Eugene Weekly (OR) - Rotten Tomatoes

Eugene Weekly (OR)

Eugene Weekly (OR) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Molly Templeton, Rick Levin
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
Saint Frances (2020)

Molly Templeton

O'Sullivan's script knows when to press and when to pull back, and the entire cast is beautifully comfortable in director Thompson's hands.
Posted May 20, 2020
2
Phoenix, Oregon (2020)

Molly Templeton

Lived-in, warm and life-sized...
Posted Apr 6, 2020
3
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2020)

Rick Levin

Mostly, the documentary conveys the way The Band, a product of the '60s, stood both inside and outside the culture of the time.
Posted Mar 5, 2020
4
Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)

Molly Templeton

I'm ready for the sequel.
Posted Mar 2, 2020
5
The Lodge (2020)

Rick Levin

The Lodge takes everyday family dysfunction and cranks the knob to 11, and the result is a postmodern fairy tale that brilliantly churns our contemporary fears and phobias into something resembling a 21st-century Hansel and Gretel.
Posted Feb 28, 2020
6
Color Out of Space (2020)

Rick Levin

Stanley, with tasteful precision, walks the finest tightrope between Lovecraftian grandiosity and grindhouse grit, resulting in a movie that is both really scary when it's scary and really funny when it's funny, and supremely in control of both poles.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
7
1917 (2020)

Rick Levin

Cue awards season. This one's a shoo-in for the Oscars, which can't resist imitation, regurgitation and the great-man theory of bunk history.
Posted Jan 16, 2020
8
Uncut Gems (2019)

Rick Levin

Uncut Gems spools out like an Old Testament parable updated for our late-capitalist collapse, a timely tale of greed, envy and idolatry which - like that chunk of mined rock - hides an eternally glimmering truth inside its jagged exterior.
Posted Jan 9, 2020
9
Honey Boy (2019)

Rick Levin

I can't imagine what sort of emotional reckoning, not to mention courage and risk, was involved for LeBeouf to bare his soul - and his family's past - with such raw vulnerability, but the results are invigorating.
Posted Dec 19, 2019
10
Knives Out (2019)

Molly Templeton

Knives Out effectively re-establishes Johnson post-The Last Jedi as a filmmaker with a lot more on his mind than just franchise pictures.
Posted Dec 19, 2019
11
The Irishman (2019)

Rick Levin

For all its tragedy, the story of The Irishman is told with love - a grudging but expansive love, one that neither condemns nor praises but rather looks deep inside each character to find a strangled humanity.
Posted Dec 6, 2019
12
Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Rick Levin

Beneath the madcap action, the goony characters and Wes Anderson scenery beats a big heart coursing with the stuff of life, against all odds and, often, in the throes of unspeakable crimes.
Posted Nov 7, 2019
13
The Lighthouse (2019)

Rick Levin

Eggers balances the film's darkly religious and malevolently Freudian themes by portraying the visceral realities of two men scrunched together in ramshackle surroundings on an island of rain and rock.
Posted Oct 28, 2019
14
Monos (2019)

Rick Levin

Monos has the feeling of being dropped with no map into the middle of a world in collapse, and the confusion on screen telegraphs a kind of psychic and social fracture.
Posted Oct 17, 2019
15
The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)

Rick Levin

If our humanity is going to be restored, fostered and buttressed, it's art like this that will accomplish the deed, by reminding us all what it means to believe in one another.
Posted Sep 12, 2019
16
Ready or Not (2019)

Rick Levin

Despite the cartoonish exterior, Ready or Not is a nasty movie, a millennial revenge fable that takes full cathartic aim at the monstrousness of our social upheaval.
Posted Aug 29, 2019
17
Maiden (2019)

Rick Levin

Exaltation, not outrage, is the primary experience of this film.
Posted Aug 22, 2019
18
Melvin (2009)

Rick Levin

Channeling the spirit of Troma's low-budget horror grinders, director Henry Weintraub creates a decisively anti-John Hughes teen fantasy, full of high-concept raunch and low-blow delight.
Posted Aug 22, 2019
19
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)

Rick Levin

Tarantino has upped his game with this one, and in the process revealed the mature sensibility of a filmmaker capable of looking backward without simply cannibalizing his own achievements and becoming a self-parody.
Posted Aug 1, 2019
20
Midsommar (2019)

Rick Levin

As in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," Aster hints that the price of paradise is not dreaming; it is blood.
Posted Jul 3, 2019
21
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2019)

Rick Levin

Directed by Pamela B. Green, this documentary is at once a love letter to and a furious argument for the lasting legacy and inarguable genius of Guy-Blaché.
Posted Jun 27, 2019
22
Late Night (2019)

Molly Templeton

The movie isn't without its clichés... but Kaling and director Nisha Ganatra build in nuance wherever possible.
Posted Jun 21, 2019
23
Booksmart (2019)

Rick Levin

Wilde humanizes this much maligned but rarely understood generation, giving it a voice that is properly rapturous, chaotic and, yes, dignified.
Posted May 30, 2019
24
Tolkien (2019)

Molly Templeton

Tolkien has no idea how that magic happens - no idea how to show it, no idea how to infuse a film about a master of imagination with anything but the most literal of fantastic imagery. Its subject deserved better.
Posted May 24, 2019
25
Rafiki (2019)

Rick Levin

Director Wanuri Kahiu deftly balances vibrant, expansive scenes of Kenyan street life with more-intimate peeks into the relationship between Kena and Ziki, evoking a very specific sense of time and place that only heightens the story's emotional impact.
Posted May 9, 2019
26
Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Molly Templeton

These broad-appeal movies have to please a lot of people just enough to keep us invested, and this one gets the job done.
Posted May 2, 2019
27
High Life (2019)

Rick Levin

Denis' film defies all categorization: If it's a sci-fi movie, so is Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, and if it's horror, so is David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.
Posted Apr 29, 2019
28
Hellboy (2019)

Molly Templeton

Hellboy wants to have it both ways, to cover familiar ground and present a new story, and it fails at both.
Posted Apr 25, 2019
29
Us (2019)

Rick Levin

Peele proves that he's not going to be content resting on his laurels, and that he's fearless and talented enough to hold a mirror up to our own worst selves - literally, it turns out.
Posted Apr 2, 2019
30
Dragged Across Concrete (2019)

Rick Levin

Dark, violent and, at times, wickedly funny, Zahler's film harkens to the golden era of independent film, though it's hardly an exercise in simple nostalgia.
Posted Mar 22, 2019
31
Captain Marvel (2019)

Molly Templeton

Captain Marvel is about Carol - it's not about saving the world, though that happens along the way. The antagonist, a brilliantly cast Ben Mendelsohn, is not the problem. Something much bigger - and subtler - is.
Posted Mar 20, 2019
32
Micmacs (Micmacs à tire-larigot) (2010)

Molly Templeton

Micmacs is clever, sweet, beautifully shot and disappointingly unsatisfying.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
33
Some Days Are Better Than Others (2011)

Molly Templeton

[Matt] McCormick's eye for the small things that change a day, or a life, is sharp and compassionate; he finds the moments that initially seem unremarkable and follows them until they gradually transform into something greater.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
34
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2011)

Molly Templeton

Tucker and Dale is a surprisingly sweet movie, even when kids are chucking themselves into wood chippers or getting accidentally impaled on conveniently located sharp sticks.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
35
Mr. Nice (2011)

Molly Templeton

Part of the problem with Mr. Nice is that the endless sequences of [Howard] Marks and company moving, packing, hiding or hiding drugs lead to a muddled, disconnected narrative that lacks emotional impact.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
36
Skeletons (2010)

Molly Templeton

The way [Nick] Whitfield never bounds his characters' existences with biography, gives Skeletons the resonance of a short story that contains an entire life, painted on a tiny canvas but composed of vital details that tell all the important truths.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
37
Lemmy (2011)

Molly Templeton

Lemmy is a fascinating, slightly overlong, almost-warts-and-all documentary about Motörhead's bassist/lead singer.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
38
Cold Weather (2011)

Molly Templeton

Cold Weather is more formally lovely than any mumblecore film I've yet seen (and I do have a modest taste for the genre, if you can really call it that).
Posted Feb 27, 2019
39
Skateland (2011)

Molly Templeton

Skateland, Anthony Burns' 1983-set coming of age story, is warm, welcoming and seen through a high gloss of nostalgia.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
40
How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

Molly Templeton

How to Train Your Dragon, an animated wonder of a film, does have often-familiar, heartwarming themes about individuality, acceptance, teamwork and prosthetics. It also has wicked awesome dragons...
Posted Feb 27, 2019
41
Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry (2008)

Molly Templeton

You don't have to be a tattoo junkie to find this story fascinating as a vivid, historical look at a subculture and the way it has developed, expanded and become commercialized.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
42
Hood To Coast (2010)

Molly Templeton

Lovingly pieced together from a patchwork of stories, Hood to Coast is gorgeously shot and cheerfully sincere.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
43
How To Die In Oregon (2011)

Molly Templeton

For a film about death, How to Die in Oregon is awfully life-affirming.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
44
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Molly Templeton

The obnoxious and ungrateful shall inherit the Autobots, the power and the cash.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
45
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)

Molly Templeton

[The Best Exotic Marigold] Hotel charms while you're watching it, lightly pushes a few buttons (some unintentionally), and gives you little to chew on when you leave the theater.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
46
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

Molly Templeton

Beasts [of the Southern Wild] has the contradictory, inevitable, glorious feel of a myth, a folk tale about a place that never was but is everywhere, in a time that's entirely now and could have been decades ago.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
47
Lawless (2012)

Molly Templeton

Complex, horrifying, pitch-perfect and exceedingly well acted, it's the near-brilliant film you never expected at the end of summer.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
48
Sleepwalk With Me (2012)

Molly Templeton

Sleepwalk [With Me] takes familiar material and twists it slightly, bringing new themes into focus even as it relies heavily on [Mike] Birbiglia's tales of screwy gigs, stoic audiences and downright dangerous sleepwalking episodes.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
49
Elena (2012)

Molly Templeton

Luxurious cinematography, careful choices about focus and editing, and excellent, constrained performances, particularly from [Nadezhda] Markina, give Elena much greater depths than its plot suggests.
Posted Feb 27, 2019
50
Samsara (2012)

Molly Templeton

I can't fault the film on a technical level and I can appreciate the years of work that went into it. But it's manipulative and condescending, a series of striking visuals appropriated and arranged into a film that's not half as deep as it thinks it is.
Posted Feb 26, 2019