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Rob Gonsalves
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Critics' Group:
Movies reviews only
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Megalopolis (2024) |
Most of "Megalopolis" feels locked up in Coppola’s head; this movie is wheezing for some fresh air outside the green-screen rooms... - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 30, 2024
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The Substance (2024) |
I couldn’t wait for this nauseating movie to be done with me, and yet another part of me, a part that respects aesthetic swinging for the fence no matter how batty the story is, must admit it’s a hostile work of art. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 24, 2024
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Speak No Evil (2024) |
It works on very basic needs, the needs we bring to a story, the needs so thoroughly dismantled and spat on by Michael Haneke’s two versions of "Funny Games." It’s "Funny Games" without the remote control. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 16, 2024
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) |
This movie doesn’t feel like it was made by the same guy who spent most of the 2010s on remakes and junk. Burton seems genuinely glad to be back on a set with Keaton and Ryder and O’Hara. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 10, 2024
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Strange Darling (2023) |
Ultimately Mollner uses the premise to comment on tropes and expectations. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Alien: Romulus (2024) |
At its most ruthlessly efficient it has a certain big-sci-fi-movie sweep to it as well as some nail-biting action. But, boy, has this franchise gotten pointlessly ugly. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Aug 19, 2024
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It Ends With Us (2024) |
The movie isn’t disgraceful, but we may have a hard time distinguishing it from the usual Hallmark or Lifetime fodder aside from the star power of Lively and the bestselling imprimatur of Hoover. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Aug 15, 2024
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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) |
The leads elevate the experience somewhat. They find the roughhouse comedy in the premise. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jul 31, 2024
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Twisters (2024) |
Sort of a bummer. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jul 22, 2024
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Longlegs (2024) |
In a thriller like this, usually the tension tightens as more clues click into place, but here each new revelation or explanation sounds loopier than the last. The whole experience gets really hard to take seriously. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jul 22, 2024
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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) |
The movie is empty as can be... But Murphy has regained the twinkle in his eye and reconnected with Axel’s love of mocking imposture... - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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In a Violent Nature (2024) |
It’s for longtime die-hard splatter fans curious to see these cobwebbed tropes done a little askew, and some of it does play well. But I could still occasionally feel it tugging at the limits of my patience with blood-tacky fingers. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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Handling the Undead (2024) |
One can be grateful for not having to stare at gory slaughter and still wish there were something here to break the suffocating trance of sadness. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Perfect Days (2023) |
Wenders, who cowrote the script with Takuma Takasaki, finds considerable beauty in Hirayama’s routine. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Immaculate (2024) |
The film isn’t terrible, but the first hour or so gets a bit dreary and frustrating; Sweeney has talent and energy, and it’s a bummer to see that squandered on Cecelia’s suffering. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jun 10, 2024
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Godzilla Minus One (2023) |
This is a legitimately great adventure film — not just a great Godzilla film — with moments of overwhelming despair and joy... - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jun 06, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
Miller's compositions are still rock-solid, orienting us visually so we can understand and enjoy the maelstrom. But I’m not sure this is a story we needed to see. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Hit Man (2023) |
This director works his characters with warm, soft hands, setting the stage for the actors to take over and win our sympathy honestly. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted May 23, 2024
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) |
If this franchise is to go on without Caesar, telling stories about his legacy and how it is used and misused isn’t a bad way to go. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted May 14, 2024
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The Fall Guy (2024) |
If the people onscreen don’t take their situations or love lives or anything else very seriously, why should we? "The Fall Guy" was never going to be high drama, nor should it be, but even a fizzy action-comedy should have some stakes. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted May 07, 2024
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Humane (2024) |
Cronenberg keeps things short and briskly paced, with a mitigating sense of humor — bleak humor, to be sure, but enough to humanize the brittle, often objectionable characters. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted May 02, 2024
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Late Night with the Devil (2023) |
Dastmalchian makes the movie fun to watch all by himself. It’s the movie around him that falters. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Apr 23, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
It’s not a bad movie; it just isn’t what a lot of viewers will be wanting and expecting. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Apr 17, 2024
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The First Omen (2024) |
Arkasha Stevenson knows her stuff and creates a suffocating mood. It’s the script, whose end is designed to click neatly into the 1976 movie’s beginning, that lost me. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Apr 09, 2024
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Asphalt City (2023) |
It has its own ornery integrity, and wants to stare death and despair full in the face, as its protagonists do every night. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024) |
This kind of emotionally fuzzy psychodrama, which feels palpably physical but relentlessly interiorized, can poke us in raw places that other movies can’t get at. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Mar 18, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024) |
It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Mar 04, 2024
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
Every scene has an eerie tone, an uneasy texture, an insistent backdrop of apocalypse. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Feb 27, 2024
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Madame Web (2024) |
The saddest/funniest aspect of the whole ordeal, though, is that it seems convinced it’s the first of many adventures with this quartet. There will be no such sequels. We will never see these characters again. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
A mere murder mystery is not on the agenda; the mystery here is the deeper mystery of relationships, how they start, how they endure or fail. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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The Greatest Night in Pop (2024) |
It’s not a great movie — the performance energy is splintered and scattered — but it’s hard to dislike and it’s a decent salute to the impulse of creativity to aim itself at a good cause. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Feb 06, 2024
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Dario Argento Panico (2023) |
The anecdotes are informative, the analysis often on-target. We can’t escape, though, the inconvenient feeling that the filmmaker "Panico" celebrates stopped being that filmmaker long ago. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jan 30, 2024
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Eileen (2023) |
The movie throws away whatever McKenzie and Hathaway had built together, and we realize we’re watching a collection of self-sabotaging dimwits. Sigh. At least it’s short. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jan 16, 2024
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The Boy and the Heron (2023) |
Miyazaki will give you more movie than anyone else or die trying. It’s frankly too much for the eye and brain to take in at one sitting. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jan 08, 2024
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Poor Things (2023) |
With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Jan 02, 2024
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Finestkind (2023) |
Helgeland has created people who deserve better than what the studio demands he give them. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Dec 19, 2023
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American Fiction (2023) |
It leaves the viewer with curiosity about what Jefferson will try next, and no movie that allows Jeffrey Wright this much screen time should be ignored. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Dec 12, 2023
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Saltburn (2023) |
Unlike "Promising Young Woman," it doesn’t tap into the rage of its day. It’s just purposelessly unpleasant. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Dec 05, 2023
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The Holdovers (2023) |
Payne has put together a tonally satisfying fable in which people watch each other carefully and wait for them to reveal hidden layers. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Nov 28, 2023
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Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023) |
Reiner does a decent job of establishing why Brooks became what he did, a titan held in equal awe by Carson and Kubrick. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Nov 21, 2023
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The Killer (2023) |
Washed-out and callowly nihilistic as a narrative but tasty cinema. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Nov 13, 2023
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Sly (2023) |
There are no voices that challenge Stallone’s view of himself as the Hell’s Kitchen kid who didn’t quit. It’s the kind of amiable mythmaking that would’ve been right at home on a 1985 episode of Entertainment Tonight. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Nov 07, 2023
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Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (2022) |
"Radical Dreamer" can’t help but be Herzog 101, the film equivalent of one of those Very Short Introduction books. But he’s terrific company. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Oct 30, 2023
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Once Within a Time (2023) |
This time out, Reggio seems to acknowledge that the end of life as we know it doesn’t have to mean the end of life full stop, that there might be a next chapter only the youngest of us might read. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Oct 16, 2023
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The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) |
The medium close-ups of tormented faces dominate the proceedings, and Friedkin stays on those faces, knowing each one is its own mini-movie of fear and regret. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Oct 10, 2023
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) |
Those who eagerly await the newest American Empirical Picture will be entranced, as usual, by the toybox sets and the people standing stock still like toy figures inside immaculate compositions. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Oct 03, 2023
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No One Will Save You (2023) |
The filmmaking, proceeding by image and sound alone, is nicely accomplished pure cinema. There wouldn’t be much of a movie, though, if it didn’t have an expressive actor like Kaitlyn Dever at its center. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Dazed and Confused (1993) |
The movie’s vibe is warm and good-natured, and we feel welcomed into the world of the cool older kids. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 18, 2023
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Landscape with Invisible Hand (2023) |
More depressing than insightful or entertaining. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 13, 2023
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The Boogeyman (2023) |
"The Boogeyman" isn’t scary, but it could have been. The source material was right there. David Dastmalchian was right there. - Rob's Movie Vault
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| Posted Sep 05, 2023
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