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Leo Goldsmith
Tomatometer-approved critic
http://notcoming.com
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Trial (2023) |
Somber as these proceedings are, what’s most distinctive about the film’s distillation of the trial is its perhaps inevitable element of theater. - Artforum
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| Posted Jan 26, 2024
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Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
Even Beau Is Afraid’s character portraits—usually a strength in Aster’s work—seem, despite the tumescent running time, strangely underdeveloped, even caricatural...it’s a surprisingly uninspired effort. - 4Columns
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| Posted Apr 21, 2023
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Riotsville, USA (2022) |
This fantasy -- one of prevention, perfectibility, and preparedness -- is Riotsville’s true theme, and its principal irony resides in the way the documentary’s own mechanics are entangled with its construction. - Artforum
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| Posted Sep 15, 2022
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Ahed's Knee (2021) |
It conveys the simplistic sense that the largest issues of the dayof institutionalized violence, oppression, and social stratificationare mere personal pathologies. Isnt the point not to free your mind, but to free Palestine? - 4Columns
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| Posted Mar 25, 2022
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All Light, Everywhere (2021) |
The subject matter at hand demands a degree of toughness that All Light, Everywhere shies away from in favor of a more fluid rumination that doesn't quite land on a point. - 4Columns
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| Posted Jun 04, 2021
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Just Don't Think I'll Scream (2019) |
Just Don't Think plays a game of its own, then, candidly revealing one moment and slyly obscuring the next. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Feb 18, 2021
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(undefined) |
The film functions much like their analytical camera -- allowing us to bring the past closer to us, to examine it in detail, to reach out and touch it. - Hyperallergic
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| Posted Feb 22, 2020
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Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001) |
The monster battles... are among the best in the entire series. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 21, 2019
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Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (1994) |
While there is an overall lack of excitement... the film nonetheless delivers on anonymous citizens fleeing in terror, roaring beasts blasting and beating the hell out of each other, and iconic landmarks and urban infrastructure being utterly devastated. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 21, 2019
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Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) |
While Terror of Mechagodzilla is not exactly a good film, it at least veers into slightly darker territory than some of the later Showa efforts. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 13, 2019
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Son of Godzilla (1967) |
This showdown, a father-and-son team up held amid a blizzard orchestrated in a last ditch effort by the experimental meteorologists, is the film's true highlight, a curious denouement to an already odd film. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 13, 2019
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Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) |
Invasion has many pleasures, not least of which is its resemblance to Honda's earlier, more purely sci-fi ventures... But perhaps its most remarkable feature is its subtle, but noticeable steps in rehabilitating Godzilla's character. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 11, 2019
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Transit (2018) |
The shape of Transit becomes close to that of a double helix, in which the convoluted managerial processes of immigration become intertwined in the recursive patterns of desire. - 4Columns
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| Posted Feb 22, 2019
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Los Reyes (2018) |
The documentary is more substantial (and dialectical) than a Facebook dog-spotting video. But it dabbles in the same paradoxes of humanity's peculiar relationship with animals that most animal media share. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Feb 15, 2019
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Eyes Wide Shut (1999) |
This is, one might argue, what the audience has paid to see and what they've always wanted to see: the then-most famous couple in the world, at home in both the literal and figurative sense, unguarded and au naturel. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Oct 27, 2018
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Burning (2018) |
It's a pity that a work so precisely constructed as Burning too often devolves into yet another male-insecurity movie...dwelling intently on male pathology at the level of character psychology and signposting its connections to the problems of the day. - 4Columns
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| Posted Oct 26, 2018
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In the Jungle (2018) |
Barber's overabundance of language and logos - her insistence on the artificiality and constructedness of the Scientist's natural environs - positions the jungle as a space of subconscious play rather than a lost paradise. - Village Voice
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| Posted Feb 20, 2018
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Bitter Money (2016) |
We are not, as in so many a contemporary documentary, made to merely identify with the position of cameraperson, but are forced to consider and find our own ethical and political positions. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jan 16, 2018
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Letters to Max (2014) |
In Letters to Max, the cinema itself serves as a time machine: a vehicle for nostalgia, for reconstructing the past(s) and places lost, but also for accessing a time and place that have not yet arrived. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 10, 2017
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The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) |
Rivers' latest work is a sprawling set of projects whose variety, size, and complexity matches the verbosity of its title. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 10, 2017
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The Human Surge (2016) |
In Williams' film, this pulse of energy is everywhere, running through and between all of the subjects: human, animal, material, ambient, and machinic. - Cinema Scope
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| Posted Nov 10, 2017
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The Death of Louis XIV (2016) |
The film's brief moments of drama and all of its morbid fascination rely on our willingness to observe, in detail, the slow decay of a treasured body. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Oct 14, 2016
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Horse Money (2014) |
All plot synopses are necessarily attenuations, but for Horse Money any summary feels especially futile, or even violent, a crude reduction of its complex network of impossible geographies, fuzzy memories, and jumbled chronologies. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Dec 07, 2015
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Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2013) |
Fleeting though it may be, there is nonetheless a feeling of having completed the routines the film has set out and, perhaps, achieved a sort of understanding. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Dec 07, 2015
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Jauja (2014) |
With Jauja Alonso follows the ever-widening orbit his films have been tracing even further, nudging his trademark concerns... of his earlier work into something considerably more expansive, playful, even supernatural. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Dec 07, 2015
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The Birds (1963) |
The Birds represents better than any other Hitchcock film the extreme polarities of his universe: vicious unpredictability and moral and emotional disorder on the one hand, and rigorous stylistic control and formal organization, on the other. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Dec 16, 2011
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Marnie (1964) |
Marnie's Mama's house is a masterpiece of repressed emotion, a bland domestic space of seemingly placid creams and yellow, rendered in swirling wallpaper and upholstery patterns. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Dec 16, 2011
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Luna (1979) |
Ultimately, while Luna hints at a resolution for its characters that restores the normative balance of the family structure, it also seems to content to keep its vivid beauty and its dark, perverse passions hopelessly entangled. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 29, 2011
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The Tree of Life (2011) |
Tree of Life, in this way, seems unmoored from a linear conception of time and narrative to an extent new to Malick's cinema and quite foreign to Hollywood cinema generally. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted May 31, 2011
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The Matrix (1999) |
It's that balance between blockbuster-style action sequences and in-depth philosophical undertones that I've always admired about The Matrix. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jan 27, 2011
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Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) |
But perhaps Pee-wee's appeal lies precisely in the slightly discomfiting uncertainty of his persona... insufferably giddy, occasionally malevolent, and completely indefatigable; demented, irritating, narcissistic -- and infectiously funny. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jan 25, 2011
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Boxing Gym (2010) |
If anything, Wiseman shows how, in the boxing gym, violence is sublimated in fantasy. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Oct 08, 2010
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Blonde Venus (1932) |
von Sternberg puts forth a typically probing analysis of gender and exploitation that's uncomfortably close to home. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Aug 24, 2010
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Lions Love (1969) |
Varda's film teeters on the edge of total absurdity, running roughshod over cinematic conventions of all kinds while retaining a lucid outsider's perspective on its milieu. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 30, 2010
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Treeless Mountain (2008) |
[The film provides] an enveloping, but plausible recreation of a child's perspective -- fascinated by minutiae, sensitive to pain, and unaware of the workings of time. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 06, 2010
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The Last Movie (1971) |
An astute and rather nasty allegory of Hollywood's cultural imperialism that seemingly could only have come from one of Tinseltown's very own longtime residents. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 06, 2010
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The Exiles (1961) |
There is poetry in this atmosphere as well, suggested not least by the candid, often heartbreaking voiceovers of the main characters. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 06, 2010
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Antichrist (2009) |
A beautiful and ultimately very sad film. - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Jul 06, 2010
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Rancho Notorious (1952) |
There is a distinct hokeyness about Lang's vision of the West--pancake-flat sets in a generic studio-backlot Western town; giant, abstract crab-colored boulders made out of papier-mache, brazenly unnaturalistic stage-lighting--but it's the ardent phoneyne - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Chasing a Dream (2009) |
A grand gesture, an exercise in epic biography that explodes the intimate details of Isaiah's life and its effects on his family onto the screen. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Street of Shame (1956) |
The film's cinematography utilizes an unusual technique for a Mizoguchi film, the close-up, whereby the camera gets steadily closer to each protagonist as the various causes of their downfall to prostitution are revealed. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Tokyo! (2008) |
Sandwiched between Gondry and Bong's variously euphoric entries, Carax's contribution seems either a work of deep cynicism from an inveterate party-pooper or a welcome satirical sour note from one of the great talents of 80s and 90s French cinema. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Stuff and Dough (2001) |
Ultimately, like Lazarescu, Ovidiu becomes a mere cog in a social and economic system that would chew him up without a moment's consideration, and it's Puiu's goal to elevate this and other such stories above their banality and into the realm of myth. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Bigger Than Life (1956) |
Always a shrewd melodramatist, with a particular eye for the domestic space, Ray builds this sense of conflict into the Avery home itself, with its frequently competing horizontal and vertical patterns. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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The Ruins (2008) |
So bereft of creativity that it fails even to deliver to its base--teenage boys--the ghouls and boobs they so desperately want to see. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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A Summer at Grandpa's (1985) |
Hou's film places demands on our powers of observation, insisting that we, like Tung-tung, attend to the minutiae, ironies, and deeper meanings it offers us. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Hairspray (2007) |
Shankman's crassly theatrical attenuation of Hairspray only draws gay culture away from a moment of American history with which it ought to have a great deal in common - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Hairspray (1988) |
The shock Waters's cinema offers, then, is not transcendent, but almost reflexive, implicating the viewer in the awkward complexities of his own humanity and forcing him to either celebrate it or run screaming away. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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Berlin (2007) |
Schnabel's set design, onstage projections, and postproduction add a good deal of visual noise to Reed & company's aural variety, which reproduces the album with a mixture of professional exactitude and unpredictable cacophony. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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This Is England (2006) |
It is the war within him--and by extension, within the minds of many embittered, working class young men left behind in Thatcher's England--that Meadows's film most strikingly portrays. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Aug 08, 2009
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