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Graham Fuller
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
Trans writer-director Schoenbrun’s film is an instant classic, a disquieting but non-judgmental post-modern psychothriller about the value and dangers of wholesale immersion in visual media and the complexities of trans self-identification. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jul 29, 2024
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Chuck Chuck Baby (2023) |
Writer-director Pugh doesn’t conceal her rage at the inhumane ways some men treat women. Her movie is laced with delicate visual and aural flourishes rare in earthy, humour-tinged dramas about the travails of working-class women. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jul 19, 2024
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Silver Haze (2023) |
Silver Haze is exemplary in showing how first love is wondrous until it curdles and how young adults learn -- or don’t, at their peril -- to negotiate that disillusionment and make tough decisions. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 02, 2024
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The Promised Land (2023) |
The movie’s moral shadings aren’t as subtle as Mikkelsen’s acting. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 19, 2024
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This Blessed Plot (2023) |
It says a lot for Adam Ganz’s script and Isaacs’ ability to suspend disbelief for these contrived events that we grow to care for the characters. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jan 30, 2024
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Eileen (2023) |
Hathaway and McKenzie make sweet music together throughout, even when it’s as discordant as Richard Reed Parry’s shrieking jazz score. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Dec 04, 2023
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Tish (2023) |
Paul Sng’s documentary Tish is one of the best British films of 2023 – both a heartfelt tribute to the life and work of the late photographer Tish (born Patricia) Murtha and a timely reminder of the war waged on the nation’s industrial working-class. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 18, 2023
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The Royal Hotel (2023) |
Bolstered by Garner and Henwick’s astute portrayals of women with different sensibilities, Green again proves a sharp storyteller who doesn’t overburden the screen with symbols. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 02, 2023
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Typist Artist Pirate King (2022) |
Macdonald’s sharp performance registers how wearying it can be providing companionship for someone whose consciousness is tuned to radio signals that are constantly being scrambled through no fault of their own. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Oct 28, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) |
Scorsese combines his sprawling crime thriller with an intimate mixed-race love story, one that curdles. This makes for a microcosmic approach to the Native American genocide that couldn’t be more wrenching. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Oct 20, 2023
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The Old Oak (2023) |
In lieu of humor, The Old Oak champions empathy, unity, unconditional kindness, the exotic idea of communal sharing, the solidarity of ordinary people wherever they come from, a little hope. It’s a magical space in itself. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Sep 29, 2023
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A Year in a Field (2023) |
Not the least of the documentary’s strengths is the realisation that such a world is as sustainable as an unnamed insect, fragility personified, getting its fill on a leaf. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Sep 21, 2023
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My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2022) |
As a primer on the master’s ingenious methods, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is a treat. Cousins should be applauded for his discretion: in showing over and over again how Hitchcock creates and defies expectations in scenes, he never reveals the outcomes. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jul 24, 2023
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Reality (2023) |
Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character... that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the foreseeable future. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 05, 2023
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Amanda (2022) |
So empathetic is Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal of this emotional aggressor, however, that it’s difficult not to root for her. Especially if, per William Blake, one’s bag is eternal night rather than sweet delight. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 05, 2023
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Pacifiction (2022) |
Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically enhanced by Artur Tort’s fly-on-the-wall widescreen cinematography. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 24, 2023
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In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 (2022) |
An enthralling and often amusing experience. It’s also disconcerting if you labour under the illusion that the people who make the music you love enjoy each other’s company while they’re making it, perhaps forging spiritual bonds. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 10, 2023
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In the Middle (2022) |
Pondering what drives these apparently sane individuals to do such an onerous job, director-producer Greg Cruttwell's documentary is a vibrant study in diversity and concomitant prejudice that benefits from his light touch. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 03, 2023
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021) |
Charming animated tale of a bereft one-inch shell overdoes the sentiment.
- The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 18, 2023
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January (2021) |
Doomy it may be, but Paunov’s allegorical folk chiller is also a joy -- a playful grim fairytale that disturbs the imagination more than the viscera. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 01, 2023
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The Substitute (2022) |
Much of The Substitute’s vivid realism and immediacy as a moment-to-moment experience owes to the Polish cinematographer Wojciech Staron’s darting hand-held cinematography. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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Empire of Light (2022) |
Though a heartfelt and well-meaning personal project, the first film written solely by the director feels inauthentic, a simulacrum of the lived-in experience it should be. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jan 09, 2023
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Rimini (2022) |
The spectacle of Richie slouching almost daintily on his Toad of Toad Hall legs past Rimini's mist-shrouded shore and liminal spaces carries metaphorical weight: he’s a monument to selfishness and fraudulence in an entropic Europe. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Dec 12, 2022
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She Said (2022) |
There’s never a bad moment to hammer home the intolerableness of workplace sex crimes -- and German director Maria Schrader’s movie is especially trenchant in its denunciation of the corporate systems in place. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 29, 2022
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Aftersun (2022) |
Writer-director Charlotte Wells's feature debut Aftersun is a sublime example of how an opaque style can be wedded to an ambiguous storytelling technique without cost to psychological truth. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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Blonde (2022) |
The Cuban-Spanish actress could win awards for her uncanny performance -- if only she had given it in a film with an ounce of compassion and warmth for the brave spirit of Norma Jeane Baker instead of in this reptilian exercise in gloating schadenfreude. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Oct 03, 2022
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Silent Land (2021) |
The film is a caustic allegory of Western indifference in the face of the global humanitarian catastrophe. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Sep 23, 2022
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Her Way (2021) |
Essentially a mother-son survival drama, the film is also a snapshot of France in pain, and one that refuses a bandage. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Aug 26, 2022
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Anaïs in Love (2021) |
More than anything, it’s Anaïs’s vitality that makes her irresistible (in the true sense of that word) and because she adheres to what passes in her world for a code of moral integrity: duty to oneself. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Aug 22, 2022
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Give Them Wings (2022) |
The film version of Hodgson’s 2021 memoir isn’t a world-beater, but it is a crowd-pleasing underdog with guts, grit and an admirable streak of unsentimental humour. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Aug 08, 2022
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Moon, 66 Questions (2021) |
Blessed by the performances of Kokkali and Georgakopoulos -- invalidism has rarely been so feelingly and precisely rendered -- Moon, 66 Questions announces a major new voice in world cinema. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 29, 2022
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Pleasure (2021) |
Pleasure, I would argue, is a film of feminist resistance to the hatred of women that heterosexual phallocentric pornograpy manifests as a response to thwarted male desire. Whatever - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 17, 2022
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Earwig (2021) |
Modish homages aside, Earwig demands constant revisiting. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 13, 2022
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Vortex (2021) |
Vortex is an unignorable howl of pain. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted May 16, 2022
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Murina (2021) |
[Gracija Filipović] is an especially exciting discovery for the reticence, watchfulness and apparent dispassion she brings to the role as she carries the film. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 13, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World (2021) |
Reinsve’s co-stars are note-perfect -- Lie has unusual gravitas -- but it’s she who carries and energizes the movie. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Mar 29, 2022
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The Souvenir Part II (2021) |
It’s a psychologically perceptive drama full of acute observations, yet it’s disconcerting in its social complacency. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 08, 2022
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Titane (2021) |
The miracle of Julia Doucournau's luridly beautiful Palme d'Or-winner is that the memory of the violence puncturing the film's first half recedes as loving tenderness takes hold. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jan 04, 2022
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Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) |
Nationalism, fascism, militarism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and capitalism are all grist for the mill in this withering provocation. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Dec 11, 2021
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Drive My Car (2021) |
The impeccable Drive My Car cuts close to the bone of romantic and familial relationships and the fraught issue of trust and betrayal. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 22, 2021
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The Power of the Dog (2021) |
Cumberbatch does his richest film work here -- as does Dunst -- though he's more at ease as the relaxed, avuncular Phil schooling his protegé than as the cruel oppressor. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Nov 19, 2021
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The Ballad of Billy McCrae (2021) |
The Ballad of Billy McCrae should have greater relevance, but it does at least pass muster as a tale of corrupt power and psychologically twisted motives. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Sep 24, 2021
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Our Ladies (2019) |
It's often the company one keeps that makes a journey worthwhile, not the destination. That's as true for the five ebullient Fort William schoolgirls making their first trip to Edinburgh in Our Ladies as it is for the film's audience. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Aug 27, 2021
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A Quiet Place Part II (2021) |
You daren't look away from a film that passes in a flash, ending at the poiint A Quiet Place Part III begins. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Jun 07, 2021
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Frankie (2019) |
Sadly, Sach's new film Frankie pales beside its predecessors, despite the presence of Isabelle Huppert and Brendan Gleeson and a postcard-perfect Portuguese Riviera backdrop. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted May 29, 2021
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Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008) |
Rembrandt's J'Accuse-the first of nine documentaries Greenaway is making about classic paintings-is rigorous and enthralling. - Artforum
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| Posted Apr 20, 2021
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Undine (2020) |
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy - Christian Petzold's optimistic romantic tragedy Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 19, 2021
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The Columnist (2020) |
Never better than when humorously expressing quizzicalness through everyday mannerisms, [Katja] Herbers (from TV's Manhunt, Westworld, and Evil) gives a typically understated performance as Femke. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Apr 02, 2021
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The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1925) |
The movie's enduring beauty resides in the exquisiteness of Reininger's elaborately curlicued and filigreed costumes, foliage, and plumage, all cut by her from black card with scissors. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 22, 2021
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Simple Passion (2020) |
It's a shame the tension created by their feverish pas de deux and the torturous aftermath is dissipated by the awful selection of non-diegetic pop songs added to the soundtrack. - The Arts Desk
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| Posted Feb 22, 2021
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