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The Treatment (Substack)

The Treatment (Substack) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Charlotte Simmons.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Until Dawn (2025) Charlotte Simmons There is absolutely, positively nothing that embodies the state of gaming better than a movie based on a game that does "game" better than said game, which is trying to be a movie.
Posted Jan 25, 2026  Edit critic review
The Colour Out of Space (2010) Charlotte Simmons And so Die Farbe — in my mind — exemplifies the natural, humanist evolution of cosmic horror; studiously playing by the genre’s misanthropy-coded rules, but ultimately finding a way to honour the power of the human expression/imagination.
Posted Jan 15, 2026  Edit critic review
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Charlotte Simmons So while Wicks is the force we root against, the actual conflict is, again, between Jud and Blanc, i.e. between storytelling and the whodunit, i.e. between religion and fear.
Posted Jan 12, 2026  Edit critic review
Guacamole Yesterdays (2024) Charlotte Simmons It tracks, then, that artists have a storied history with pro-friction narratives.
Posted Jan 01, 2026  Edit critic review
Fireplace for Your Home (2008) Charlotte Simmons One of postmodernism's most enduring works.
Posted Dec 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Xeno (2025) Charlotte Simmons the goal isn’t really to challenge Alien so much as to illuminate the nature of morality using Alien as a foil.
Posted Dec 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Shelby Oaks (2023) Charlotte Simmons My question then becomes this: Why contrive a gratuitous, traditional, familial emotional core around a film whose natural interests seem clearly divorced from that tradition and those emotions?
Posted Dec 09, 2025  Edit critic review
Don't Die (2023) Charlotte Simmons What’s so interesting about this is how the film rightly insists upon altruism, but also recognizes that evil loves — and tends to be exceedingly capable of — passing itself off as altruism
Posted Nov 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Clocking the T (2018) Charlotte Simmons Clocking the T, then, is comedic romance looking to evolve into the dutiful erotic, and encourages us to do the same.
Posted Nov 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) Charlotte Simmons The Nightmare Before Christmas is a robustly metamodernist examination of the intersections between Christianity, paganism, scientific thought, and mythopoeic thought (and what that all means for the human condition)
Posted Nov 24, 2025  Edit critic review
The History of Sound (2025) Charlotte Simmons In a film that’s fully committed to the beauty that can exist in lieu of barriers, how does one reconcile the act of recording as an entirely conceivable barrier in its own right?
Posted Nov 16, 2025  Edit critic review
The Toxic Avenger (2023) Charlotte Simmons Thus, if the 1984 film concerned itself with — in a sentence — frankness for the sake of the people, then the 2025 film ought to do that same thing, but in its own way.
Posted Nov 08, 2025  Edit critic review
The Toxic Avenger (1984) Charlotte Simmons There’s no diplomacy to be found here; the film knows it needn’t play with the specifics of the corruption amalgam or otherwise mythologize the villainy of the system; it trusts the audience enough to not be corpo-worshipping morons.
Posted Nov 08, 2025  Edit critic review
The Long Walk (2025) Charlotte Simmons The reason it’s never explained why the Long Walk contributes to those things is because it... doesn’t. But a “thinly-drawn premise” never stopped the Vietnam draft, the War on Terror, or the indica that comprises NSPM-7.
Posted Nov 04, 2025  Edit critic review
The Alto Knights (2025) Charlotte Simmons Frank Costello — as pointed out on the film’s poster — “brought about the downfall of the American Mafia.” The natural direction for a film about his escapades, then, would be satire; cinema’s choice tool for bringing about downfall.
Posted Oct 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Relay (2024) Charlotte Simmons Indeed, we can accomplish quite a bit by focusing on each other first and the institutions second, just as any film worth watching — like Relay — focuses on its human thrust before the puzzle of the plot.
Posted Oct 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Caught Stealing (2025) Charlotte Simmons Caught Stealing is an old-school American blockbuster — replete with a movie star, sex appeal, violence, and a handful of chuckles — that, perhaps paradoxically, is about the inevitability of reality, in all its decolonized expanse.
Posted Oct 24, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Charlotte Simmons What if One Battle After Another is daring the (majority) white male portion of its audience to quantify all Black women and queer people with the vices of individual human beings who happen to belong to those demographics?
Posted Oct 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Freaky Tales (2024) Charlotte Simmons The nutritious thrust of Freaky Tales is how — amidst the camp, combat, Nazi-stomping, and supernatural twinge — it frontloads an ode to personal power while insisting on that power’s presence within all of us.
Posted Sep 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Together (2025) Charlotte Simmons Not only is its attitude towards codependency markedly impressive in scope and incision, but it also nods to the thematic baggage found across the horror genre, thereby highlighting the horror genre’s codependency with its own ideological history.
Posted Sep 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Eddington (2025) Charlotte Simmons Eddington is a film that's home to my three favourite cryptids: Ari Aster, Joaquin Phoenix, and politics.
Posted Sep 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Charlotte Simmons Superman is, primarily, an announcement. That announcement is metamodernism — not romanticizing, not deconstructing, but unearthing new ways forward using the power of curiosity.
Posted Aug 28, 2025  Edit critic review
The Shrouds (2024) Charlotte Simmons How does the artist’s internal struggle — quasi-immortalized by the artist’s externalization of that struggle — change when faced with the blind spots/fallacies of the truth they attempted to chase with that externalization?
Posted Aug 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Materialists (2025) Charlotte Simmons And here’s where Celine Song’s unique brand of compassion comes into play: Materialists tells us — and bear with me here — that there’s nothing wrong with being materialistic, because it’s more-or-less impossible not to be.
Posted Aug 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) Charlotte Simmons Joker: Folie à Deux is about the exact same thing that Joker is about, except Folie à Deux is being way, way, way, way, way less polite about it, to the point where it pissed pretty much everybody off.
Posted Aug 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Y2K (2024) Charlotte Simmons I can only assume that this struggle is exponentially worse for the teenagers of today, who frankly have every right to be worried that, in a sentence, the future is not for them. But what if the future wasn’t for anybody?
Posted Aug 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Companion (2025) Charlotte Simmons The best version of Companion would not primarily focus on how horrible Josh is (it only really needs a third of its story beats to drive home its takedown of this culture of control anyway), but how limitless Iris is.
Posted Aug 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Mountainhead (2025) Charlotte Simmons With distance, I can shrug off the emotional shock of Mountainhead’s way-too-close-to-home satire and eagerly sink my teeth into the way it frames this whole ordeal with both the theory and the practical realities of games.
Posted Aug 06, 2025  Edit critic review
The Flash (2023) Charlotte Simmons This [superhero] renaissance began with The Flash; a film that more or less hit a sacrificial bunt so as to indict the then-conundrum of Hollywood’s superhero problem.
Posted Jul 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Friendship (2024) Charlotte Simmons Friendship, then, is this monolithic manifestation of narcissism. Not as a trait, but as an entity that influences susceptible men like Craig
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Novocaine (2025) Charlotte Simmons And so here’s my question for the directors: if you need comedy in order to be passionate about whatever project you’re working on, why direct a screenplay that isn’t intended to be comedic?
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
The Legend of Ochi (2025) Charlotte Simmons We can do the film one better by also recognizing that this is a story about a story — fractured into different languages and egos and mediums... The Legend of Ochi is a story divorced from itself.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Free Guy (2021) Charlotte Simmons Its indictment of the power fantasy aspect of games like Grand Theft Auto is hilariously unsubtle, and yet, it demonstrates a gross, bafflingly hypocritical adherence to the philosophy of video games as pleasure factories.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
On the Count of Three (2021) Charlotte Simmons On the Count of Three has negative interest in being a morality play; a decision that arguably contributes the most to the film’s refreshing, compassionately transgressive attitude on suicide.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Thunderbolts* (2025) Charlotte Simmons Thunderbolts* is acknowledging something we’ve been begging the MCU to clue in to for some time — the glitzy combat is nothing more than frosting for the superhero.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) Charlotte Simmons In this regard, what I find so fascinating about Revenge of the Sith is that it offers us a meditation on how these authoritarian regimes well and truly begin — not politically, but on a human level.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Back to the Future Part II (1989) Charlotte Simmons It’s 100-ish minutes of Zemeckis and Gale caricaturizing the very enterprise that’s backing Part II (and pop culture on the whole) into this corner of gross commercialization.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) Charlotte Simmons An unimaginative faceplant could very well have been the fate of Dial of Destiny if the reins had gone to a studio yes-man. Luckily, they went to James Mangold instead, and so the film emerged as a deceptively gutsy and nuanced meditation on heroism.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Anora (2024) Charlotte Simmons But, rebelliously, Anora constructs itself in a way that indicts the burden of proof placed upon Ani’s personhood... Anora is a brilliant achievement in this regard.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Queens of Drama (2024) Charlotte Simmons We’re meant to understand these interactions as obtusely histrionic, and upon doing so, one can further observe how the film coalesces themes of queerness, adolescence, and the dark side of cultural pedigree into a scrumptious thesis statement.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Don't Look Up (2021) Charlotte Simmons what’s really going on here is emotion, which — as Don’t Look Up seeks to illuminate — is the aforementioned power that too many people believe they do not have.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
American Fiction (2023) Charlotte Simmons If it’s a particularly impressive comedy film, its beats can function in two or more frameworks at once so as to tickle even more subconscious funnybones. And if it’s as ingeniously crafted as American Fiction? Well...
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Saltburn (2023) Charlotte Simmons But there’s one note on this movie that has somehow managed to encapsulate everything I loathe about Saltburn discourse while simultaneously being the only note worth pivoting around — that it’s a film about nothing.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Willow (1988) Charlotte Simmons Willow is better than “good,” because rather than trying to be another great fantasy story, it does something completely different -- it pulls back the curtain of mythmaking...
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Alien: Romulus (2024) Charlotte Simmons Alien: Romulus plays host to some razor sharp ideas about liberation — ideas that you won’t find in your run-of-the-mill cattle on the IP farm — that make it artistically valuable, and also pertinent to the conversation of said brighter future.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Late Night with the Devil (2023) Charlotte Simmons At this point, it is not possible for American cinema to traffic in demonic or satanic horror without acknowledging that the fundamentals of witchcraft are inseparable from the spectre of the United States.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Nosferatu (2024) Charlotte Simmons The terror of Nosferatu is inseparable from its beauty. Not beauty in its evocative visuals, nor in the thrill of its more transgressive material, but in the permission it gives us to excavate a mythopoeic, rapturous, alien-yet-purely human truth.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
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