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Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Chance Solem-Pfeifer's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Movies reviews only
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Fancy Dance (2023) |
Still, good signs abound for Gladstone’s continued brilliance, not the least of which is that Forest Whitaker executive-produced Fancy Dance. She shares his uncanny knack for controlling tone and pace, such that believability is never in question. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 26, 2024
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New Life (2023) |
While New Life holds few pleasures as it twists and convulses into new genres, it excels at glimpses of terror and jaded job execution. - Willamette Week
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| Posted May 22, 2024
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The Beast (2023) |
Bonello is known as a provocateur, but The Beast is a thuddingly dense Madama Butterfly pastiche that dares only to use an actor of Seydoux’s caliber as a construct for two hours and 25 minutes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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A Perfect Day for Caribou (2022) |
A Perfect Day of Caribou is intentionally, sometimes stiflingly disquieting—with the visual palette of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and elliptical, nature-bound dialogues reminiscent of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 03, 2024
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Little Wing (2024) |
Dean Israelite and writer John Gatins don’t thread their chosen needle between the theme-heavy character study and the YA crowd pleaser. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 21, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
It’s curious to say that a two-hour, 45-minute epic of this tonnage is holding something back, but Villeneuve is (once again) just as interested in prophesying the next film as he is in cementing the current one. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 06, 2024
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Io Capitano (2023) |
The folk-tale framing gives the movie its narrative grip, though that conceit doesn't always sit easily next to the process-driven indignities endured by Seydou and Moussa. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Mississippi Masala (1991) |
It’s a nuanced tale of interracial love that tackles colorism, how prejudice functions within a local economy, and the generational pain of cultural displacement. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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How to Have Sex (2023) |
How to Have Sex appears devised more as a foregone conclusion than a story. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Origin (2023) |
Both lyrical and essayistic, the latest film by Ava DuVernay is, firstly, a feat of adaptation. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Perfect Days (2023) |
Wenders taps into a precious cinematic paradox: We viewers escape our lives to be mindful inside someone else’s. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Ferrari (2023) |
Ferrari is probably a better statement on Mann’s career than a standalone movie. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 20, 2023
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Eileen (2023) |
Eileen looks more forward than inward at the plot hijinks caused by playing God with traumatized people. Still, dimensionality be damned, there are worst sins than taking a wild left turn in a character study. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 14, 2023
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Fallen Leaves (2023) |
The filmmaking mimics the characters’ stiffness with long static shots while costuming Holappa and Ansa in monochromatic reds and greens, as if suggesting that emotionality has to live somewhere, if only in vibrant dyes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 14, 2023
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Can't Seem to Make You Mine (2023) |
That may sound like a moralistic setup, but directors Aaron Keene and Sara Burke (both former Portlanders) withhold judgment. Can’t Seem to Make You Mine is a patient character study. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 02, 2023
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The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) |
Elegiac to a fault, the film offers a chance to return one last time to the mind of a genius who passed away in 2020 and left behind 30 novels that seek, twist and elide the truth with every page. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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When Evil Lurks (2023) |
When Evil Lurks can’t quite sustain its impressive escalation... But if your Halloween watchlist needs a sick new heart and brain breaker, try a movie that’s liberal with its entrails. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 25, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) |
Flower Moon is at once a crime epic, a spiritual exorcism, a portrait of a ne’er-do-well, a black comedy about the FBI’s birth, and a ballad of those who didn’t see modernity coming. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 25, 2023
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Scrapper (2023) |
Scrapper director Charlotte Regan, who hails from this working-class London milieu, effortlessly captures how the community wildly crisscrosses in the shared spaces around their pastel, candy-colored flats. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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The Royal Hotel (2023) |
The onslaught of threat -- tangible, perceived, what’s the difference at a certain point? -- fries your every last nerve ending into red Outback dust. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 05, 2023
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You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023) |
If you want SNL wild card Sarah Sherman sashaying and improvising as Rabbi Rebecca (you do), you'll need to accept Netflix's YA house style, which demands endless drone shots and music supervision that feels indebted to DJ Schmuley. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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The Adults (2023) |
The performances are all distinctly sad and believable, and Cera expertly channels his onscreen neuroses into a suspiciously over-controlled, serious-man façade. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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Fremont (2023) |
In the film, as in life’s loneliest moments, it’s hard to decipher how ill-fitting new relationships can be until the fog lifts and the real thing appears. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 07, 2023
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Between Two Worlds (2021) |
The need to manufacture drama often feels patronizing to the workers and ironically misfocused. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 24, 2023
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Jules (2023) |
Heartfelt to the end, Jules has no ambitions to ascend the alien-encounter movie canon, but by toying with the E.T. formula, it makes clear a gentle point well taken: Before life ends, the need for childlike wonder comes back around. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 10, 2023
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Afire (2023) |
Petzold keeps challenging the audience with Leon’s shaky grip on protagonist status. Often, this sour lump is the last character whose vantage point you’d want in this film, but that’s all part of Petzold’s ever-fascinating “both/and” filmmaking. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 26, 2023
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The Lesson (2023) |
The Lesson downshifts to belligerently throwing its cards on the table by the end, but the slippery journey there shouldn’t be written off. Beware meeting your heroes -- and, especially, freelancing for them. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Biosphere (2022) |
As with many Duplass brothers-produced comedies, there’s a charm to the pure, idea-driven screenwriting no one was asking for. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 06, 2023
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Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (2023) |
With little introspection from Hudson to go on, the film’s forte is the many frank interviews with Hudson’s totally over it former buddies and boyfriends. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 28, 2023
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Maggie Moore(s) (2023) |
There’s only one Fargo, but thanks to the actors, the desert edition isn’t half bad. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 28, 2023
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Falcon Lake (2022) |
Falcon Lake is summer-loving in the vein of Call Me By Your Name, both innocent and daringly amorous, as every Bastien and Chloé interaction -- each bike ride, prank and outfit change -- is charged, taken personally and riddled with perspective gaps. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 28, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
These characters aren’t looking to blow up their lives for the sake of movie contrivances, but through every private conversation, they’re drawn to discussing the same narrative possibilities on the audience’s minds. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Brooklyn 45 (2023) |
For all its twists, torture and worrying that Nazis walk among these paranoid vets, Brooklyn 45 struggles to live in the haunted, expository past and still uphold the immediacy of a confined, genre-shifting present. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 07, 2023
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Everything Went Fine (2021) |
As a straight drama, Everything Went Fine is messy, unsparing and perhaps confused in its loyalties... As a psychological conundrum, though, Everything Went Fine holds sway. - Willamette Week
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| Posted May 10, 2023
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Showing Up (2022) |
Like Lizzy’s unassuming anthropomorphic sculptures, Showing Up reveals more the nearer you lean toward it. Community, inspiration, validation; clay’s got little to do with it. These are the myths and truths that animate our every day. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 19, 2023
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Somewhere in Queens (2022) |
It’s a warm, affecting performance by newcomer Jacob Ward, playing the quietest member of a brassy Italian family that perpetually overlooks him and his father. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 19, 2023
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Mafia Mamma (2023) |
Mafia Mamma may not be a great movie, but it has the vibe of a not-bad vacation. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 13, 2023
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Moving On (2022) |
While major script contrivances link the murder threat's ridiculousness to the unspoken insecurities of a failed marriage, Moving On does the splits more ambitiously than most American indies of this dramedy ilk. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 16, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
Even Sandra’s career as a translator deemphasizes her perspective. That’s a fascinating challenge for Seydoux, a movie star (best known for Bond films and Blue Is the Warmest Color) inhabiting an everyday person decentralized in her own life. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Juniper (2021) |
Filmmakers should showcase Rampling’s indomitable presence and deep-set eyes for as long as she’s working, but ideally with more actors capable of facing the look. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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The Quiet Girl (2022) |
The result is a soft summer fable that all but attacks our tear ducts. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 08, 2023
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Creed III (2023) |
Like all the Creed films, III reimagines its Rocky forebears in better taste: empathy for “villains,” better roles for women, honest conversations between Black heroes and antiheroes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Emily (2022) |
O’Connor’s script largely invents a web of Brontë family dynamics, positing her path to becoming the lit-loving clan’s simultaneous North Star and black sheep. That’s a welcome alternative to depicting staunch Victorian manners. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 23, 2023
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The Civil Dead (2023) |
Tall premise aside, the film’s generative force is the duo’s meandering chemistry and the silly way they mumble in support of idiotically jagged haircuts and dance-karate kicks. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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The Volcano: Rescue From Whakaari (2022) |
Intermittently, the film verges on criticizing ineffective threat systems or irregulated eco-tourism, but The Volcano isn’t willing to explore controversial ramifications, even to illustrate how responsibility was eluded. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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Close (2022) |
[Close] remains involving and intimate throughout—and it’s arguably a playbook for how adults should treat children. Maybe they just do middle school better in Belgium. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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No Bears (2022) |
In No Bears, as with This Is Not a Film and Taxi before it, Panahi autobiographically prods the very meaning of cinematic intervention and political filmmaking. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Infinity Pool (2023) |
Infinity Pool may not blow minds, but it reliably explodes heads. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Living (2022) |
As a showcase for Nighy, the film is all a veteran character actor could wish for. He plays Williams as hushed and upstanding, with sadness carved into his frown lines decades ago. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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The Pale Blue Eye (2022) |
Given the story’s flat complications, it’s frustrating how magnificent the movie appears when Bale is silhouetted in his top hat amid the Hudson Valley fog. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 19, 2023
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