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Armond White
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) |
A Quiet Place: Day One, Nyong’o agrees to her own stigmatization -- a perpetual victim archetype in another shabby enterprise. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 11, 2024
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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024) |
A punishingly long, TV-style Western epic that both oversimplifies and overcomplicates the history of the expansion of the North American continent. - National Review
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| Posted Jul 05, 2024
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Daddio (2023) |
Daddio’s duet sustains Hall’s commitment to the humanism missing from today’s gender wars. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 28, 2024
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Last Summer (2023) |
The surprise of Last Summer -- maybe its shock -- is that Breillat uses Anne to go beyond obvious political messaging. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness (2024) |
Lanthimos literalizes a “theater of cruelty,” misunderstanding Antonin Artaud’s original concept in favor of fashionable nihilism. Lanthimos’s phoniness doesn’t intend to shock audiences, but to indulge their decadence. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 21, 2024
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Inside Out 2 (2024) |
Inside Out may have been the best of all Pixar films, but what made it so owes to a premise that went beyond childhood innocence to imagine everyone’s psychology. Now, Inside Out 2 resorts to trite, “family movie” insipidness. - National Review
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| Posted Jun 14, 2024
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Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (2023) |
A psychological epic of extraordinary richness. Its cultural comedy and spiritual tragedy are an uncanny Millennial mix. - National Review
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| Posted May 31, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
For all this busy-ness, Furiosa has no emotional power. Despite Miller’s directorial signature, none of the pandemonium matters; his quirky wizardry is remarkably impersonal. - National Review
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| Posted May 24, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
Whether or not the clearly progressive Schoenbrun intends it, I Saw the TV Glow warns against the cultural reality of passive media obedience that has replaced active, scrutinizing media consumption -- the ultimate tragedy of Gen X and Gen Z superfans. - National Review
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| Posted May 18, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist (2023) |
Evil Does Not Exist isn’t a political film, but Hamaguchi mounts a bully pulpit. He has made an ideological horror movie based on climate-crisis sanctimony. - National Review
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| Posted May 10, 2024
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Challengers (2024) |
Challengers, in its story of romantic unfairness, observes a generation’s sexual awareness and unawareness. It contradicts HBO’s Euphoria, in which Zendaya and showrunner Sam Levinson exploit drugs and sex merely for sensationalism. - National Review
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| Posted May 06, 2024
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The Fall Guy (2024) |
All of the film’s fatuousness substitutes for the lack of relatable substance in contemporary Hollywood product. The Fall Guy blazons the insipid content that the movie industry never tires of selling us. - National Review
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Salvador (1986) |
It is Stone’s cynicism that recommends Salvador for contemporary viewing. No other American filmmaker this millennium dares Stone’s candor about the sins and absolute corruption of political journalism. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 26, 2024
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) |
Though no more realistic than a QT debauch or Matthew Vaughn’s ludicrous Kingsman franchise, Ritchie’s movie refashions such adolescent sadism so that this patriotic violence feels larky. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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The Long Game (2023) |
Directed and co-written by Julio Quintana, The Long Game exploits easy sentimentality to gain political advantage. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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Leave the World Behind (2023) |
The most insolent executive-office musing ever committed to film -- a full-out assault on the nation’s people. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 12, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
Garland tries for visionary virtuosity, faking rawness and sensationalism, all to predict America’s collapse. Designed to be fun, it is, instead, offensive. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 12, 2024
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Coup de Chance (2023) |
The superficiality of these urban sophisticates should sting, but it hurts less than it ought because Allen merely evokes the superior films that ignited his culture-vulture leanings, fooling American gatekeepers for a while. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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La Chimera (2023) |
In fact, the arty posturing in La Chimera is rather conventional. - National Review
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| Posted Apr 05, 2024
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Shirley (2024) |
[A] sometimes touching but fence-sitting portrayal of Chisholm... Yet, midway through Shirley, both Ridley and King seem to have finally realized their folly and, like responsible pop artists, give Chisholm flashes of integrity and complexity. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 29, 2024
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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) |
"Do Not Expect" has enough audacity and insights for a dozen movies stuffed into one. The film’s plenitude shows how people subsist alongside the irresistible rise of media fascism. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
By keeping concentration-camp obscenity off-screen, while referring to it obliquely through sci-fi sound effects and abstract visual metaphors, Glazer invites a new, smart-aleck sanctimony... Glazer has made an oddly complacent movie for an amoral era. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) |
Rather than expanding and becoming richer, Anderson’s method folds in, like origami. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Spaceman (2024) |
In the farthest reaches of outer space, Kafka is transcended. Spaceman expresses our anxiety rather than leaving it at politics. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Robot Dreams (2023) |
Director Pablo Berger uses anthropomorphism to explore the complexity of human passions. That means Robot Dreams is a cartoon for adults. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
It’s all fatuous, like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films... Nothing in Villeneuve’s Dune series is as good as Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, which revives mythic understanding of both mankind’s history and fate. - National Review
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| Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Poor Things (2023) |
The basic response to any Yorgos Lanthimos film is repulsion. Anyone delighted by Poor Things, his smirky, smutty uglification of The Bride of Frankenstein, falls for his usual depravity. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 27, 2024
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Bob Marley: One Love (2024) |
Green and Ben-Adir mostly present facile charm to advance today’s facile notion of celebrity-heroism. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 22, 2024
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The Palace (2023) |
In a scabrous, outré attack, Polanski caricatures the ruling class so mercilessly that their humanity is almost unrecognizable, but then, it’s too recognizable. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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The Princess Bride (1987) |
What’s unacceptable about this threadbare fantasy is its contemporary irrelevance. Reiner and Goldman betray the instructional tradition that fables and legends pass on. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 09, 2024
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The Taste of Things (2023) |
The Taste of Things encapsulates our neglected artistic, moral heritage. Hung’s defense of artistic passion starts with the human touch, then illumines our basic needs and spiritual appetite. - National Review
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| Posted Feb 09, 2024
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Her storytelling is so assiduous that it’s a shame Triet’s “ambiguity” is also predictable. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 31, 2024
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The Crime Is Mine (2023) |
It’s Ozon’s way of addressing today’s social crises -- incessant lawfare and fake news, all of it compacted into this brilliant, perplexing farce. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 27, 2024
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Origin (2023) |
DuVernay fails to be compelling. When her candidate’s pitch lands, it’s like being buttonholed by a strident politician. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 27, 2024
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Mean Girls (2024) |
Fact is, the very idea of repackaging Mean Girls is insulting. It perpetuates the degradation that has overtaken pop culture since 2004, the year the culture broke. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 19, 2024
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May December (2023) |
May December is salacious and insidious. Misrepresenting real life, it is a transgressive act of criminal reprieve. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 12, 2024
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The Color Purple (2023) |
Winfrey’s musical reworking of The Color Purple is essentially tuneless and unpleasant. - National Review
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| Posted Jan 06, 2024
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All of Us Strangers (2023) |
What cinches this daring perspective is actor Andrew Scott’s phenomenal characterization as a weakling who grapples with gradual self-awareness. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 30, 2023
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The Holdovers (2023) |
This pity party is too transparently allegorical. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 30, 2023
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Maestro (2023) |
This disingenuous biopic is symptomatic of our era’s convenient reliance on moral equivalency. That’s the only explanation I can think of for Cooper’s peculiar approach to his subject -- half reverential, half reticent. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 23, 2023
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Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (2023) |
Working as his own cinematographer, Snyder makes the narrative as lusty as fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, but the sensual daring produces kineticism and wonder that matches The Thief of Bagdad. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 20, 2023
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Saltburn (2023) |
Films about English class privilege used to be sane, continuing a proud tradition. Now the worst people in Hollywood make films about the worst people in the world. Fennell sells attitude to replace knowledge and feeling. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 15, 2023
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American Fiction (2023) |
The problem isn’t simply that American Fiction can’t live up to Everett’s breezily compacted humor and convoluted linguistic games -- such as a protagonist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison -- but that Jefferson himself deals in stereotypes. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 15, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
Hollywood romantic icons may be in disrepute, but Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are dull, inexpressive performers whose emotions are as flat as the untrained subjects of a documentary. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 08, 2023
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The Strangler (1970) |
Discovering The Strangler enriches appreciation of how playful and poetic movies can be. The murder-mystery plot goes beyond guilty titillation and reveals an understanding of human nature. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 01, 2023
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Thanksgiving (2023) |
It is more attuned to contemporary trauma than any other movie. This horror flick about modern obscenity helps us see it for ourselves. - National Review
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| Posted Dec 01, 2023
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Napoleon (2023) |
Napoleon is protracted, as if running time and rambling narrative incidents amounted to substance. Napoleon parades an empty spectacle for a market uninterested in learning from history. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 28, 2023
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The Marvels (2023) |
This is false sophistication, especially in this case, when it covers up the visual ineptitude and chaos of The Marvels. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 28, 2023
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The Killer (2023) |
Fincher’s rejection of The Smiths aims to destroy the band’s great contributions to civilization. This anti-art horror film appeals to the hipster appetite for self-destruction. - National Review
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| Posted Nov 18, 2023
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The Players Club (1998) |
[Ice Cube's] pop virtue is in making a salacious good time a serious good time. - The Crisis
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| Posted Nov 14, 2023
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