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The Sunday Age

Tomatometer-approved publication.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Misery (1990) Tom Ryan Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman do nothing more than a workman-like job with the material.
Posted Jan 21, 2026  Edit critic review
Pacific Heights (1990) Tom Ryan 'Pacific Heights' works well enough as a thriller.
Posted Jan 21, 2026  Edit critic review
2/3
The American President (1995) Tom Ryan The tone is genial and Bening is adorable, but one doesn't have to be an unredeemed cynic to observe that Rob Reiner's old-fashioned romantic comedy is also a blatant PR exercise on behalf of the White House.
Posted Jan 20, 2026  Edit critic review
The Abyss (1989) Tom Ryan Cameron offers a spectacular nothing, a close encounter of the banal kind.
Posted Dec 09, 2025  Edit critic review
3/3
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) Tom Ryan The message is certainly not a new one. But the pleasures of 'Terminator 2' are to be found in the way it is delivered. It is one of the rare sequels that lives up to the standard of the original.
Posted Dec 09, 2025  Edit critic review
2/4
Casper (1995) Tom Ryan The effects...are certainly convincing, the gadgetry is ingenious, and 'Casper' is fascinating as a result.
Posted Sep 29, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Boogie Nights (1997) Tom Ryan Reynolds has always been the kind of actor who's allowed his characters to seep through the bemused-eyebrow pauses between the lines. Except that they're not really pauses at all: they're expressive and eloquent in the way that words can never be.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Night of the Living Dead (1990) Tom Ryan An intelligent splatter movie, if you're game.
Posted Sep 17, 2025  Edit critic review
2/4
Darkman (1990) Tom Ryan The film's mythic foundations are clear enough, but Raimi and his team of screenwriters have failed to build on them.
Posted Aug 25, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Happy Gilmore 2 (2025) Craig Mathieson ...Happy Gilmore 2 honours its forebear with a swathe of self-referential tributes and some amusing callbacks. It’s a little too dutiful, and could have done with more chaos and absurdism before it revs up for a ludicrous but mostly pleasing finale.
Posted Jul 25, 2025  Edit critic review
4/4
Red Rock West (1993) Tom Ryan The suspense works well enough, and both Walsh and the estimable Hopper bring a hardish edge to the film's cyclical sequence of deals and counter deals.
Posted Jul 15, 2025  Edit critic review
3/3
Jurassic Park (1993) Tom Ryan Frankly, I don't care how the film-makers did it, just that they did... In Jurassic Park, disbelief is suspended gratefully.
Posted Jul 01, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) Nick Place If nothing else, Steven Spielberg knows how to milk a formula and he was never going to mess with the ingredients that made JP1 such a box-office monster.
Posted Jun 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Mission: Impossible (1996) Tom Ryan Stylistically exuberant and irrepressibly playful, Brian De Palma's action-packed espionage adventure is loads of fun.
Posted May 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) Nick Place ...George Lucas delivers enough of the goods to avoid a letdown. Which doesn't sound like much of a commendation, but it is. Star Wars: Episode I is better than ok and that is quite an achievement, given the expectations.
Posted Apr 16, 2025  Edit critic review
The Wedding Banquet (1993) Paul Harris Ang Lee's cross-cultural-marriage-of-convenience-comedy-of-errors effortlessly manages the delicate balancing act of being neither grossly offensive nor crudely caricatured.
Posted Apr 15, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
The Wedding Banquet (1993) Tom Ryan It is largely due to the efforts of an appealing cast and Lee's unqualified affection for their characters that 'The Wedding Banquet' works as well as it does.
Posted Apr 15, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Scream 2 (1997) Nick Place Williamson's script is tight and funny. Great lines and asides are scattered throughout, and the plot is always moving along.
Posted Feb 05, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Tarzan (1999) Nick Place The storyboarding is clever, particularly through Tarzan's early years, and the tree-surfing stunts are pretty cool.
Posted Dec 20, 2024  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Mulan (1998) Nick Place It all adds up to a fun package, with great sight gags, a tender ending and lots of laughs.
Posted Dec 20, 2024  Edit critic review
Hercules (1997) Tom Ryan While much of the animation is curiously sombre, even bland, everything else about the film comes with considerable flourish. The dialogue crackles, the voices are just right and a couple of those delightfully eccentric little creatures... sparkle.
Posted Dec 18, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Tom Ryan Three years in the making, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is Disney's 34th animated feature and one of its best.
Posted Dec 18, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
Apollo 13 (1995) Tom Ryan Apollo 13, an unequivocal celebration of its heroes' struggles against their own frailty and against conspiracies of the universe, belongs to a characteristically American strand of story-telling. It even manages to turn defeat into victory.
Posted Dec 17, 2024  Edit critic review
2/4
Pocahontas (1995) Tom Ryan Aside from an occasional flourish of wit in the writing, there's not much to enthuse about here, and any sense that something substantial is at stake in the inter-racial relationship at the heart of the tale has been Disneyfied out of existence.
Posted Dec 17, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Beauty and the Beast (1991) Tom Ryan If there is such a thing as "Disney genius," it surely resides in the way the animators are able to create a truly enchanted world. And in Beauty and the Beast, they are helped immeasurably by a collection of variously witty, exuberant and melodic songs.
Posted Dec 16, 2024  Edit critic review
The Wizard (1989) Tom Ryan That the film is able to link family renewal and the product it is so capably marketing should only serve to remind us of what a valuable selling-point the family can be.
Posted Dec 13, 2024  Edit critic review
The Little Mermaid (1989) Tom Ryan The Little Mermaid is, more or less, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella, pepped up with some terrific songs.
Posted Dec 13, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) Tom Ryan Coppola has taken Bram Stoker's story and majestically adapted it with a masterful intelligence and a breathtaking intensity.
Posted Sep 26, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
The Devil's Advocate (1997) Tom Ryan Helped by some very snappy dialogue, Pacino makes The Devil's Advocate his own.
Posted Aug 06, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
Alien Resurrection (1997) Nick Place Alien Resurrection is cleverly written, with some neat twists, cute photography, cool effects and great sci-fi concepts (watch for the laser-whisky).
Posted Aug 06, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Fargo (1996) Tom Ryan Immaculately plotted, beautifully written and superbly shot by British cinematography Roger Deakins, a longtime Coen collaborator, Fargo is a treasure.
Posted Jul 16, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
Twister (1996) Tom Ryan Even if its gusto sometimes feels very manufactured, and even if one laments the bland predictability of the film's romantic triangle, the sheer apocalyptic bravura of the storm sequences in Twister will still blow you away.
Posted Jul 16, 2024  Edit critic review
Little Women (1994) Tom Ryan Helped by a fine performance from Sarandon, Armstrong pays homage to motherhood through her.
Posted Apr 11, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Georgia (1995) Tom Ryan Georgia is a boldly conceived film, its emotional intimacy intensified by the fact that its songs are corded live by the cast.
Posted Mar 29, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Seven (1995) Tom Ryan The best crime thrillers are the ones whose protagonists are not there simply to sort out the mess but are deeply implicated in it as well. And Seven is one of the best of the best.
Posted Mar 29, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Le Samouraï (1967) Tom Ryan Melville's style throughout is rigorously detached, his methods masterful in their economy. But it is the passion that pervades his portrait of a dysfunctional humanity that makes Le Samouraï one of the great French films.
Posted Feb 28, 2024  Edit critic review
4/4
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) Tom Ryan The confidence of the writing is an absolute delight. The one-liners are frequently crackerjack zingers, the strategic withholding of a pay-off is, without exception, timed to perfection, and there is gleeful sense of the absurd.
Posted Feb 28, 2024  Edit critic review
1/4
The Pagemaster (1994) Tom Ryan The perfunctory prologue and epilogue, the unimaginative use of the literary sources, the mushy songs which Disney appears to have made obligatory and the lacklustre animation left me with little to do but bemoan missed opportunities.
Posted Feb 12, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
Quiz Show (1994) Tom Ryan The strength of Redford's film is its clear-headed grasp of the collusion between The People (whether as citizens or TV viewers) and their leaders, a silent conspiracy that has sustained a national myth of fair play and social equality.
Posted Feb 12, 2024  Edit critic review
3/4
Heat (1995) Tom Ryan There's nothing new in any of this, but Mann's kinetic merging of image and sound launches the predigested characters and the clichéd dramatics into another sphere. Heat throbs with the rhythms of a primitive ritual.
Posted Dec 20, 2023  Edit critic review
4/4
Goodfellas (1990) Tom Ryan GoodFellas is a masterwork. It is superbly crafted, densely textured and richly provocative, and it makes an ideal companion piece to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films. It also just might be the best gangster film you'll ever see.
Posted Oct 18, 2023  Edit critic review
3/4
Shadows and Fog (1992) Tom Ryan Shadows and Fog will certainly surprise anyone who has settled comfortably into the view that films made in Hollywood are likely to be little more than sanitised, homogenised products packaged to please.
Posted Aug 30, 2023  Edit critic review
3/4
White Men Can't Jump (1992) Tom Ryan Shelton is an astute observer of the show-room mentality, of the codes underpinning male bonding, and of the obstacles they create for the "buddies"... He encourages us to like his flawed heroes, but he also makes us see their limitations.
Posted Aug 30, 2023  Edit critic review
2/3
When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) Keith Connolly This is such a compelling film, in places, that one hesitates to use curate's-egg qualifications.
Posted Aug 28, 2023  Edit critic review
Licence to Kill (1989) Tom Ryan It's helped by Sanchez, its wonderful villain, simultaneously sadistic and principled, played as Bond's opposite with a superbly sinister aloofness by Robert Davi. And the ending is suitably spectacular.
Posted Jul 25, 2023  Edit critic review
Batman (1989) Tom Ryan It's Nicholson the ham at his worst, though the lacklustre lines he has been given certainly haven't helped him. Batman is often stunning to look at. But, ultimately, it's a real disappointment.
Posted Jul 25, 2023  Edit critic review
Mighty Aphrodite (1995) Tom Ryan Full of wise-cracks and featuring a deliciously ironic denouement, Mighty Aphrodite is an amiable romantic farce which thumbs its nose at political correctness and smiles benignly at human foibles.
Posted Jul 19, 2023  Edit critic review
3/4
La Haine (1995) Tom Ryan There's nothing affable about La Haine, its agit-prop directness linking Kassovitz to a school of cinema which largely fell out of fashion with the greying of the New Wave.
Posted Jul 19, 2023  Edit critic review
2.5/5
The Matrix (1999) Tom Ryan Some of the best science fiction of recent times have convinced us that something important is at stake in what happens to the characters. But the Wachowskis' plot seems to be in the service of the special effects rather than the other way around.
Posted Jul 12, 2023  Edit critic review
4/5
Magnolia (1999) Tom Ryan A thoroughly engrossing and sometimes very funny story about families, fate and the ways in which the past pervades the present.
Posted Jun 30, 2023  Edit critic review
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