The Film Verdict - Rotten Tomatoes

The Film Verdict

The Film Verdict is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Boyd van Hoeij, Deborah Young, Stephen Dalton
Rating
Title/Year
Author
1
Ascension (2021)

Stephen Dalton

A visually overstuffed, mostly mesmerising audiovisual symphony, even if it relies a little too heavily on arresting images over hard facts.
Posted Jan 19, 2022
2
Flee (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Touching on timely issues including illegal immigration, LGBT rights and recent grim developments in Afghanistan, Flee is a generally compelling, moving work with strong awards potential.
Posted Jan 19, 2022
3
Drive My Car (2021)

Deborah Young

Hamaguchi's long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.
Posted Jan 19, 2022
4
Lamb (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Eerily beautiful and strangely moving, even if questions remain whether any substance lies behind the film's boldly WTF premise.
Posted Jan 19, 2022
5
The Four Walls (2021)

Deborah Young

Ghobadi also sounds a full register of genre keys, from the blackest tragedy and furious drama to paradoxical humor, but with more ambition than conviction. One is left wondering how to react to Boran's drama.
Posted Nov 14, 2021
6
Titane (2021)

Stephen Dalton

A gloriously lurid Oscar submission, Julia Ducournau's prize-winning thriller about a gender-blurring serial killer with a fetish for sex with cars is funny, fast and furious.
Posted Nov 14, 2021
7
A Hero (2022)

Stephen Dalton

A little too flat and prosaic for its rich, dark themes. While there are sporadic flashes of visual poetry, the low-voltage naturalism and overstretched runtime drag in places. Could use a little more stylistic daring, dramatic punch and nimble editing.
Posted Nov 3, 2021
8
Clara Sola (2021)

Deborah Young

Costa Rica dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya gives an eerie, riveting perf but it only goes so far in this unstructured tale of magic realism and female power from debuting director Nathalie Alvarez Mesen.
Posted Oct 29, 2021
9
Compartment No. 6 (2021)

Deborah Young

An engrossingly offbeat rail movie (...) Fully modulated yet natural performances by the two leads, Seidi Haarla and Yuriy Borisov, walk us through the human condition with the nuances of a big Russian novel.
Posted Oct 29, 2021
10
Invisible Demons (2021)

Deborah Young

An apocalyptic vision of Delhi's life-threatening pollution that floods the screen with present-day disasters.
Posted Oct 29, 2021
11
DASHCAM (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Taken on its own terms as a punky, adrenalised, irreverent joyride of a movie, Dashcam is consistently engaging and hilarious.
Posted Oct 28, 2021
12
Life of Ivanna (2021)

Deborah Young

Documaker Renato Borrayo Serrano offers eye-opening glimpses into the harrowing and chaotic life of a modern Nenets woman that overturn stereotypes about Arctic life.
Posted Oct 25, 2021
13
Murina (2021)

Deborah Young

Extols female rebellion but walks a dangerous tightrope connecting the male gaze with the body of a rebellious 17-year-old girl.
Posted Oct 25, 2021
14
Olga (2021)

Boyd van Hoeij

A soberly staged but intense drama. (...) Budiashkina impresses as a gymnast and as the gloomy adolescent who tries so hard to be an athlete that she often forgets to simply be a teenager who doesn't need to have all the answers all the time.
Posted Oct 25, 2021
15
Hive (2021)

Boyd van Hoeij

Though the cinematography and production design are quite bland, viewers will remain invested in the story because of Gashi's layered performance.
Posted Oct 23, 2021
16
The Middle Man (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Norwegian director Bent Hamer's English-language drama is full of quirky charm, but gets stuck in the middle between comedy and tragedy.
Posted Oct 18, 2021
17
Ear for Eye (2021)

Stephen Dalton

James Bond star Lashana Lynch joins a large ensemble cast in this powerful stage-to-screen drama for the Black Lives Matter era.
Posted Oct 18, 2021
18
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand and a solo Joel Coen turn Shakespeare's bloody classic into a ravishingly beautiful game of thrones.
Posted Oct 18, 2021
19
Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de fuego) (2021)

Deborah Young

Tatiana Huezo makes her dazzling feature fiction debut with the unforgettable Prayers for the Stolen.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
20
Django & Django (2021)

Deborah Young

Tarantino explains his love for Sergio Corbucci's Spaghetti Westerns and reveals a lot about his own work in the process in Luca Rea's irresistible, eye-opening documentary.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
21
Maixabel (2021)

Deborah Young

Icair Bollain chillingly dramatizes the real-life encounter between a strong-minded widow and the repentant Basque terrorists who murdered her husband.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
22
One Second (2020)

Deborah Young

Zhang Yimou ironically salutes the movies and their fervent audiences during China's Cultural Revolution, in a stylistic pastiche that drags a little.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
23
Rhino (2021)

Deborah Young

The thing is, they don't really know why they're so bad or what they're after - and the film offers precious few clues. (...) Many viewers of this Venice Horizons films will wonder what the point is.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
24
America Latina (2021)

Deborah Young

If the narrative thread is frustrating, Elio Germano (he played one of the off-the-wall parents in Favolacce) keeps you guessing.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
25
The Catholic School (2021)

Deborah Young

A paradoxical conclusion that's not at all convincing in a film that elides social and historical analysis and lays an uncomfortable amount of the responsibility on school and family for a terrible true crime.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
26
Captain Volkonogov Escaped (2021)

Deborah Young

A grotesque comedy set in the 1930s that gives full vent to the Russian lust for metaphor, mysticism and visual expressionism. (...) A coherent stylistic choice that pays off handsomely in the final moments.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
27
Karmalink (2021)

Deborah Young

An ambitious sci-fi mystery and teenage adventure yarn set in the near future in Buddhist Cambodia.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
28
Blue Moon (2021)

Deborah Young

An assured and absorbing first feature; another gift from contemporary Romanian cinema.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
29
The Good Boss (2021)

Deborah Young

Javier Bardem is the main attraction as a smooth-talking factory owner in Fernando Leon de Aranoa's drawing room social satire about modern labor.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
30
The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic (2021)

Deborah Young

Finnish filmmaker Teemu Nikki's story about disability moves you for a long list of complicated reasons.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
31
Reflection (2021)

Deborah Young

Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych follows up his Venice Horizons-winning 'Atlantis' with a perturbing if less incisive true horror tale of his country's war with Russia.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
32
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2021)

Deborah Young

AN occasionally amusing but mostly treadless fantasy.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
33
Sundown (2022)

Deborah Young

It is a very sad film that not all viewers will be anxious to spend time with, and it is a mysterious one that requires thought to understand what is going on onscreen.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
34
Last Night in Soho (2021)

Deborah Young

A girl's exhilarating mind-trip through swinging London of the Sixties turns wild and woolly and full of zombies in Edgar Wright's multi-genre treat.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
35
The Lost Daughter (2021)

Deborah Young

Strays too far from Italy to be convincing, but a stunningly good Olivia Colman saves the day.
Posted Oct 15, 2021
36
Benediction (2021)

Deborah Young

The life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon movingly expresses the traumas of war and love, in one of writer-director Terence Davies' finest creations.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
37
The Card Counter (2021)

Deborah Young

One of Paul Schrader's most complex and profound reflections on personal traumatic memory bleeds into the American tragedy of Abu Ghraib in this anguishing drama.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
38
The Power of the Dog (2021)

Deborah Young

Jane Campion's bold cinematic interpretation of Thomas Savage's novel (...) is a sensuous, aestheticized Netflix release, whose meticulous detail and gay subplot are admirable but a little tiring.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
39
Dune (2021)

Deborah Young

There must be a reason Frank Herbert's sci fi masterwork Dune defies cinematic adaptation, the latest attempt being director Denis Villeneuve's attentively lensed but humorless actioner aimed at teen fans of the book and Timothée Chalamet.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
40
The Tender Bar (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Monahan's screenplay aspires to the hard-bitten authenticity of a Raymond Carver anthology, or at least a Bruce Springsteen album, but it too often delivers stiffly drawn characters and tinny jukebox sentimentality.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
41
As Far As I Can Walk (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Its emotional power sometimes gets a little lost in translation, while its literary conceit can feel more stylistic gimmick than essential dramatic element in places, but the overall grand ambition is hard to fault.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
42
Bird Atlas (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Feeling like a gentler European cousin of HBO's hit family saga Succession in places, this cautionary fable swaps high-voltage boardroom powerplay in favor of sly social satire and bittersweet absurdism.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
43
Runner (2013)

Stephen Dalton

Blazevicius is playing a more ambiguous and subtle game than first impressions suggest, teasing the audience with his unreliable narrator, volatile emotional temperature and hints of a deeper state-of-the-nation subtext.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
44
Three Minutes - A Lengthening (2021)

Stephen Dalton

This formally bold essay film is a quietly moving memorial to a lost Europe and to countless lives cut short by the Holocaust.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
45
True Things (2021)

Stephen Dalton

A sumptuous sensory feast, but it occasionally jars as drama. While Wilson and Burke are both riveting on screen, they sometimes risk slipping into mannered caricatures of their marginalised lower-class protagonists.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
46
Otar's Death (2021)

Stephen Dalton

A fractious family drama with breathless thriller elements and a deep streak of black comedy. Bliadze's screenplay elevates personal tragedy into a sardonic state-of-the-nation commentary.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
47
The Harder They Fall (2021)

Stephen Dalton

The plot is a fistful of cliches, and the humour as subtle as a shotgun blast to the face, but the rich ensemble cast and handsome New Mexico locations add up to a glossy overall package that is best enjoyed as deluxe bubblegum entertainment.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
48
Boiling Point (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Stephen Graham gives a raw, red-meat performance as a troubled chef in this sizzling single-shot drama.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
49
Belfast (2021)

Stephen Dalton

A warm, funny and visually sumptuous treat.
Posted Oct 14, 2021
50
Ali & Ava (2021)

Stephen Dalton

Barnard mostly avoids heavy-handed melodrama in favour of something more nuanced, humane and lyrical.
Posted Oct 14, 2021