy film with a disturbing edge that will surely trigger further discussion about contemporary dating and romantic protocols. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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The Starling Girl (2023) |
Parmet shows dramatic confidence as she sets up a story that serves as a reminder of how dominant religion-based societies are in significant swaths of American life. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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To Live and Die and Live (2023) |
Stylistically, To Live and Die and Live is cut down to the bone, with the essential action being conveyed but with a vital terseness that both frustrates and keeps you on your toes. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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The Pale Blue Eye (2022) |
A drama with good and particular qualities rather than one that’s genuinely exciting. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Dec 22, 2022
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
There is beauty everywhere you look, from the spectacle provided by nature’s creations, the tactile sense you get from the skin and hair of humans and other natural life, and the emotional expressions of strength and sensitivity. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Dec 13, 2022
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Spoiler Alert (2022) |
The film challenges itself to be both amusing and emotionally involving where matters of life and death are concerned. Fortunately, it manages to more or less succeed on both counts due to its ever-ready wise-crack nature and sympathetic direction. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Nov 29, 2022
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Black Adam (2022) |
Johnson is the man. Unfortunately, such arguably worthwhile matters as narrative coherence, appealing characterizations and suspense struggle to emerge here amidst a veritable logjam of intentions and tones. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Oct 18, 2022
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Luckiest Girl Alive (2022) |
As formulaic as it is, the story nonetheless confronts the persistence of guilt over past questionable behavior and how people struggle to deal with it, even long after the fact. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Oct 08, 2022
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Theater of Thought (2022) |
This is decidedly a talking-heads sort of film, but the talk and the heads are worth listening to and beholding. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 22, 2022
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My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2022) |
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is a frisky, free-wheeling, deeply informed salute from one very clever British chap to another who was also rather more than that, one who made his first film 97 years ago and whose work is still widely seen and known. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 20, 2022
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The Corridors of Power (2022) |
The Corridors of Power provides a privileged opportunity to hear and assess the views of many of the key players from those years, as well as to examine the reasons why they acted as they did. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 16, 2022
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Carmen (2022) |
From almost any perspective—dramatic, cinematic, political or musical–this is a thoroughgoing wash-out. It has no sense of cinema. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 13, 2022
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The Lost King (2022) |
A modest but thoroughly captivating tale that has the look and feel of so many good British films of 25 or 30 years ago, a quality that can no doubt be significantly attributed to that reliable all-rounder Stephen Frears at the helm. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 11, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) |
A simple and diabolical tale of a friendship’s end shot through with bristling humor and sudden moments of startling violence. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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Women Talking (2022) |
Immaculately made, intellectually adventurous and politically incisive... - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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The Wonder (2022) |
Atmospheric and intriguing up to a point, it nonetheless feels like much ado about a mildly curious situation that’s been milked for rather more than it’s worth. - Deadline Hollywood Daily
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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