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Michael Scoular

Michael Scoular's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Dreams (2024) 90% EDIT “It stands out in the trilogy... [but] Haugerud’s tendencies of over-universalizing his scenarios, and of never finding a way out of a schematic structure for the films besides adding on more interpretive scaffolding via dialogue, are still present.” – In Review Online Oct 6, 2025 Full Review Sex (2024) 86% EDIT “The film’s large quantity of dialogue and pauses act as an alibi for only so much abstract dithering.” – In Review Online Jul 24, 2025 Full Review Love (2024) 96% EDIT “Haugerud evidently sees a gap in the way filmmakers have approached the tech-rewritten games of meeting and parting, and has executed his vision with little jargon and almost no footage of people looking at screens.” – In Review Online Jun 6, 2025 Full Review Death Does Not Exist (2025) 79% EDIT “Death Does Not Exist stands out as an impressive display of animation labor, but its narrative arc is as unmotivating and prescriptively moral as any children’s parable.” – In Review Online Jun 1, 2025 Full Review Peak Everything (2025) 75% EDIT “...the far more worrying aspect of the film is that Émond’s voice as a filmmaker appears to be buried, maybe for good, in hackneyed material.” – In Review Online Jun 1, 2025 Full Review Marcello Mio (2024) 50% EDIT “Chiara and the rest of the cast seem game for this thorny question of history and how to poetically misremember it, but Honoré shrinks from his own challenge. He ends on the classic metonymy of a deep plunge into water as a means of rebirth.” – In Review Online Feb 4, 2025 Full Review All Shall Be Well (2024) 97% EDIT “Yeung might not be a director who can take this kind of moment and render it completely transformative, but he does know how to conceive a film motivated not by emotional appeals common to the pop-psychology narrative of the grieving process.” – In Review Online Jul 24, 2024 Full Review Inside Out 2 (2024) 91% EDIT “As in Pixar’s house animation style of fuzzy, phosphorescent, and physically coherent surfaces, this summation is a safely hedged bet, and suggests any route toward the varieties of experience that children actually remember will remain safely not taken.” – In Review Online Jun 14, 2024 Full Review Safe Place (2022) 83% EDIT “If this film is a resurrection, it’s by turns a startling and intelligent one — but one that ultimately fails to seize the possibilities of its venture like similarly inclined time-splitters.” – In Review Online Jun 17, 2023 Full Review Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022) 86% EDIT “And so, by relying so heavily on Lawrence’s novel’s events, but taking a disinterest to both its playfulness and seriousness, this version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is essentially anonymous.” – In Review Online Dec 1, 2022 Full Review Wendell & Wild (2022) 80% EDIT “Peele and Selick’s script is so heavily weighted toward an engagement with current events that it’s hard to see this film as belonging to anything but a content mill.” – In Review Online Nov 14, 2022 Full Review Winter Boy (2022) 77% EDIT “As a portrait of grief that avoids extremes, Winter Boy is tasteful to a fault ... To surround this chaos with near-diagnostic maturity is less a useful balance on the part of Honoré, and more a stodgy mischaracterization. ” – In Review Online Sep 17, 2022 Full Review Love Life (2022) 87% EDIT “Love Life then can best be approached as a comedown from the dizzying dramatic heights of The Real Thing... Here, everything is cleanly kept within bounds.” – In Review Online Sep 13, 2022 Full Review Heaven: To the Land of Happiness (2020) 83% EDIT “Im, an oddly dedicated hack, writes all his own material, in this case transforming the premise of Thomas Jahn and Til Schweiger’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door ... to the point where no credit to the source material was any longer required.” – In Review Online Aug 1, 2022 Full Review The Unknown Country (2022) 92% EDIT “The Unknown Country [is] a curious hybrid [that] gives us a well-made narrative of grief, heat-pressed over the conveniences of interview-based non-fiction storytelling.” – In Review Online Jul 1, 2022 Full Review Homeroom (2021) 85% EDIT “[Homeroom is] ... a fallacy of 'kids are the future' thinking to privilege the most adult-like behavior and sentiments that can be found among the young.” – In Review Online Nov 19, 2021 Full Review Thy Kingdom Come (2017) EDIT “There is little in Thy Kingdom Come to distinguish it from an unorganized compilation of deleted scenes.” – In Review Online Nov 19, 2021 Full Review Ahed's Knee (2021) 74% EDIT “The film's subjective ruptures and discontinuities are not meant to convey a sense of political deadlock... [but are] an intuitive attempt to give complete satisfaction to human reason.” – In Review Online Oct 1, 2021 Full Review Huda's Salon (2021) 77% EDIT “This [Hollywood] proximity has only encouraged a certain kind of carelessness in Abu-Assad's cinema, one where genre is merely a pretext to gesture at loose connections to reality.” – In Review Online Sep 15, 2021 Full Review Compartment No. 6 (2021) 93% EDIT “Juho Kuosmanen isn't interested in pulling apart the social conditions that separate the two; instead, he knows these are the ingredients for an opposites-attract romance.” – In Review Online Sep 15, 2021 Full Review Maria Chapdelaine (2021) 82% EDIT “Pilote unfailingly illustrates the way in which, as in the visual metaphor he chooses to speak of Maria's heart, a new card disappears into an old deck.” – In Review Online Sep 13, 2021 Full Review The Power of the Dog (2021) 94% EDIT “The way this film is organized leaves it ample room to disappoint and defer, in order to make up in brief moments of iconographic pleasure.” – In Review Online Sep 13, 2021 Full Review The Green Knight (2021) 89% EDIT “Lowery's blockbuster-agnostic approach to [The Green Knight] is never less than confident, [but] consistent mood and succinct spectacle are not where his strengths ultimately lie.” – In Review Online Jul 30, 2021 Full Review Collective (2019) 99% EDIT “What sets Colectiv apart isn't just the emotional heft of its story... but how it never simply adopts the POV of any of its subjects, instead judiciously choosing scenes in offices and press rooms that represent what all the information and reports can't.” – Cinema Scope Sep 10, 2019 Full Review Son-Mother (2019) 100% EDIT “[A] relentless, emotionally draining triptych of separation and punishment.” – Cinema Scope Sep 8, 2019 Full Review
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