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Manohla Dargis
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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It Ends With Us (2024) |
“It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long. - New York Times
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| Posted Aug 12, 2024
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Alien Resurrection (1997) |
Jeunet's greatest sin as a director is that of pride: He indulges in his own playful design to the detriment of both the story and his main character. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Aug 06, 2024
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War Game (2024) |
War Game is blunt and effective. It’s easy to get swept up by the ticktock storytelling, and to be moved both by the recent history it invokes and by the sincerity of its participants. - New York Times
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| Posted Aug 01, 2024
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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024) |
Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West... - New York Times
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| Posted Jul 01, 2024
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Last Summer (2023) |
A story about a woman who — after entrancing and appalling you — emerges as both more monstrous and more human than you’re prepared for. - New York Times
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| Posted Jul 01, 2024
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Green Border (2023) |
That cruelty can be shocking, and while there are moments in this tough movie when I wept, the rigor of Holland’s filmmaking, and the steadfastness of her compassion, help steady you as a viewer. - New York Times
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| Posted Jun 21, 2024
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The Bikeriders (2023) |
“The Bikeriders,” a romanticized ballad of tribal love, outlaw cool and the illusion of freedom, gets your motor runnin’ early. - New York Times
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| Posted Jun 21, 2024
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Inside Out 2 (2024) |
Works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original's ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar. - New York Times
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| Posted Jun 12, 2024
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Banel & Adama (2023) |
... You remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently. - New York Times
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| Posted Jun 11, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it... It’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom. - New York Times
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| Posted May 15, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist (2023) |
Lapidary, word by word, detail by detail, juxtaposition by juxtaposition, “Evil Does Not Exist” beautifully deepens. - New York Times
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| Posted May 02, 2024
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The Fall Guy (2024) |
“The Fall Guy” is divertingly slick, playful nonsense about a guy who lives to get brutalized again and again... which may be a metaphor for contemporary masculinity and its discontents, though perhaps not. - New York Times
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| Posted May 02, 2024
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Planet of the Apes (2001) |
Wahlberg can’t obscure his incredulity at the words he’s made to speak or the sheer silliness of the whole thing. Without latex and a full-bodied shag there’s no hiding from this film. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 01, 2024
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Challengers (2024) |
It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 25, 2024
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Boy Kills World (2023) |
Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 25, 2024
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We Grown Now (2023) |
Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices -- the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over -- finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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Abigail (2024) |
A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 18, 2024
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Little Women (1994) |
Armstrong maneuvers Alcott's prose with sympathy and a cool head. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Coup de Chance (2023) |
“Coup de Chance,” the latest from Woody Allen, looks and plays like many of his recent movies, only better; it sounds like them, too, except that it’s in French. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 04, 2024
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Monkey Man (2024) |
A movie that tries so hard to keep you entertained, it ends up exhausting you. - New York Times
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| Posted Apr 04, 2024
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Seven (1995) |
Each actor reaches deep and brings forth a character far greater than the one written; for all its disappointments, the film can pierce the heart. As for Fincher, he pierces the heart with genius. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 29, 2024
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La Chimera (2023) |
“La Chimera” sneaks up on you. Rohrwacher is a discreet virtuoso with a visual style that is appealing and demonstrably unshowy. - New York Times
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Almost Famous (2000) |
The film shimmers with the irresistible pleasures that define Hollywood at its best -- it's polished like glass, funny, knowing and bright, and filled with characters whose lives are invariably sexier and more purposeful than our own. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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Immaculate (2024) |
“Immaculate” is a scare-fest with a plucky heroine, an irreverent hot-button twist and just enough narrative ambiguity to give viewers something to argue about. - New York Times
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| Posted Mar 21, 2024
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The Shadowless Tower (2023) |
This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully. - New York Times
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| Posted Mar 14, 2024
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The Animal Kingdom (2023) |
An amusing what-if French fantasy with a touch of comedy and some glints of horror. - New York Times
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| Posted Mar 14, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024) |
Glass borrows liberally but not mindlessly. Instead, she takes familiar themes and more than a few clichés — romantic doom, family trauma — and playfully bends them to her purposes. - New York Times
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| Posted Mar 07, 2024
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The Shawshank Redemption (1994) |
Darabont, making his debut as a director, is swamped by ambition. There is just too much here -- too much plot, too many particulars, too many prisoners vying for attention. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 04, 2024
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Io Capitano (2023) |
Garrone invites you into a story and demands your attention with visual clarity and narrative urgency. Yet his great strength here is the tenderness of his touch... - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 22, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024) |
The title of Ethan Coen’s leaden romp “Drive-Away Dolls” summons up the vulgar excesses of old-school exploitation cinema, with its horrors and pleasures, carnage and flesh. If only! - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 22, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in “Dune: Part Two,” and it’s a blast. - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Bleeding Love (2023) |
It’s hard to see why this movie was made other than to expand Clara McGregor’s résumé. - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 15, 2024
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Madame Web (2024) |
"Madame Web" is a dud, but it's one that Johnson transcends long before the final credits roll. - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Quiz Show (1994) |
A terrifically entertaining account of the tarnishing of television's Golden Age. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 13, 2024
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The Monk and the Gun (2023) |
Modestly scaled, lightly comic and blithely ingratiating... - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 08, 2024
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Ennio (2021) |
One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes. - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 08, 2024
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The Promised Land (2023) |
What makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen. - New York Times
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| Posted Feb 01, 2024
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Tótem (2023) |
There are worlds inside worlds in “Tótem,” a soulful drama populated by an array of creatures, some with two legs and sad smiles, others with feathers, fur and shells. - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 25, 2024
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Pictures of Ghosts (2023) |
A cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 25, 2024
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I.S.S. (2023) |
Consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising. - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 18, 2024
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The Settlers (2023) |
Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured. (It’s his feature debut.) - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 11, 2024
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Mean Girls (2024) |
It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact. - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 11, 2024
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Memory (2023) |
The relationship doesn’t cohere dramatically, alas, despite the demonstrative tenderness and commitment that the actors bring to it, and the story’s multiple gaps in logic don’t help. - New York Times
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| Posted Jan 04, 2024
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Ferrari (2023) |
You’re about as deep inside this character’s head as imaginable, though given the glimpses you catch of what’s inside and all the damage that Enzo does, it is the filmmaker more than the character who holds you rapt. - New York Times
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| Posted Dec 25, 2023
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Occupied City (2023) |
As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. - New York Times
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| Posted Dec 24, 2023
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The Iron Claw (2023) |
Smooth, spooky, often moving... - New York Times
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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Heat (1995) |
At its core it's actually about virtuosity... and, by extension, the virtuosity of Mann himself, of which there's no short supply. Too bad it's running on empty; if the film weren't so hollow it would be a masterpiece. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. - New York Times
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| Posted Dec 14, 2023
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Wonka (2023) |
The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome. - New York Times
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| Posted Dec 14, 2023
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