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Poor Things Review

12 Jan 2024

Poor Things

The original 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray on which  Poor Things  was based — or, to give it its full, appropriately ludicrous title,  Poor Things: Episodes From The Early Life Of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer  — was never seriously considered as obvious film fodder before director Yorgos Lanthimos came along. It’s a curious, meandering tome, told by at least four narrators of varying degrees of reliability, documenting a unique take on the Frankenstein mythology: the coming-of-age of Bella Baxter, a young woman powered by the brain of her own baby who learns about feminism, social justice and sexual mores in Victorian Glasgow.

Lanthimos matches Gray’s sensibilities like a close cousin. Perhaps cinema’s best absurdist, the Greek filmmaker has always been able to tread a delicate line between ridiculous dark comedy and rich emotional and political truths, from  The Killing Of A Sacred Deer  to  The Favourite ; he and screenwriter Tony McNamara — a co-writer of  The Favourite , and creator of similarly ahistorical romp  The Great  — have here fashioned a surreal steampunk spectacular, a riotous dissection of gender dynamics, and perhaps the most nakedly entertaining entry in Lanthimos’ swellingly accomplished career.

It is funnier, swearier and hornier than Gray’s original novel, necessarily trimmed in certain places, beefed up in others. The final part of the book, which hands the narrator-reins to Bella and completely recalibrates everything that went before it, is boldly excised; in its place, the perspective and the focus shifts from the gentle-hearted Archibald McCandlesss (here renamed Max McCandles) to Bella herself, the themes of patriarchy and female agency lifted to the surface.

Emma Stone has turned in maybe her richest, most interesting, utterly fearless performance yet.

That decision hands the centre-stage to Bella, and to Emma Stone. She makes the very most of that spotlight. Clearly still intoxicated by her collaboration with the director on  The Favourite , Stone has turned in maybe her richest, most interesting, utterly fearless performance yet. She begins as a literal baby, an acting challenge that in the wrong hands could feel like a drama-school exercise; with Stone at the wheel, it’s odd, keenly observed, full of texture and wisdom. Bella’s progression is both incremental and rapid: beginning non-verbally, she slowly builds a vocabulary, ending the film as a thesaurus-verbose polymath, gleeful in her curiosity, incautious in her lack of filter. Watching her work is a constant, unpredictable thrill.

This is a consciously silly role, and requires a huge amount of nudity — a coming-of-age in every sense of the word ‘coming’ — but Stone has always been just as good at the intuitive, subtle notes as the big, outrageous ones. Just as Bella learns to be, Stone is in total command of her body as an instrument, wielding it with a surgeon’s precision in sketching a journey of enlightenment.

That journey is shaped by the men of her life, who seem to represent different expressions of masculinity: there is her proxy father Godwin, played by a stately and stubborn and typically stellar Willem Dafoe, whom Bella refers to as ‘God’. There is her gentle husband-to-be Max (Ramy Youssef, impressive in what is effectively his film debut). And there is Duncan Wedderburn, her first lover, played by Mark Ruffalo. Like a kind of big-screen take on  The Fast Show ’s 13th Duke of Wybourne, Duncan is the definition of cad. Ruffalo, endlessly droll, offers up gems like, “At the risk of being immodest, you’ve just been thrice fucked by the very best,” with a preposterous English accent, a raised eyebrow, and a rakish twiddle of his moustache.

As Bella and Duncan embark on a kind of gaudy Grand Tour — which involves seeing the world, vomiting up custard tarts, and repeatedly “furious jumping” each other — the gorgeous imagery from prolific Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan shifts from Gothic black-and-white to a hyperreal saturated colour palette, blossoming just as Bella’s own social and cultural palette expands too. Her perspective is a kind of alt-Victorian dreamscape, with psychedelic skies and realism-be-damned diversions. The off-kilter tone is only firmed up by Jerskin Fendrix’s brilliantly daffy, discordant score, as if Mica Levi soundtracked a CBBC show.

The combined effect leaves you with a giddy cinematic high: like eating too many pastel de natas laced with hallucinogens. Yet Lanthimos again somehow finds an absurdist line dripping in substance. He, McNamara and Stone ultimately grant Bella her agency and self-possession — and with it, the most infectiously bizarre, cocktail-clinking happy ending in cinema history. A goat is involved. Hardly obvious film fodder — but that’s what we’ve come to expect from this lot.

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Matt Reynolds

You should ignore film ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes

Picking a film to watch is an emotional rollercoaster. First, you have to deal with the crushing knowledge that none of your streaming services of choice actually have the film you want to watch. Then you narrow the field down to three films that you never really intended to watch but are the only half-decent options available.

At this point, paralysed by the thought of making the wrong decisions in life, you will Google the ratings of these films to find out if they’re worth your time. Three hours later – unable to make a decision because of the conflicting information – you realise that it’s too late to start watching a film now anyway and settle down to watch old episodes of Parks and Rec .

But why do the big film-ranking sites come up with such radically different options? Is The Wizard of Oz really best film of all time, or is it The Shawshank Redemption ? Why does Metacritic think that Ratatouille is the twenty-third best film in the history of cinema?

To answer all these questions, let’s take a look at how the three biggest film-ranking sites come up with their ratings, and why you should ignore them all.

Movie-rating: the methodology

On IMDb, all films are given an overall rating out of ten. In a roundabout way, these ratings are derived from votes submitted by IMDb users, not movie critics.

All registered IMDb users can submit a single rating – a number between one and ten – for any film on the website. These votes are then re-jigged so that certain demographics (newly-registered users, for example) don’t disproportionately influence the overall ranking of the film. IMDb doesn’t disclose how it re-jigs these votes, but what does mean is that a film’s ranking is not quite an overall average of all its user scores, but it’s probably quite close.

Read more: 52 of the best films on Netflix UK this week

Brian Barrett

Brendan I. Koerner

Steven Levy

Scott Gilbertson

Just to be extra helpful, IMDb’s Top 250 films are ranked in a slightly different way. Only votes from ‘regular IMDb voters’ are used to make up these rankings. Helpfully, IMDb doesn’t say what makes someone a regular IMDb voter.

In short: IMDb ratings are based on the votes of the website’s users, with a little bit of mathematical re-jigging to stop certain groups disproportionately influencing the vote.

This all sounds very egalitarian, but as we’ll see, most IMDb voters are male, which seems to skew the rankings in favour of films that are aimed more towards men.

****: 1. The Shawshank Redemption

****: 2. The Godfather

****: 3. The Godfather: Part II

****: 4. The Dark Knight

****: 5. 12 Angry Men

****: 6. Schindler's List

****: 7. Pulp Fiction

****: 8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

****: 9. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

****: 10. Fight Club

Rotten Tomatoes gives films a score out of 100 based on the averaged reviews of professional film critics. If a film gets a rating of 60 or more it gets a ‘fresh’ red tomato on the site. Less than 60 and it gets a rotten tomato. The best films are picked out for a ‘certified fresh’ rating, which usually means the film has at least 80 critical reviews and a rating of 75 or more. The website also separately ranks film by user scores, but let’s not get distracted by that here.

For its main rankings, Rotten Tomatoes only takes into account reviews from approved critics and approved publications. To rank as an approved critic , you have to write for a large or well-regarded website, magazine or newspaper.

But just to make things a little more complicated, Rotten Tomatoes also weights its rankings depending on how many reviews a film has. That’s why The Wizard of Oz with an average score of 99 from 111 reviews beats Citizen Kane , which an average score of 100 from 75 reviews, to the top spot.

In short: Rotten Tomatoes ranks selected critics' reviews, and tweaks the rankings to favour films with a large number of positive reviews,

And you guessed it. Most of rotten Tomatoes’ selected critics are men.

****: 1. The Wizard of Oz

****: 2. Citizen Kane

****: 3. The Third Man

****: 4. Get Out

****: 5. Mad Max: Fury Road

****: 6. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari)

****: 7. All About Eve

****: 8. Inside Out

****: 9. Metropolis

****: 10. The Godfather

Metacritic also gives films a score out of 100, based on published critics’ reviews. The site converts letter or number scores from reviews into a score out of 100 and then weights those scores so that some reviews influence the score a little more than others do.

The website doesn’t publish a list of its featured critics, but you can see the list of which publications it aggregates scores from here . This list of publications is updated on a regular basis, but Metacritic doesn’t say why it picks some websites and ignores others.

Read more: 40 of the best documentaries you need to watch

Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic seems to calculate its ranks based on fairly small numbers of critics’ reviews, so they are more subject to strange fluctuations in the rankings.

In short: Metacritic works a bit like Rotten Tomatoes, but with fewer reviews.

Metacritic seems to place a bit more emphasis on publishers rather than critics, so it’s hard to get an idea what the gender balance of reviewers is. Its top-ranking film – Citizen Kane – is based on reviews from only two women and ten men, though.

****: 1. Citizen Kane

****: 3. Casablanca

****: 4. Boyhood

****: 5. Three Colors: Red

****: 6. Singin' in the Rain

****: 7. Moonlight

****: 8. Pan's Labyrinth

****: 9. Hoop Dreams

****: 10. My Left Foot

Why you should ignore all movie-ranking sites

Don’t be tricked into thinking that movie-ranking sites give some kind of objective rating on how good a film is. All three of the above sites are skewed pretty heavily towards the opinions of men.

Take IMDb’s top-ranked film for example – The Shawshank Redemption . Its score of 9.3 is based on the votes of around 1.86 million IMDb users . 1.2 million of those votes came from men. IMDb does tweak its rankings to lessen the influence of particular demographics, but men often make up over 70 per cent of the voters for any film.

And it turns out that men tend to look much more favourably on films with more masculine themes, or male leading actors.

A look at the ratings for Sex and the City demonstrates how divided the voting audience on IMDb is. Over 29,000 men gave the film an average rating of 5.8, while 43,000 women came up with a score of 8.1. A straight-up averaging of the scores gives it a ranking of 7.4, but IMDb’s maths leaves it with a final score of 7.

IMDb breaks down the voting demographics for all of its films. Take a flick through them and you’ll see that men consistently rank masculine films higher than films that feature female leads or more traditionally female themes.

Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t come off much better. In 2015, Meryl Streep attacked the website for featuring way more male critics. Back then, there were 168 female critics on the websites’ approved list, and 760 men. A 2016 study from San Diego State University found that only 27 per cent of ‘top critics’ on the site were women.

There aren’t comprehensive breakdowns for the gender balance on Metacritic, but since it shares many of the same sources at Rotten Tomatoes, it’s likely that the website suffers from a similar degree of bias.

Just pick a film already

If you came here hoping for a verdict on which site should reign supreme in the movie-ranking stakes, then you must be bitterly disappointed. Really, it boils down to this: if you want to know which movies men on the internet tend to like, look on IMDb. If you’re looking for critics’ favourites, go for Rotten Tomatoes. If you want a slightly worse version of Rotten Tomatoes, opt for Metacritic.

Or just watch Inside Out now because it’s lovely and heartwarming and you are clearly incapable of making a decision independently.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Angela Watercutter

Jennifer M. Wood

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The Best Movie Reviews We’ve Ever Written — IndieWire Critics Survey

David ehrlich.

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Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

While this survey typically asks smart critics to direct readers toward good movies, we hope that the reverse is also true, and that these posts help movies (good or bad) direct readers towards smart critics. 

In that spirit, we asked our panel of critics to reflect on their favorite piece of film criticism that they’ve ever written (and we encouraged them to put aside any sort of modesty when doing so).

Their responses provide rich and far-reaching insight into contemporary film criticism, and what those who practice it are hoping to achieve with their work.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SidizenKane), Freelance for The Village Voice and /Film

Let’s cut right to the chase. Christopher Nolan is probably my favourite working director, and going five thousand words deep on his career after “Dunkirk” was an itch I’d been waiting to scratch for nearly a decade. “The Dark Knight” was my dorm-room poster movie — I’m part of the generation that explored films through the IMDb Top 250 growing up — though as my cinematic horizons expanded and my understanding of storytelling grew, I didn’t leave Nolan’s work behind as I did the likes of “Scarface” and “The Boondock Saints.” What’s more, each new film by Nolan hits me like a tonne of bricks. I’m waiting, almost eagerly, for him to disappoint me. It hasn’t happened yet, and I needed to finally sit down and figure out why.

In “Convergence At ‘Dunkirk,’” by far the longest piece I’ve ever written, I’d like to think I unpacked a decade worth of my awe and admiration, for a filmmaker who uses the studio canvas to explore human beings through our relationship to time. Tarkovsky referred to cinema as “sculpting in time.” Time disorients. Time connects us. Time travels, at different speeds, depending on one’s relationship to it, whether in dreams or in war or in outer space, and time can be captured, explored and dissected on screen.

What’s more, Nolan’s films manipulate truth as much as time, as another force relative to human perception, determining our trajectories and interpersonal dynamics in fundamental ways. All this is something I think I knew, instinctively, as a teenage viewer, but putting words to these explorations, each from a different time yet connected intrinsically, is the written criticism that I most stand by. It felt like something that I was meant to write, as I interrogated my own evolving emotional responses to art as time went on.

Carlos Aguilar (@Carlos_Film), Freelance for Remezcla

At the 2017 Sundance premiere of Miguel Arteta’s “Beatriz at Dinner,” starring Salma Hayek, I found myself in shock at the reactions I heard from the mostly-white audience at the Eccles Theatre. I was watching a different movie, one that spoke to me as an immigrant, a Latino, and someone who’s felt out of place in spaces dominated by people who’ve never been asked, “Where are you really from?” That night I went back to the condo and wrote a mountain of thoughts and personal anecdotes that mirrored what I saw on screen.

This was a much different piece from what I had usually written up to that point: coverage on the Best Foreign Language Oscar race, pieces on animation, interviews with internationally acclaimed directors, and reviews out of festivals. Those are my intellectual passions, this; however, was an examination on the identity that I had to built as an outsider to navigate a society were people like me rarely get the jobs I want.

My editor at Remezcla, Vanessa Erazo, was aware of the piece from the onset and was immediately supportive, but it would take months for me to mull it over and rework it through multiple drafts until it was ready for publication in time for the film’s theatrical release. In the text, I compared my own encounters with casual racism and ignorance with those Hayek’s character faces throughout the fateful gathering at the center of the film. The reception surpassed all my expectations. The article was shared thousands of times, it was praised, it was criticized, and it truly confronted me with the power that my writing could have.

A few months later in September, when Trump rescinded DACA, I wrote a social media post on my experience as an undocumented person working in the film industry, and how difficult it is to share that struggle in a world were most people don’t understand what it means to live a life in the shadows. The post was picked up by The Wrap and republished in the form of an op-ed, which I hope put a new face on the issue for those who didn’t directly knew anyone affected by it before. Once again that piece on “Beatriz at Dinner” regained meaning as I found myself filled with uncertainty.

Ken Bakely (@kbake_99), Freelance for Film Pulse

Like many writers, I tend to subconsciously disown anything I’ve written more than a few months ago, so I read this question, in practice, as what’s my favorite thing I’ve written recently. On that front, I’d say that the review of “Phantom Thread” that I wrote over at my blog comes the closest to what I most desire to do as a critic. I try to think about a movie from every front: how the experience is the result of each aspect, in unique quantities and qualities, working together. It’s not just that the acting is compelling or the score is enveloping, it’s that each aspect is so tightly wound that it’s almost indistinguishable from within itself. A movie is not an algebra problem. You can’t just plug in a single value and have everything fall into place.

“Phantom Thread” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s dreamy cinematography. It is Jonny Greenwood’s impeccably seductive, baroque music. It is Vicky Krieps’s ability to perfectly shatter our preconceptions at every single turn as we realize that Alma is the movie’s actual main character. We often talk about how good films would be worse-off if some part of it were in any way different. In the case of “Phantom Thread,” you flat-out can’t imagine how it would even exist if these things were changed. When so many hot take thinkpieces try to explain away every ending or take a hammer to delicate illusions, it was a pleasure to try and understand how a movie like this one operates on all fronts to maintain an ongoing sense of mystique.

Christian Blauvelt (@Ctblauvelt), BBC Culture

I don’t know if it’s my best work, but a landmark in my life as a critic was surely a review of Chaplin’s “The Circus,” in time for the release of its restoration in 2010. I cherish this piece , written for Slant Magazine, for a number of reasons. For one, I felt deeply honored to shed more light on probably the least known and least respected of Chaplin’s major features, because it’s a film that demonstrates such technical virtuosity it dispels once and for all any notion that his work is uncinematic. (Yes, but what about the rest of his filmography you ask? My response is that any quibbles about the immobility of Chaplin’s camera suggest an ardent belief that the best directing equals the most directing.) For another, I was happy this review appeared in Slant Magazine, a publication that helped me cut my critical teeth and has done the same for a number of other critics who’ve gone on to write or edit elsewhere. That Slant is now struggling to endure in this financially ferocious landscape for criticism is a shame – the reviews I wrote for them around 2009-10 helped me refine my voice even that much more than my concurrent experience at Entertainment Weekly, where I had my day job. And finally, this particular review will always mean a lot to me because it’s the first one I wrote that I saw posted in its entirety on the bulletin board at Film Forum. For me, there was no surer sign that “I’d made it”.

Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker

No way would I dare to recommend any pieces of my own, but I don’t mind mentioning a part of my work that I do with special enthusiasm. Criticism, I think, is more than the three A’s (advocacy, analysis, assessment); it’s prophetic, seeing the future of the art from the movies that are on hand. Yet many of the most forward-looking, possibility-expanding new films are in danger of passing unnoticed (or even being largely dismissed) due to their departure from familiar modes or norms, and it’s one of my gravest (though also most joyful) responsibilities to pay attention to movies that may be generally overlooked despite (or because of) their exceptional qualities. (For that matter, I live in fear of missing a movie that needs such attention.)

But another aspect of that same enthusiasm is the discovery of the unrealized future of the past—of great movies made and seen (or hardly seen) in recent decades that weren’t properly discussed and justly acclaimed in their time.”. Since one of the critical weapons used against the best of the new is an ossified and nostalgic classicism, the reëvaluation of what’s canonical, the acknowledgment of unheralded masterworks—and of filmmakers whose careers have been cavalierly truncated by industry indifference—is indispensable to and inseparable from the thrilling recognition of the authentically new.

Deany Hendrick Cheng (@DeandrickLamar), Freelance for Barber’s Chair Digital

It’s a piece on two of my favorite films of 2017, “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name”, and about how their very different modes of storytelling speak to the different sorts of stories we tell ourselves. Objectively, I don’t know if this is my best work in terms of pure style and craft, but I do think it’s the most emblematic in terms of what I value in cinema. I think every film is, in some way, a treatise on how certain memories are remembered, and I think cinema matters partly because the best examples of it are prisms through which the human experience is refracted.

Above everything else, every movie has to begin with a good story, and the greatest stories are the ones that mirror not just life, but the ways in which life is distorted and restructured through the process of remembering. Every aspect of a film, from its screenplay on down, must add something to the film’s portrayal of remembering, and “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name” accomplish this organic unity of theme with such charm yet in such distinct ways, that they were the perfect counterpoints to each other, as well as the perfect stand-ins for cinema as a whole, for me.

Liam Conlon (@Flowtaro), Ms En Scene

My favorite piece of my own work is definitely  “The Shape of Water’s” Strickland as the “Ur-American.”  I’m proud of it because it required me to really take stock of all the things that Americans are taught from birth to take as given. That meant looking at our history of colonialism, imperialism, racism, anticommunism and really diving into how all Americans, whether they’re liberal or conservative, can internalize these things unless they take the time to self-examine. Just as “Pan’s Labyrinth’s” despotic Captain Vidal was a masterful representation of Francisco Franco’s fascism, Richard Strickland represents a distinctly American kind of fascism. Writers Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor took great care in Strickland’s creation, and my piece was my own way of self-examining to make sure I never become or abide by a person like Strickland ever again.

Robert Daniels (@812filmreviews), Freelance

This is tricky, but “Annihilation” is definitely my favorite piece of film criticism that I’ve written. My writing style is a combination of criticism and gifs, and sometimes the words are better than the gifs, and the gifs are better than the words. With “Annihilation,” I thought the balance was perfect . My favorite portion: “Lena is just an idea, part of an equation that’s been erased from a chalkboard and rewritten with a different solution. The shimmer is part of her, even down to the DNA” is up there as one of my best. It was also a struggle to write because that film had more wild theories than the Aliens in Roswell. Also, the amount of research I had to do, combining Plato’s Ideal Forms, Darwin, the Bible, and Nietzsche, was absurd. However, it did make it easier to find matching gifs. The result made for my most studious, yet lighthearted read.

Alonso Duralde (@ADuralde), The Wrap

I’m the worst judge of my own material; there’s almost nothing I’ve ever written that I don’t want to pick at and re-edit, no matter how much time has passed. But since, for me, the hardest part of film criticism is adequately praising a movie you truly love, then by default my best review would probably be of one of my favorite films of all time, Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.”

David Ehrlich (@davidehrlich), IndieWire

I can’t summon the strength to re-read it, but I remember thinking that my piece on grief and “Personal Shopper” was emblematic of how I hope to thread individual perspective into arts criticism.

Shelley Farmer (@ShelleyBFarmer), Freelance for RogerEbert.com and Publicist at Film Forum

My favorite piece is a very recent one: For this year’s Women Writers Week on Roger Ebert, I wrote about “Phantom Thread”, “Jane Eyre,” and twisted power dynamics in hetero romance . I loved that it allowed me to dig deep into my personal fixations (19th century literature, gender, romance as power struggle), but – more importantly – it was exciting to be part of a series that highlighted the breadth of criticism by women writers.

Chris Feil (@chrisvfeil), Freelance for The Film Experience, This Had Oscar Buzz Podcast

My answer to this would be kind of a cheat, as my favorite work that I do is my weekly column about movie music called Soundtracking that I write over at The Film Experience. Soundtracks and needle drops have been a personal fascination, so the opportunity to explore the deeper meaning and context of a film’s song choices have been a real labor of love. Because of the demands and time constraints of what we do, it can be easy to spend our all of our energy on assignments and chasing freelance opportunities rather than devoting time to a pet project – but I’ve found indulging my own uncommon fascination to be invaluable in developing my point of view. And serve as a constant check-in with my passion. Pushed for a single entry that I would choose as the best, I would choose the piece I wrote on “Young Adult”‘s use of “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub for how it posits a single song as the key to unlocking both character and narrative.

Candice Frederick (@ReelTalker), Freelance for Shondaland, Harper’s Bazaar

“ Mother ” written for Vice. It’s one of my favorites because it conveys how visceral my experience was watching the movie. It’s truly stifling, uncomfortable, and frantic–and that’s what my review explains in detail. I wanted to have a conversation with the reader about specific aspects of the film that support the thesis, so I did.

Luiz Gustavo (@luizgvt), Cronico de Cinema

Well, I recently wrote a piece for Gazeta do Povo, a major outlet at Paraná state in Brazil, about Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (it is not on their site, but they were kind enough to let me replicate on my own website ). I don’t know the extent of the powers of Google Translator from Portugese to english, so you have to rely on my own account: is a text in which I was able to articulate de cinematographic references in the work of Mr. Del Toro, as well his thematic obsessions, the genre bending and social critique. All of this topics were analyzed in a fluid prose. On top of that, it was really fun to write!

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Negative (2017) Review

Negative is a 2017 action/thriller about a former British spy who flees Los Angeles for Phoenix after a deal with a cartel goes wrong.

Wrong place at the wrong time. That’s nothing new in film, with plenty of stories following unlikely nobodies thrust into action by circumstances they only happen to fall into. What makes it so appealing is usually how it allows the audience to identify with the ‘hero’ and keep us imaging what it would be like if it were us. Not so much with  Joshua Caldwell ‘s Negative , an ungainly thriller that has a smart start but devolves into a plodding, unconvincing road trip that spoils all its good ideas.

READ MORE : Director Joshua Caldwell speak to me about film criticism and my review of his movie Negative

Analog photographer Hollis ( Simon Quarterman ) is out and about Los Angeles, taking candid snaps of people on the street, including that of a lovely young woman strolling alone in a park. He heads home and begins developing his pictures in his darkroom when he gets a knock on the door, and by no surprise, it’s the same woman, who charges in and demands the image. She is Natalie ( Katia Winter ), and she means business, violently getting his attention and soon the photograph and negative, but hot on her trail are some thugs who she says are very, very bad, forcing the two of them to go on the run. So it’s to Phoenix they go, laying low as Hollis tries to figure out who she is and why there are killers after her.

It’s not hard to see what Caldwell and screenwriter Adam Gaines are trying to do here, a gender role reversal of the very trope-ish action movie standard, making Natalie a woman of great beauty and even more kick-assery while Hollis remains the mild-mannered do-gooder who asks clerks at hotels the thread count of bed sheets. It’s a work of broad strokes and as such makes the generic switch all too obvious rather than organic. We learn that Natalie is a former spy something or other for an elite British agency of sorts who was on her way out (despite looking barely old enough to have even begun a career) and ended up mixed up with a Colombian drug cartel in LA., a deal that left her being hunted by some ruthless sicarios. She is now ‘stuck’ with Hollis, believing they would kill him for the photo, forcing him to depend on her to survive.

The idea is a good one, but the execution is off, raising a number of troubling questions. Natalie was simply photographed in public walking in a park, hardly appearing to be in hiding or on the run, so why would a random image of her be of any value? The cartel bad guys somehow track Hollis (or her) to his apartment, a conceit that is purely plot-driven as any closer inspection renders it impossible. Either way, the filmmakers are more interested in the relationship of Hollis and Natalie, and by the time we get to a lengthy exposition on the history and importance of Marshmallow Fluff, the film has well-established itself as an awkwardly talky and expositional experience with rarely a moment of earned action. While there are some good moments in direction, and one pretty decent fight scene (that itself ends in cliché), there is nothing we haven’t seen before.

Negative is a noble attempt but a misstep nonetheless, and yet despite the flaws, there is promise from the filmmakers that better can be done. Caldwell builds a convincing sense of atmosphere and for the most part, Natalie is a compelling character that might have worked better with a different setup and without the baggage of Hollis.

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The director of "Coraline" has suggested it is for brave children of any age. That's putting it mildly. This is nightmare fodder for children, however brave, under a certain age. I know kids are exposed to all sorts of horror films via video, but "Coraline" is disturbing not for gory images but for the story it tells. That's rare in itself: Lots of movies are good at severing limbs, but few at telling tales that can grab us down inside where it's dark and scary.

Even more rare is that Coraline Jones ( Dakota Fanning ) is not a nice little girl. She's unpleasant, complains, has an attitude and makes friends reluctantly. Nor does she meet sweet and colorful new pals in her adventure, which involves the substitution of her parents by ominous doubles with buttons sewn over their eyes. She is threatened with being trapped in their alternate world, which is reached by an alarming tunnel behind a painted-over doorway in her own.

Not that Coraline's own parents are all that great. They're busy, distracted, bickering and always hunched over their computers. They hardly hear her when she talks. That's why she recklessly enters the tunnel and finds her Other Mother and Other Father waiting with roast chicken and a forced cheerfulness. All she needs to stay there is to have buttons sewn into her own eye sockets.

"Coraline" is the new film by Henry Selick , who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) and again combines his mastery of stop-motion and other animation with 3-D. The 3-D creates a gloomier image (take off the glasses and the screen is bright), but then this is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.

The ideal audience for this film would be admirers of film art itself, assuming such people exist. Selick creates an entirely original look and feel, uses the freedom of animation to elongate his characters into skeletal spectres looming over poor Coraline. Her new friend, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), is a young hunchback whose full name is Wyborn, and it doesn't take Coraline long to wonder why his parents named him that.

The Other Mother and Father (voices of Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman , who are also Father and Mother) essentially want to steal Coraline from her real but distracted parents and turn her into some kind of a Stepford daughter. Their house, which looks like Coraline's own, has two old ladies ( Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French ) in the basement, boarders who seem in retirement from subtly hinted careers in the adult-entertainment industry. The upstairs boarder is Mr. Bobinsky ( Ian McShane ), a sometime vaudevillian who has a troupe of trained mice. One of the rooms of the house has insects bigger than Coraline who act as living furniture.

It's more or less impossible for me, anyway, to be scared by 3-D animation. The process always seems to be signaling, "I'm a process!" I think it's harder to get involved in a story when the process doesn't become invisible. I hear from parents who say, "My kids didn't even notice the 3-D!" In that case, why have it in the first place?

Kids who will be scared by the story may not all be happy to attend, 3-D or not. I suspect a lot of lovers of the film will include admirers of Neil Gaiman , whose Hugo Award-winning novel inspired Selick's screenplay. Gaiman is a titan of graphic novels, and there's a nice irony that one of his written books has been adapted as animation.

I admire the film mostly because it is good to look at. Selick is as unconventional in his imagery as Gaiman is in his writing, and this is a movie for people who know and care about drawing, caricature, grotesquerie and the far shores of storytelling. In short, you might care little about a fantasy, little indeed about this story, and still admire the artistry of it all, including an insidious score by Bruno Coulais, which doesn't pound at us like many horror scores, but gets under our psychic fingernails.

Credit is due to those who backed this film. I'm tired of wall-to-wall cuteness like " Kung Fu Panda ," and wonder if Selick's approach would be suited to films for grown-ups adapted from material like stories by August Derleth or Stephen King .

And perhaps I didn't make it clear that it's fine with me that Coraline is an unpleasant little girl. It would be cruelty to send Pippi Longstocking down that tunnel, but Coraline deserves it. Maybe she'll learn a lesson.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Coraline (2009)

100 minutes

Dakota Fanning as Coraline

Teri Hatcher as Mother/Other Mother

John Hodgman as Father/Other Father

Ian McShane as Mr. Bobinsky

Robert Bailey Jr. as Wybie

Jennifer Saunders as Miss Spink

Dawn French as Miss Forcible

Keith David as Cat

Written and directed by

• Henry Selick

Based on the graphic novel

• Neil Gaiman

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The 13 Worst Horror Movies of All Time, Ranked According to Rotten Tomatoes

Oh, the terror! ...And not in a good way.

Right now, audiences are living in a golden age of horror. "Elevated horror" has been on the rise for nearly a decade, and over the past year or two, it's become apparent that the beloved slasher movie is back with a vengeance. Also, as has always been the case, the reality is there are a ton of terrible horror films out there. Then, now, and forever.

Horror movies are cheap to produce and infamously profitable, so they're churned out incessantly. So it makes sense that a relatively high ratio is pure junk. According to critics on Rotten Tomatoes, these are the absolute worst horror movies ever made , ranging from woefully lame and uneventful action horror films such as House of the Dead to lifeless Hollywood J-Horror remake One Missed Call .

13 'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey' (2023)

Rotten tomatoes score: 3%.

One of the more infamous horror movies and so-bad-it's-good movies of the modern era (though some argue it's just plain bad) Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the first in what's sure to be an era of uninspired IP mining. The crudely animated opening (the best part of the movie by a mile) lays the premise: After Christopher Robin abandons his childhood friends (you know, the plus novelties), Eeyore is devoured by the others as they're on the verge of starvation. Henceforth, the

Many will tell you there is no enjoyment to be found here, that Blood and Honey is just irredeemable trash. Not so! So long as you're in the mood for a formulaic, shameless slasher movie that looks like it cost hundreds of dollars to make, it's an artistically bankrupt, ironic good time. A sequel followed one year later to more positive, though overall still negative critical notices.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

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After Christopher Robin abandons them for college, Pooh and Piglet embark on a bloody rampage as they search for a new source of food.

12 'House of the Dead' (2003)

Uwe Boll will make more than one appearance on this list (and possibly many, many "worst" lists). One of his most maligned movies is this early-aughts adaptation of the rail shooter arcade game of the same name, which somehow feels less substantial than its source material. The movie illustrates a fictional island infested by zombies that forces its survivors to fight for a way out. Things go south when a group of college students travel to the mysterious island to attend a rave.

House of the Dead is most infamous for playing video game footage over its (headache-inducing, flatly staged) action sequences , surely one of the most remarkably lazy directing calls on record. It's overall not a good zombie film , and it will surely (at least according to Rotten Tomatoes critics, anyway) go down as one of the worst in the genre.

House of the Dead

11 'the apparition' (2012).

A solid cast including Ashley Greene , Sebastian Stan and Tom Felton have nothing to work with in an ostensibly spooky thriller that's about as non-threatening and meh as its title. Greene and Stan play a couple plagued by a mysterious, parasitic presence in their home. It's an unoriginal, downright derivative premise to begin with, and to make matters worse the ending was fully spoiled in the trailer.

Director Todd Lincoln was at one point reportedly in talks to direct a remake of revered horror tale The Fly . It's not much of a challenge to speculate The Apparition ' s critical pummeling and paltry $6.4 million worldwide box-office gross contributed to that not happening.

The Apparition

10 'feardotcom' (2002).

The uncertainty of the cyber world lends itself to terror (the Unfriended movies and especially Host mined this pretty well), and in 2002 it felt like the perfect time to jump on that. This William Malone movie follows detective Mike Reilly ( Stephen Dorff ) and Department of Health researcher Terry Huston ( Natascha McElhone ) as they team up to uncover the cause behind four inexplicable deaths.

Unfortunately, aside from fleeting moments of stylishness, Feardotcom is ugly, blandly gruesome — and worse, boring. Although the dialogues are relatively bad and the editing is questionable, Malone's film's worst sin is arguably a total waste of brilliant character actors : Stephen Dorff , Natascha McElhone , Udo Kier and The Crying Game 's Stephen Rea all have nothing to do, and appear flat-out lost.

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9 'Bless the Child' (2000)

Rotten tomatoes score: 4%.

None of this is on Kim Basinger . Just three short years after the icon and oft-brilliant actress won an Academy Award for a resplendent turn in L.A Confidential , Basinger appeared in this hot mess about child abduction, devil worshipers, and terrible special effects. It leans most heavily into the latter.

Bless The Child emerged from a millennium-themed era where movies studios churned out uninspired end-of-the-world stuff constantly. You'll remember Bless the Child about as well as you remember End of Days. Don't remember that one, or at least had to be reminded of it? Exactly. Nothing about Bless the Child stands out, except maybe just how generic it is.

Bless the Child

8 'the haunting of molly hartley' (2008), rotten tomatoes score: 2%.

Featuring stiff acting and, regrettably, a forgettable premise, the supernatural horror film The Haunting of Molly Hartley is about a young woman's family's pact with Satan, romantic rivalries, and actors who definitely aren't teens playing teens who like to party. Despite its critical failure, it was a mild commercial success.

Long before roles in films like Thank You For Your Service , Cyrano , and Swallow garnered the talented actress critical acclaim, Haley Bennett starred in this oh-so-aughts, punishingly lame PG-13 horror flick opposite hunky Chace Crawford , the lone draw at the time whose star was on the rise thanks to Gossip Girl . The Haunting of Molly Hartley looks shot for TV, and it's about as scary as a toothpaste commercial . This is a "horror" movie aimed at tweens.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley

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7 'Alone in the Dark' (2005)

Rotten tomatoes score: 1%.

Starring Christian Slater in the lead role, Alone in the Dark is an action horror sci-fi that follows a paranormal investigator who uncovers a long-lost tribe called the Abskani. After discovering that they worshiped demons and these evil creatures are now attempting to break loose on the face of the earth, Edward must run against time to stop them with the help of archeologist Aline Cedrac ( Tara Reid ).

Uwe Boll's $20 million-budgeted (that seems modest, but the movie looks way cheaper) video-game adaptation is often ranked among the worst films of all time, a standout among the filmmaker's less-than-critically-adored pantheon. Slater and Reid have negative chemistry, and the action scenes are stunningly inept. Alone in the Dark is astonishingly lacking , so it's no wonder why it is often considered one of the worst horror movies of all time.

Alone in the Dark

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6 'Beneath the Darkness' (2011)

Rotten tomatoes score: 0%.

In addition to having about as generic a horror title as one can fathom, the Texas-set Beneath the Darkness stars Dennis Quaid , Tony Oller , and Aimee Teegarden in a derivative teen thriller plot about a murder and a cover-up. Furthermore, probably due to its unengaging premise that leaves out much to be desired, this 2011 flick was also a box office flop, earning a total of $23,998 all over the globe.

Though it aims for a similar tone, Beneath the Darkness is so vanilla and unremarkable it makes I Know What You Did Last Summer look like a masterpiece by comparison. Unfortunately, Martin Guigui 's R-rated debut falls several stories short of expectations and inevitably takes a place on this list.

Beneath the Darkness

5 'homecoming' (2009).

In Homecoming , Mischa Barton steps into the shoes of the stereotypical jealous ex-girlfriend who seeks vengeance after her former bae ( Matt Long ) returns to their hometown with a new girlfriend ( Jessica Stroup ). While poorly received by critics worldwide, though, Homecoming was somewhat of a box office success, grossing $8.5 million against a $1.5 million budget.

There have only been about a billion Fatal Attraction and Misery knockoffs (this is a little bit of both), but arguably none as instantly forgettable as this Morgan J. Freeman (not the Oscar-winning actor) film . Critics dog-piled on Homecoming for wall-to-wall clichés, and a lack of entertainment value. It's rare, though not unheard of, for a movie with subject matter like this to be genuinely good art. To not even be good nonsense is unforgivable.

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4 'The Disappointments Room' (2016)

But seriously, who ok'd this title? What's next, a horror movie called The Underwhelming Films Bunker ? Kate Beckinsale is usually brilliant (this movie was released the same year as Love & Friendship , perhaps her best work to date), but she appears to be sleepwalking through this supernatural thriller movie (that is thrill-free) about a Brooklyn couple who discover a weird room in their new country house. And who could blame her?

The Disappointments Room was released in the wake of Relativity folding. Surely much of the talent involved would have rather it never saw the light of day. Director D.J. Caruso has made a crackling horror film in 2007's Disturbia , but The Disappointments Room practically evaporates as you watch it — like its title suggests, audiences really are in for a disappointment .

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3 'Cabin Fever' (2016)

Why, oh why is this film? An aggressively unnecessary remake of Eli Roth 's 2002 original (which rests at a far more palatable 62% on the Tomatometer ), Cabin Fever 2.0 simply retells the original story: it centers around a group of five college friends who succumb to an infectious, flesh-eating disease while staying at a remote cabin, only without the weird energy and humor that made the original movie what it was.

Roth surely has his detractors, but the Cabin Fever remake goes a long way in making Roth look good . In addition to not doing anything different from its source material, it is a gross horror movie without personality and a depressing experience; not in the cathartic way audiences sometimes want from a horror movie. It's really just a bummer.

Cabin Fever

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2 'Jaws: The Revenge' (1987)

How low can you go is the name of the game in this abominable third sequel to arguably the best suspense film ever made. The fourth and final film in the Jaws franchise shifted the focus to now-widowed Ellen Brody ( Loirrane Gary ) and her genuine belief that a white shark is seeking revenge on her family, especially when it kills her youngest son and then follows her to the Bahamas.

The Revenge is mostly unwatchably boring and unpleasurable, but there are so-bad-it's-good assets , like the roaring shark (yes, a roaring shark). Michael Caine famously missed an Oscars ceremony where he won for Hannah and Her Sisters to film Jaws: The Revenge. Film critic Roger Ebert famously knocked him for it.

Jaws: The Revenge

1 'one missed call' (2008).

The Ring starring Naomi Watts was a box-office leviathan and the beginning of a J-horror remake influx in Hollywood. The worst of these mostly terrible pale imitators of the solid Ring is this lame thriller about cursed voicemails. Gore Verbinski 's phenomenally successful retelling of Ringu accumulated a handful of mixed-to-negative critical notices (they were mostly positive).

Compared to One Missed Call , which centers around Beth Raymond ( Shannyn Sossamon ) as she witnesses the deaths of two friends who hear horrifying messages through the phone, that film is Psycho , an untouchable peak of the horror genre. According to Rotten Tomatoes (based on 80 reviews), this insult to Takashi Miike's well-received original is the worst horror movie, ever .

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NEXT: The Best Horror Movies of All Time, Ranked

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Negative Reviews

Negative is greater than the sum of its flawed parts.

Full Review | Original Score: B | May 29, 2018

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Directed by Joshua Caldwell

Negative is set in the American southwest and follows Natalie, a former British spy who flees Los Angeles for Phoenix after a deal with a cartel goes wrong. She's joined by Hollis, a street photographer who has put his life at risk by taking Natalie's photo at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

Sebastian Roché Katia Winter Josh Randall Simon Quarterman Joanna Sotomura Whitney Anderson Karen Sours Albisua Santiago Salviche Miguel Pérez Tamar Kummel Marem Hassler Jason Garcia Jr.

Director Director

Joshua Caldwell

Producers Producers

Joshua Caldwell William Borthwick

Writer Writer

Adam Gaines

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Tom Spriggs

Composer Composer

Face Films MarVista Entertainment Meydenbauer Entertainment

Releases by Date

25 apr 2017, releases by country.

• Premiere Source: IMDB (Palm Beach)

99 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Matt ★★½

Oh wow, if only the pacing wasn't so horrible this could've been pretty good. Really enjoyable chemistry from the two main characters and there's a cracking hammy villain + fight scene a way through but it's a real hike to get there. Very much in the 'watchable, never essential' category.

Review by Christopher Renney ½

Negative. It’s a shame you can’t give negative review, in every sense of the phrase. 

Was it a good film? Negative.  Are they any stand out performances in this? Negative.  Would I watch this again? Negative. 

The film is basic at best. It’s almost like a student film but in saying that I feel like I’m disrespecting myself and other student film makers cause I know I’ve seen better made for less.

Review by Jerome1994 ★ 2

The title says it all.....no but seriously this movie is awful. Bad acting, terrible writing, has a couple okay scenes, poor filming and very predictable plot. Seriously 2017 give me some more bad straight DVD movies that I can criticize and crack jokes on, not terrible garbage that isn't anything special like this...

Review by John Pold ½

Embarrassing dialogue. No action. Cute lead.

Review by Shiruba ½

It's Norway's national day today. On an unrelated note, god i hate this so much. The acting sucks, the music is shit, and nothing happens, but that's not really what I wanted to mention here. They're so confident in the cinematography they did. I can see why they thought it looked good but it just looks like fucking stock footage. There's a lot of bad camera work. The camera is always shaky. The shitty looking zooms. The ones they edited in and the ones they did with the camera. It's so annoying to actually look at. I feel like there's something else to why it sucks ass but i just can't put my finger on it. I think maybe it could have worked better as photographs i don't know.

Review by lookitsline ★

this entire movie plot could have been avoided if dickhead photographer asked for her consent before taking her photo, like any good photographer should

Review by Svenningen ★

Very close to DNF on this one.

Pacing, plot, dialogue. No, no and more no.

Review by MovieBurners ★★½

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

When a casual photographer Hollins (Quarterman) snaps a photo of a seemingly unassuming woman named Natalie (Winter), his life is flipped upside down when she shows up to retrieve the photo.

With very little explanation, she informs him that his life is now in danger and in order to survive he must flee with her to Arizona.

After being left in the dark for a spell, she finally explains her shady MI-6 past and all that’s transpired up to the point of the photograph. On the run from the cartel hunting her, this pretty much turns into one lengthy road trip full of empty convo that tries desperately to deliver suspense.

Unfortunately, this movie SEVERELY lacks the one thing you…

Review by Kyle Jonathan ★★★

Spy thrillers have grown beyond a niche genre into some of the most profitable films of the 21st century. The central story usually remains the same: Betrayal, covert operations, and outrageous action set pieces. Jonathan Caldwell's tightly paced indie Negative chooses to focus on the quiet moments between the shootouts. Taking an intimate approach into the psyche of trained operatives and the mere mortals they cross paths with, this is an outstanding return to the inception of the genre, exploring themes of psychological torment and the price of trauma. Featuring two captivating performances, slick visual compositions, and one of the most brutal fight scenes of the year, this is an exceptional addition to the canon of espionage.

A photographer captures…

Review by Film Blitz ★★½

Full review: girlswithguns.org/negative/

"a.k.a. We've Got a Drone And We're Gonna Use It"

I was startled to learn some people apparently still take pictures on film requiring an actual darkroom to develop it: personally, this left the movie already feeling like a throwback to the eighties, about as out of time as Phone Booth is now. [References to The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy don't exactly help there] Moving past that, it all feels rather too understated. Apart from some blood-spatter, we don't get any real evidence of Natalie's qualifications as a bad-ass until an hour into the movie - she's more about evasion than confrontation, save for a drunk guy at a motel. This may have been a function…

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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ Review: The Origin Story of Furiosa Has Dazzling Sequences, but George Miller’s Overstuffed Epic Is No ‘Fury Road’

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the title hellion as a heavy-metal Candide bouncing through the Wasteland, but despite some awesome action moments (and two mega villains), the feeling is one of inflated franchise overkill.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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The first thing to say about “ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ” is that it’s not like any other “Mad Max” film. The movie, which runs 2 hours and 28 minutes, is teemingly, sprawlingly, phantasmagorically ambitious. Where “Mad Max: Fury Road” was set over three days, “Furiosa” takes place over 15 years and tells the origin story of Imperator Furiosa in five chapters (which come with titles like “The Pole of Inaccessibility”). The film has a cast of thousands of depraved hooligan bikers with rusty weapons and rotten teeth. At times, it feels like they’re getting ready to gather for Wasteland Woodstock.

Popular on Variety

Most people would say “The Road Warrior” is greater. But “Mad Max,” in its cruder low-budget way, had a down-and-dirty B-movie virtuosity. “The Road Warrior” was bigger and grander. I decided — this was part of the fun of the game — that the greatest “Mad Max” film was whichever one you happened to be watching.

A few years later, Miller, perhaps high on his own legend (a syndrome that’s more or less built into being a visionary filmmaker), made “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985), a threequel that had some splendid things in it — Tina Turner, the Thunderdome showdown — but that also turned into an inflated Jungian fairy tale about “saving the children” (a good idea in life, but not so often in movies). It wasn’t a terrible film, yet the series felt cooked, spent, diminished. It seemed as if “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” were too bravura in their drive-by nihilism to keep extending. Miller had made the two greatest action films of all time, and he moved on to other things.

But that, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. In a world of recycled IP, “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), released 30 years later, did the impossible. It revived the series at full intensity, sweeping memories of “Beyond Thunderdome” under its spectacular wreckage, and creating a heroine — Charlize Theron’s hellacious buzzcut Furiosa — who was every bit as full-throttle commanding as Mel Gibson’s Max. True to her name, the film was so fast and furious that your eyeballs had to learn how to watch it, to follow the ballistic micro edits. But when you got onto the wavelength, the black magic of the “Mad Max” world was back. It was an epic desert drag-race miracle, a sequel worthy of the first two films — and, in that sense, maybe the third greatest action film ever made.

So what does one do for an encore to that ?

“Furiosa” tells the story of how its title character grows up, how she goes from being an innocent village girl, raised in the Green Place of Many Mothers (where she’s already daring enough to sever the fuel hose on a stranger’s motorcycle), to a kidnapped waif to a resourceful orphan who passes herself off as a boy to a devious hellion who bounces back and forth between dueling postapocalyptic underworld empires: that of the Warlord Dementus ( Chris Hemsworth ), the long-haired-and-bearded ruler of the Biker Horde that first absconds with her (leading them, Dementus rides in the chopper version of a “Ben-Hur” chariot); and that of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the ancient, gas-masked, white-maned cult leader of the Citadel, the colony of white-faced fighter disciples who Furiosa was trying to escape from in “Fury Road.”

“Furiosa,” by contrast, is a picaresque with a stop-and-go rhythm, as the young Furiosa goes from the frying pan into the fire, like a heavy-metal Candide, forming attachments through her survival instincts but never sticking with anyone for long. She’s a lone wolf in a world of scoundrels. Theoretically, that’s easy to understand, but a movie, almost by nature, needs to be about the forging of bonds. And “Furiosa,” as populated as it is with disposable warriors (and characters with names like Scrotus and Toe Jam and The Octoboss and The People Eater and War Boy), feels alienated and a touch impersonal. The film seems more invested in Miller’s elaborate and, at moments, overly digitized extensions of the Wasteland than in the people who inhabit it. In that way, it’s got a touch of Marvel-itis.   

The film seems all but designed to show off its world’s-end locations — the Citadel, the skull-faced cliff we already know well, and Gas Town, a petrochemical jungle surrounded by a giant moat, and the Bullet Farm. There’s one spectacular action sequence. It’s plunked into the center of the movie, and it involves a gleaming silver two-section tanker, with a jagged whirring read-end doohicky, the entire thing built out of spare parts, as it speeds along the desert blacktop with rogue bikers attacking it from all sides. We’ve been here before, but it’s sensationally gratifying to be here again: in the unholy thick of speed and murder, with warriors now dying by incineration.

Yet it’s never a good sign, at least in a “Mad Max” movie, when your most dazzling set piece comes in the middle. “Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.

When the young Furiosa, played by Alyla Browne, is first captured, we think horrible things are going to happen to her. She is zoomed across the nighttime desert, where the gnarly biker who nabbed her plans to inform Dementus of the oasis she came from (which, in the Garden of Eden opening sequence, looks civilized enough to be the Whole Foods of the apocalyptic afterworld). But then Furiosa’s mother shows up to rescue her — a ruthless warrior named Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser) who knows how to repair and ride a Thunder Bike and is willing to die to protect her cub.

Then too, there’s something a bit off about how the movie comes close to cushioning the evil of Immortan Joe. This is a ruler who presides over a sick sect of suicide killers, and who extends his royal line by maintaining a harem of sex-slave wives. We know all this from “Fury Road,” of course. But since Immortan Joe’s Citadel is the place Furiosa is destined to end up, the film goes a little easy on it. Immortan Joe and Dementus cut a deal over gasoline, and given how dastardly both of them are supposed to be, the battle between them should have been more lavishly twisted.

The scenes where Furiosa passes herself off as a boy aren’t quite convincing; you have to just go with them. Then she grows up, and Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role. She’s a powerful actor with a sensual scowl, but here, with hardly any words to speak, she’s at her most stoic. That seems on some level appropriate, especially when she propels herself through an entire road chase underneath a vehicle. But the character is more reactive and less hellbent than either Gibson’s Max or Theron’s Furiosa. For a while, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa forms a connection with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), a road warrior whose main lesson to her seems to be to wear blue greasepaint on their foreheads. Their partnership comes out of nowhere, then fades into nowhere.

More crucial: As much as I loved the character of Furiosa in “Fury Road,” do we really need to see her tangled, deep-dive-that-somehow-stays-on-the-surface origin story? It’s an impulse, at heart, that grows out of franchise culture, and maybe that’s why “Furiosa,” for all the tasty stuff in it, is a half-satisfying movie. Miller creates a volatile world to wander around in, and I suspect a number of viewers and critics will respond fully to that. But part of the genius of the “Mad Max” films is that when they’re pumping on all cylinders, even when they’re as grand as “The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road,” they are also, in spirit, as lean and mean as one of those lethal spiked jalopies zooming down the blacktop. In attempting to inflate his universe into something larger, Miller clutters it with pretension and makes it mean less. He takes his eye off the place where the rubber meets the road.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York (Cannes Film Festival, out of competition), May 6, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 148 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of a Kennedy Miller production. Producers: George Miller, Doug Mitchell.
• Crew: Director: George Miller. Screenplay: George Miller, Nico Lathouris. Camera: Simon Duggan. Editors: Eliot Knapman, Margaret Sixel. Music: Tom Holkenborg.
• With: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Charlee Fraser, Angus Sampson, Alyla Browne, Daniel Webber, Nathan Jones, Gordon D. Kleut.

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The garfield movie review: chris pratt leads a lackluster animated adventure with little appeal.

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Every Chris Pratt Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

The garfield movie box office has already made back 80% of its budget before u.s. opening weekend, 10 new movies we’re very nervous about because they have potential to become instant classics & blockbusters.

• The Garfield Movie offers humor but lacks originality, overshadowing the main character with a bland story and better characters.
• Chris Pratt's voice performance is decent, but Ving Rhames steals the show as Otto.
• Despite an emotional father-son storyline, The Garfield Movie feels lackluster and fails to bring anything new to the table.

As one of the most famous fictional cats out there, it's no surprise that Hollywood is keen to build a franchise on Jim Davis' Garfield, the lazy lasagna-loving pet who loathes Mondays above all else. Yet, more than ten years after the misfires that were Garfield: The Movie and its 2006 follow-up, which even star Bill Murray has disavowed, the cat's prospects haven't exactly improved. The newest attempt at making the character happen, The Garfield Movie , is already at a disadvantage due to its lead star.

Based on Jim Davis's comic series, Garfield is a new imagining of the lasagna-loving cat and his friends, opting for a fully computer-animated approach. Chris Pratt voices the titular cat, with the film aiming to explore his early days and new misadventures for him, his friends, and his family.

• There is the occasional genuine bit of humor
• The voice cast is good
• The story is lackluster
• The movie doesn't offer anything creative or invigorating
• Garfield is overshadowed by better characters
• Garfield isn't a strong enough protagonist

Chris Pratt has received a lot of flack for taking on voice roles for seemingly no reason other than his star power, and his casting as Garfield sparked plenty of memes and eye-rolls (though admittedly, the furor was much smaller than it was when he was cast as Mario). That The Garfield Movie isn't a particularly strong animated movie isn't entirely Pratt's fault , far from it, but it does make me think that, unlike last year's The Super Mario Bros . Movie , this new Sony outing won't rebound from its initial reception.

From humble beginnings to Hollywood elite, Chris Pratt has rapidly become one of the most commercially successful actors in the history of film.

The Garfield Movie's Plot Moves Fast & Hits The Expected Beats

The Garfield Movie wastes no time introducing its titular character, from his seemingly bottomless stomach to his tragic origin story, which lays the foundation for the whole plot. When he was a tiny, big-eyed kitten, Garfield was left in an alley by his father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), on a dark and stormy night. Naturally, Garfield himself is providing the narration for this intro, a gimmick I found tiring almost immediately. Drawn by the scents of a nearby Italian restaurant, baby Garfield left the alley behind and found his way into the arms of sweet Jon Arbuckle (Nicholas Hoult).

Jon swiftly adopted the cat and so established the status quo comic readers are familiar with. However, it isn't long before Garfield and innocent pup Odie (Harvey Guillén) are yanked from their comfortable home and drawn into a mysterious plot, all because of former thief Vic. One of Vic's past partners in crime, Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), ended up in prison because of his actions, and she's returned for revenge. Jinx insists Vic and Garfield (with poor Odie along for the ride) must fulfill her chosen form of retribution, which involves stealing a lot of milk.

The Garfield Movie , directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds, keeps a steady pace the whole time, perhaps to ensure younger viewers don't lose focus too quickly. Much of the plot is centered around the milk heist, and Garfield's strained relationship with his dad. The father-son storyline forms the core of The Garfield Movie , and it certainly tugs at the heartstrings in exactly the way you'd expect . It's an effective way for us to gain some compassion for Garfield, since the movie itself isn't always interested in making him a well-rounded character.

The Garfield Movie

Pratt's garfield is overshadowed by stronger performances (& characters), ving rhames is especially good as otto.

There aren't many surprises to be had here, and the straightforward story, while likely working pretty well for its younger audience, won't excite adult viewers. At times, it feels as though The Garfield Movie is going through the motions, and it fails to offer anything particularly noteworthy about its main character . Maybe the nostalgia is simply lost on me, but I don't understand the appeal of Garfield as a protagonist, and this movie did little to change my mind.

Maybe I'm asking too much for a family-oriented animated movie, but there are so many titles out there that prove there is more to this medium than what is being offered here.

Performance-wise, Pratt isn't bad as Garfield. He knows how to find the humor in certain lines and injects some vulnerability into the occasional heavier emotional beat. However, he's surrounded by a very strong voice cast , and that makes his own simple approach stand out. Waddingham is clearly having a ball as the vengeful Jinx, and Hoult, brief as his part may be, sounds so unlike himself, I didn't recognize him until I saw his name in the credits.

Jackson is as reliable as always, and Ving Rhames sinks into the role of Otto, a bull Vic, Garfield, and Odie meet while preparing for their heist. Otto is perhaps the most compelling character here, with a sad backstory of his own that could've provided a bit more depth to The Garfield Movie if further explored. However, this movie is more focused on the predictable beats of the heist and the predictable comedic beats of Garfield falling flat on his face. Genuine laughs, outside a few clever references that will pass over some kids' heads, are sparse.

The Garfield Movie is far from an offensively bad take on the character , but it does leave me wondering whether the cat can actually sustain a movie all on his own. Compared to other recent animated movies, and even those still to come in 2024, this effort feels distinctly lackluster, not offering anything original or creatively invigorating. Maybe I'm asking too much for a family-oriented animated movie, but there are so many titles out there that prove there is more to this medium than what is being offered here.

The Garfield Movie releases in theaters on Friday, May 24. It is 101 minutes long and rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements.

'If' movie review: Ryan Reynolds' imaginary friend fantasy might go over your kids' heads

Even with likable youngsters, a vast array of cartoonish characters, various pratfalls and shenanigans, and Ryan Reynolds in non- Deadpool mode, the family comedy “IF” isn’t really a "kids movie" – at least not in a conventional sense.

There’s a refreshing whiff of whimsy and playful originality to writer/director John Krasinski’s bighearted fantasy (★★½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters Friday), which centers on a young girl who discovers a secret world of imaginary friends (aka IFs). What it can’t find is the common thread of universal appeal. Yeah, children are geared to like any movie with a cheery unicorn, superhero dog, flaming marshmallow with melting eye and assorted furry monsters. But “IF” features heady themes of parental loss and reconnecting with one’s youth, plus boasts a showstopping dance set to Tina Turner , and that all leans fairly adult. Mash those together and the result is akin to a live-action Pixar movie without the nuanced execution.

Twelve-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) doesn’t really think of herself as a kid anymore. Her mom died of a terminal illness, and now her dad (Krasinski) is going into the hospital for surgery to fix his “broken heart,” so she’s staying with her grandma (Fiona Shaw) in New York City.

When poking around her new environment, Bea learns she has the ability to see imaginary friends. And she’s not the only one: Bea meets charmingly crusty upstairs neighbor Cal (Reynolds) as well as his IF pals, like spritely Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and overly sensitive purple furry monster named Blue (Steve Carell). They run a sort of matchmaking agency to connect forgotten IFs whose kids have outgrown them with new children in need of their companionship, and Bea volunteers to help out.

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Bea is introduced to an IF retirement community located under a Coney Island carousel with a bevy of oddball personalities in the very kid-friendly middle section of the movie. “IF” low-key has the most starry supporting cast of any movie this summer because of all the A-listers voicing imaginary friends, an impressive list that includes Emily Blunt and Sam Rockwell as the aforementioned unicorn and superdog, Matt Damon as a helpful sunflower, George Clooney as a spaceman, Amy Schumer as a gummy bear and Bradley Cooper as an ice cube in a glass. (It's no talking raccoon, but it works.)

One of the movie's most poignant roles is a wise bear played by Louis Gossett Jr. in one of his final roles. Rather than just being a cameo, he’s nicely central to a key emotional scene.

While the best family flicks win over kids of all ages, “IF” is a film for grown-ups in PG dressing. The movie is amusing but safe in its humor, the overt earnestness overshadows some great bits of subversive silliness, and the thoughtful larger narrative, which reveals itself by the end to be much more than a story about a girl befriending a bunch of make-believe misfits, will go over some little ones’ heads. Tweens and teens, though, will likely engage with or feel seen by Bea’s character arc, struggling to move into a new phase of life while being tied to her younger years – not to mention worrying about her dad, who tries to make light of his medical situation for Bea.

Reynolds does his part enchanting all ages in this tale of two movies: He’s always got that irascible “fun uncle” vibe for kids, and he strikes a fun chemistry opposite Fleming that belies the serious stuff “IF” digs into frequently. But unless your child is into old movies, they probably won’t get why “Harvey” is playing in the background in a scene. And when “IF” reaches its cathartic finale, some kiddos might be wondering why their parents are sniffling and tearing up – if they're still paying attention and not off playing with their own imaginary friend by then.

Critics are calling 'Furiosa' one of the 'greatest prequels ever made' — but not better than 'Fury Road'

• "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" continues the franchise's high-octane action legacy.
• Critics praised the movie's stunts and performances, but said it doesn't surpass "Mad Max: Fury Road."
• Here's a roundup of what critics are saying about the movie.

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" marks the fifth movie in George Miller's high-octane action franchise.

Following the success of 2015's "Max Mad: Fury Road," which took in over $380 million at the worldwide box office , "Furiosa" tells the origin story of one of the main characters from "Fury Road," Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa.

"Furiosa" follows the title character, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, over a 15-year span as she journeys into the Wasteland and ultimately becomes a badass War Rig driver.

Now that the movie has had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, here's what critics are saying about the movie, Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth's performances, and whether it's as good as the beloved "Fury Road."

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" opens in theaters May 24.

Critics praised the movie's action sequences

The "Mad Max" franchise is known for its extreme stunts and action sequences, and critics say there are plenty more to enjoy in "Furiosa."

"The movie is teemingly, sprawlingly, phantasmagorically ambitious," wrote Variety critic Owen Gleiberman , adding that it "contains a handful of awesome action moments."

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"The mammoth scale and vision of Miller continue to delight, and 'Furiosa' absolutely deserves to be seen as big and loud as possible, a feat of technical prowess and cinematic ambition that only comes along once every few years (if we're lucky!)," wrote Hannah Strong of Little White Lies .

Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but that's not an issue

Taylor-Joy, the film's star, reportedly only has around 30 lines of dialogue in the movie, but the lead being mum shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who is a fan of the franchise. Mel Gibson, the original Mad Max, rarely spoke; same for Tom Hardy, who played Max in "Fury Road."

Critics say Taylor-Joy's lack of speech emphasizes her other qualities.

"[Taylor-Joy] is phenomenal," wrote John Nugent of Empire , "her big, intense eyes standing out starkly against her engine-oil-smeared forehead, emoting subtly in a dialogue-light role."

"The virtuosity of Miller's approach is so arresting that you might not even notice how seldom Furiosa actually speaks; like Charlize Theron before — or after? — her, Taylor-Joy conveys so much strength and desperation through the whites of her eyes alone that words would only cheapen the unparalleled purity of her purpose," wrote IndieWire's David Ehrlich .

Chris Hemsworth is impressive as the franchise's latest villain

Hemsworth plays the snarly bearded Warlord Dementus, the latest outlandish — and very buff — villain in the franchise.

"He's never had a villain showcase quite like this before, and what's so striking about it is how merciless it is; even with the occasional dropped hint at his tragic backstory, there's never a question of redemption for Dementus," wrote Liz Shannon Miller for Consequence . "It's genuinely fearless work."

One critic says it's one of the best prequels ever made

IndieWire 's David Ehrlich called the movie "one of the greatest prequels ever made" in large part because the Furiosa character is so captivating.

"Furiosa is reborn as the rare film character who's become iconic twice over in two distinct (but inseparable) forms, and future generations will awe at the fact that 'Fury Road' came first," he wrote.

But it's not as good as "Fury Road"

For all the praise "Furiosa" is receiving, many critics believe it doesn't surpass Miller's thrilling opus, "Mad Max: Fury Road."

"'Furiosa' is a big step down from 'Mad Max: Fury Road,'" opined The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney . "Whereas the 2015 instant action classic had grit, gravitas and turbo-charged propulsion that wouldn't quit, this fifth installment in the dystopian saga grinds on in fits and starts, with little tension or fluidity in a narrative whose shapelessness is heightened by its pretentious chapter structure."

"Scene for scene, 'Furiosa' is very much a complement to 'Fury Road,' yet the new movie never fully pops the way the earlier one does," wrote Manohla Dargis of The New York Times .

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‘if’: what stars voice the imaginary friends in ryan reynolds’ new movie.

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The imaginary characters in "IF."

Imaginary friends come to life in writer-director John Krasinki’s new family comedy IF , which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.

Krasinski also stars in IF as Dad, a widower who remains upbeat with childlike enthusiasm even though he is facing a frightening heart operation. His daughter, Bea (Cailey Fleming) is 12 and insists she’s not a kid anymore.

But when Bea encounters Cal ( Ryan Reynolds )—the caretaker of a bunch of imaginary friends who were left abandoned when the children they were partnered with grew up—she tries to reunite the IFs, as they’re called, with their old child pals.

While IF stars Krasinski, Reynolds and Fleming in human roles, there are several Hollywood A-listers who voice the roles of the imaginary friends in the movie. Here’s a look at some of them.

Bradley Cooper Voices Ice And Steve Carell Voices Blue

Bradley Cooper (Ice) and Steve Carell (Blue) in "IF."

In IF , Ice (Bradley Cooper) is a glass of water with an ice cube floating in the middle, while Blue (Steve Carell) is a purple fluffy creature who is actually blue but explains that his childhood friend was colorblind and thus named him the color he that saw.

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IF , of course, marked a reunion of Carell and John Krasinski, who starred together in the classic sitcom The Office .

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 06: Bradley Cooper attends SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations - ... [+] Bradley Cooper Career Retrospective at SAG-AFTRA Foundation Robin Williams Center on February 06, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 24: Steve Carell attends the "Uncle Vanya" Opening Night at Lincoln ... [+] Center Theater on April 24, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Marleen Moise/WireImage)

Phoebe Waller-Bridge Voices Blossom

Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Blossom) in "IF."

Fleabag and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny star voices the key role of Blossom, one of the first imaginary friends she encounters while staying with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) in an old apartment building. Blossom’s childhood friend was a dancer who she longs to reconnect with.

LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 07: attends the UK premiere of "IF" at the Cineworld Leicester Square on May ... [+] 07, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage) (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage)

Matt Damon Voices Flower

Matt Damon (Flower) in "IF."

Good Will Hunting Oscar winner Matt Damon voices Flower in IF , a sunflower with a sunny disposition.

AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 18: Matt Damon attends the "AIR" world premiere during the 2023 SXSW ... [+] Conference and Festivals at The Paramount Theater on March 18, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for SXSW)

Louis Gossett Jr. voices Lewis

Ryan Reynolds (Cal), Louis Gossett Jr. (Lewis) and Cailey Fleming (Bea) in "IF."

An Officer and a Gentleman Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr., who sadly passed away in April, voices Lewis in IF . Lewis watches over a large group of IFs abandoned by their children as they reside in a hidden retirement facility near the Coney Island amusement park in New York City.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 15: Louis Gossett Jr. speaks onstage at the screening of “Carmen ... [+] Jones” during the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival on April 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for TCM)

Emily Blunt Voices Unicorn

Emily Blunt (Unicorn) in "IF."

Like Flower (voice of Matt Damon), Emily Blunt’s Unicorn has a sunny disposition and the power to create rainbows, to boot. The film marks a reunion of sorts for Oppenheimer Oscar nominee Blunt and John Krasinski, since the married Hollywood power couple shares the screen in A Quite Place and its sequel.

Beverly Hills , CA - February 12: Emily Blunt arriving at the 2024 Oscars Nominees Luncheon Red ... [+] Carpet at the The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills , CA, Monday, Feb. 12, 2024. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Richard Jenkins Voices Art Teacher

Richard Jenkins (Art Teacher), Ryan Reynolds (Cal) and Cailey Fleming (Bea) in "IF."

The Visitor and The Shape of Water Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins voice Art Teacher in IF, a wooden animation figure.

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 10: Richard Jenkins attends the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards ... [+] at The Beverly Hilton on January 10, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/WireImage)

George Clooney, Awkafina, Amy Schumer And Maya Rudolph Are Among The Other ‘IF’ Voice Stars

L-r, clockwise, Maya Rudoplph (Ally Aligator), Keegan-Michael Key (Slime Ball), Sam Rockwell (Super ... [+] Dog), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Blossom), Apple, George Clooney (Spaceman), Steve Carell (Blue), Matt Damon (Flower), Emily Blunt (Unicorn), Richard Jenkins (Art Teacher), Akwafina (Bubble), Matthew Rhys (Ghost) and Bill Hader (Banana) in Paramount Pictures' "IF."

The ensemble voice cast for IF also includes George Clooney as Spaceman, Maya Rudolph as Ally Alligator, Keegan-Michael Key as Slimball and Sam Rockwell as Super Dog.

Also starring in the voice cast are Matthew Rhys as Ghost, Bill Hader as Banana, Christopher Meloni as Cosmo, Jon Stewart as Robot, Blake Lively as Octopuss, Amy Schumer as Gummy Bear, Sebastian Maniscalco as Magician Mouse, Allyson Seeger as Viola and Awkafina as Bubble.

Also starring Bobby Moynihan, Alan Kim, Catharine Daddario and Liza Colón-Zayas, IF opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 13: (L-R) Awkwafina, Catharine Daddario, Emily Blunt, Liza Colón-Zayas, ... [+] Bobby Moynihan, Steve Carell, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Audrey Hoffman, Ryan Reynolds, Alan Kim, Fiona Shaw, Maya Rudolph, Matt Damon, Christopher Meloni, Bradley Cooper, Amy Schumer, Allyson Seeger, and Andrew Form attend Paramount's "If" New York premiere at SVA Theater on May 13, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Marleen Moise/WireImage)

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