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Steve Erickson
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Cuckoo (2024) |
The pleasure of “Cuckoo” isn’t solving a mystery, just seeing where the film will take us next. - Gay City News
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| Posted Aug 12, 2024
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The Nature of Love (2023) |
Director Monia Chokri finds a language for communicating Sophia’s desire without putting her body on display. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Aug 05, 2024
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Crossing (2024) |
The film’s strands are woven together with great care, not exactly dislodging Lia from the center but treating Evrim’s story as equally worthy of time and attention. Without overdoing its optimism, it yearns for change towards a more humane world. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 15, 2024
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Sing Sing (2023) |
A genuine riposte to most TV and movie depictions of life in jail. There are no sensational scenes of stabbings or sexual assault, just a struggle to remain hopeful amidst a daily grind of boredom within a system out to shaft incarcerated people. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 10, 2024
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The Human Surge 3 (2023) |
If “The Human Surge 3” is a kind of game, it also represents a serious, disciplined struggle to figure out how to represent the present in ways cinema has never done before. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 01, 2024
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Lumberjack the Monster (2023) |
The problem is that by halfheartedly trying to take an ‘explanatory’ route, Lumberjack the Monster turns its back on serving up perverse, gory genre fare. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jun 12, 2024
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Lost Soulz (2023) |
Still, the enthusiastic spirit of Lost Soulz is appealing enough to make what feels like two different types of movies sutured together dramatically satisfying. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jun 04, 2024
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Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (2023) |
The film’s 133-minute runtime spans several decades in an ambitious attempt to fuse the micro and the macro, but it doesn’t fully succeed. The movie’s most potent moments are anchored in the domestic. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 31, 2024
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Hit Man (2023) |
Breezy as Hit Man is, there’s a sting to this romance’s tail. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 31, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
A confrontation with media’s re-shaping our brains in potentially liberating and dangerous manners, a depiction of the ‘90s which peels away nostalgia, a vision of trans experience that doesn’t explain everything for cis audiences. - Gay City News
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| Posted May 02, 2024
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Old Narcissus (2022) |
Old Narcissus is rather sober and earnest. It’s an honest effort at developing drama in these characters’ lives, instead of simply manufacturing it. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 29, 2024
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Challengers (2024) |
Its material can be unpleasant, yet it keeps a light tone. It keeps faith in its characters, who are extremely flawed people but never treated as villains. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 24, 2024
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Femme (2023) |
Up to that point, the film was ambivalent enough to be genuinely provocative. But finessing the depiction of a toxic romance can lead to some ugly places. Femme proves incapable of thinking outside of the genre box. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Apr 23, 2024
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Amar Singh Chamkila (2024) |
Amar Singh Chamkila doesn’t hit the compelling heights of Highway and Tanasha, but the director Imtiaz Ali successfully infuses — within the limits of the musical biopic — a buoyant, rebellious spirit. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Apr 16, 2024
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Stress Positions (2024) |
It has a fine ear for the limits of white, queer New Yorkers’ politics, even if it settles for too many cheap shots, but it does not go much further than simply pointing them out. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Good One (2024) |
Its drama is deceptively quiet, building to a potent story of a girl pressured into independence by having to share space with men. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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The People's Joker (2022) |
The People’s Joker remixes pop culture into something personal, made by individuals rather than huge companies. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024) |
Love Lies Bleeding puts a sapphic spin on neo-noir, flirting with clichés only to dodge away towards something more outrageous. - Gay City News
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Shayda (2023) |
Niasari and Akbarzadeh bring out the vitality of Shayda and her world via bright colors. But the presence of darkness lingers around her, and when it hits home, the monstrosity is much more troubling than a ghost jumping into the frame. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Mar 14, 2024
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Much Ado About Dying (2022) |
“Much Ado About Dying” becomes a film about collective responsibility. It even finds light at the end of David’s tunnel by editing his monologue over tranquil images of rain and snow, promising a renewal in nature and generations to come. - Gay City News
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| Posted Mar 13, 2024
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Breaking the News (2023) |
The story of the 19th* is enticing enough to demonstrate its value and make a case for a follow-up after this fall’s election. - Gay City News
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| Posted Feb 13, 2024
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How to Have Sex (2023) |
How to Have Sex doesn’t criticize teenage girls for wanting to get laid, but it points out how the cultural environment in which they do so is directed entirely towards male pleasure -- safety or respect is not a consideration. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Feb 09, 2024
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She Is Conann (2023) |
She Is Conann”turns pulpy material into a serious meditation on aging, power and violence, queering the macho heroism of Schwarzenegger’s Conan. - Gay City News
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| Posted Feb 01, 2024
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I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) |
It's road movie structure, tracing Baldwin’s travels in the south during 1980, is also a trip through time. Directors Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley nimbly edited together what was present-day footage of Baldwin’s conversations and public appearances. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jan 12, 2024
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The Color Purple (2023) |
The Color Purple comes close to achieving the catharsis it sets out for, but the finale leans into a schmaltzy spirit of uplift. - Gay City News
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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Concrete Utopia (2023) |
Concrete Utopia is hardly the first disaster movie in which panic trumps morality. But this vision of a “utopia” smashed to pieces is more disturbing and believable than most. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Dec 14, 2023
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Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023) |
The film looks fairly straightforward, but its strengths lie in re-telling Little Richard's life story while reflecting on its cultural significance. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 28, 2023
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Frybread Face and Me (2023) |
It’s loaded with small, telling details, like a dinner of spam and potatoes served to Benny’s grandparents, rather than large story arcs. This is a film suited for long, hot summer days. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 27, 2023
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Maestro (2023) |
It’s most appealing when it apes the rhythms of its subject’s work. Yet it also feels strangely distant from Bernstein as an artist, neglecting most details about his music. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 21, 2023
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Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) |
“Orlando, My Political Biography” mixes fiction and lived experience, the stories of its subjects and the work of Virginia Woolf, with a fine disregard for binaries of all kinds. - Gay City News
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| Posted Nov 08, 2023
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Rustin (2023) |
Domingo’s performance defies stereotypes about the period. - Gay City News
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| Posted Oct 30, 2023
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The Persian Version (2023) |
A poptimist spirit animates the film without really being reflected in the direction and cinematography... It’s a shame that its awkward editing and unclear timelines detract from the joy it wants to convey. - Gay City News
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| Posted Oct 12, 2023
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Anatomy of a Fall wants to profit from flirting with the thriller without embracing it, and it almost gets away with it. - Gay City News
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| Posted Oct 12, 2023
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Fair Play (2023) |
As cultural critique, Fair Play plays along with our queasy, admiring engagement with great wealth. The focus remains on the way business poisons the lives of two people -- rather than attempting to underline the flaws of capitalism. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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The Mother and the Whore (1973) |
Breaks the bonds of what a feature-length film is expected to do. As downbeat as it is, the film also laid out a path for personal, if not autobiographical, cinema that Mia Hansen-Løve, Philippe Garrel, Ira Sachs, and Arnaud Desplechin have all extended. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Sep 08, 2023
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Perpetrator (2023) |
Although full of ideas, “Perpetrator” has little sense of how to make them cohere together. - Gay City News
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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Bad Things (2023) |
Bad Things tries out a lot of ideas, many of them good, but a crisis in identity results in slapdash execution. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Aug 24, 2023
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Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) |
The evasiveness of Werckmeister Harmonies is a political gesture in itself. The film’s refusal to be pinned down is a rejection of the conformist mentality it condemns. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Aug 24, 2023
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Mutt (2023) |
Mutt suffers from building its story around a barrage of negative experiences, overt and subtle, that Feña goes through. It avoids the very worst extremes of transphobia, but it’s still a narrative built entirely around trauma. - Gay City News
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| Posted Aug 18, 2023
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KOKOMO CITY (2023) |
Smith’s style acknowledges the women she’s profiling as sexual beings without objectifying them... The final scene may be controversial, but Kokomo City sees portraiture of trans women’s bodies as central to its mission. - Gay City News
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| Posted Aug 01, 2023
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Afire (2023) |
Schubert’s performance is one of the finest in Petzold’s films, but it can only go so far in fleshing out a thinly written character. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 14, 2023
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Revoir Paris (2022) |
Overall, the film is a bit too neat.... Still, there are effective moments when she shows us a woman struggling to escape her lack of affect and find meaningful connection with other people. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jul 13, 2023
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Every Body (2023) |
Every Body makes some very important points and shines a light on a group of marginalized people, but it’s a piece of lazy filmmaking. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jul 03, 2023
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Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate (2023) |
As a made-for-TV documentary, it’s fine for what it is, but the format’s limitations become all the more evident because it tries to open them up. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 28, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
Initially off-putting, Asteroid City finds some emotional resonance by its last half hour. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2022) |
In only 100 minutes, Nancy Buirski’s documentary...covers far more ground than the simple behind-the-scenes look it could have been. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Brooklyn 45 (2023) |
Deliberately stripped down, the film doesn’t fit into a cookie-cutter model for the genre. - Gay City News
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| Posted Jun 06, 2023
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Padre Pio (2022) |
Wildly imperfect but intriguingly ambiguous, the film's flaws and contradictions are a virtue because its purported saintly hero is so hard to pin down. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Joyland (2022) |
The most powerful elements of Joyland are pictorial. Director Sadiq has a great eye for framing. His characters are strikingly posed in alleys, doorways, and other spaces within spaces. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 24, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
You Hurt My Feelings’ topical touches are witty but a little shallow. - Arts Fuse
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| Posted May 24, 2023
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