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Film Critic: Adrian Martin

Film Critic: Adrian Martin is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Adrian Martin.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
3.5/5
The Sure Thing (1985) Adrian Martin There is not a single personal attribute on which the film does not make a humorous, systematic comparison between the two teenagers.
Posted Jan 07, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Stand by Me (1986) Adrian Martin Reiner visualises this story in its full, grotesque splendour.
Posted Jan 07, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Death Race 2000 (1975) Adrian Martin One can marvel endlessly at the ingenuity of the bargain-basement special effects and canny locations.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
The Abyss (1989) Adrian Martin A brave attempt at philosophical sci-fi.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Predator (1987) Adrian Martin Predator is no real contender for the great movies of 1987. But for anyone truly concerned with the forever mutating state of popular art, it is a minor revelation.
Posted Oct 31, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Babe (1995) Adrian Martin Babe is not bland, but it is bizarre.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Barton Fink (1991) Adrian Martin The film has an anything-might-happen-next air and a faith in strange associative leaps that take the plot in unforeseen directions.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Fargo (1996) Adrian Martin I think the film is a very careful meditation on what moral position can be meaningfully, intelligently taken, in this mad, apocalyptic world of ours.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Fantastic Four (2005) Adrian Martin This is a strictly by-the-numbers superhero blockbuster.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Mouse Hunt (1997) Adrian Martin Debut feature director Gore Verbinski skilfully employs a high-energy, expressionistic style.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Spider-Man 2 (2004) Adrian Martin While revelling in such subterranean themes, Raimi’s, offbeat, cartoonish sensibility is also simultaneously able to capture a certain innocence long gone from blockbuster movie entertainment.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Spider-Man (2002) Adrian Martin What Spider-Man lacks in depth it more than makes up for in surface. Raimi has found his way back to the realm of the live-action cartoon, and he makes the most of his golden opportunity.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
The Gift (2000) Adrian Martin For too much of The Gift, Blanchett is required simply to be sullen or scared. Raimi unwisely withdraws any humour from her character and invests it in a string of daffy supporting players
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
For Love of the Game (1999) Adrian Martin Director Sam Raimi is a long way from the gleefully gory Evil Dead films that made his name in the '80s, but he grasps the most poetic elements of the sports genre with grace and élan.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
A Simple Plan (1998) Adrian Martin A Simple Plan is a modest, somewhat familiar film – at times it seems like Fargo (1995) without the cartoonish excess – but its execution is impressively effective.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
The Quick and the Dead (1995) Adrian Martin Raimi is one of those directors for whom the cinema is essentially a game, an exhibitionistic display. He has fun with the conclusion of each gunfight – who’s left standing, who’s been shot, who’s really dead or alive?
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Army of Darkness (1992) Adrian Martin Relocating Campbell and the nasty, invisible spirits who are his nemesis back in medieval times, the film is a riot of corny postures and camp lines.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
The Evil Dead (1981) Adrian Martin The Evil Dead is the ultimate movie-nerd success story, flagrantly amateurish and hand-made in many of its effects.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
1.5/5
Village of the Damned (1995) Adrian Martin Carpenter tries to recreate the old B-movie feel in several respects – in the very subdued use of special effects, and the casting of actors such as Reeve, Alley and Mark Hamill in patently one-dimensional roles. His gamble fails badly.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (1996) Adrian Martin I won’t tell you how things end in Escape from L.A., but I will say that the sight of Pliskin, alone with his cigarette in the dark, is one of the most sublime moments of 1990s cinema.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen (2000) Adrian Martin Forget all the parodic jokes down the years about twisting heads and green vomit. The Exorcist is more startling and captivating now than ever before – and a shining example of how radical, on every level, a piece of popular entertainment can be.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
1/5
Ghostbusters II (1989) Adrian Martin Comedy has rarely been this depressing.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Fright Night Part 2 (1988) Adrian Martin The original Fright Night proposed an ingenious combination of vampire horror, teenage anxiety and self-reflexive comedy centered on a Deadly Earnest-type TV host. The sequel (energetically directed by Tommy Lee Wallace) re-uses these elements.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Beetlejuice (1988) Adrian Martin This film is heaven – perhaps the only kind of heaven open to us these days, a non-transcendental heaven constituted wholly of material exchanges between energy-sources, memory banks, particles of popular culture.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
True Stories (1986) Adrian Martin David Byrne’s True Stories is an annoying and troubling film in several respects. It is the kind of film which floats purely on hype: financed by hype, promoted by hype.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
1/5
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) Adrian Martin Every single element in this film misfires hopelessly. The juvenile humour has no infectious spark. The loud action set-pieces are unexciting, despite the battery of elaborate special-effects processes.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
John Carpenter's Vampires (1998) Adrian Martin It takes about two minutes for Vampires to prove that Carpenter is far from a spent force – at least to those who can appreciate a master filmmaker at work.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
1.5/5
John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) Adrian Martin In a movie that bizarrely seems to be comprised of nothing but slow dissolves and laborious flashbacks-within-flashbacks, even the action scenes are lacklustre.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) Adrian Martin One of the biggest problems with Austin Powers is the rather tired sense of déjà vu it induces.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) Adrian Martin Almost every gag is a shambling riff on a patently ludicrous plot move or a punchline that does not quite work.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) Adrian Martin Its levels of energy and inventiveness almost never lag – although Myers and his team are rather too fond of repeating their best gags ad nauseam.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1993) Adrian Martin Attack tries to get all up-to-the-minute and 'topical', with queasy results.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
1.5/5
Supergirl (1984) Adrian Martin Supergirl is a rather drab, save-the-earth-from-the-brink-of-destruction affair.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Alien vs. Predator (2004) Adrian Martin Any aura of artistic quality that may have once surrounded the original films has well and truly vanished; director Paul W. S. Anderson follows the Roger Corman style: keep it fast, dark and full of gratuitous shocks.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Alien Nation (1988) Adrian Martin It quickly becomes a formulaic buddy cop action-thriller with a suspiciously reactionary message about what constitutes bad alien behaviour.
Posted Jul 30, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) Adrian Martin From its first, giddily disorienting moments inside Pee-wee’s own private playhouse, Burton takes us through a magical, kitsch universe where colours, shapes, sizes and scales constantly transform and surprise us.
Posted Jul 28, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Explorers (1985) Adrian Martin The film, lacking an appropriately Utopian imagination, can only assert, with a contrivedly upbeat, idiot grin, that the future is sure to be lots of fun!
Posted Jul 08, 2025  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Un Chien Andalou (1929) Adrian Martin Buñuel scrupulously respects certain conventions of classical continuity and linkage, creating a certain, disquieting narrative sense among these fragments from the unconscious.
Posted Nov 02, 2023  Edit critic review
3/5
Manny & Lo (1996) Adrian Martin Its toughness, its bizarre humour and its constant element of surprise ensure that it is a perfectly modern and searching testament to contemporary experience.
Posted Jul 24, 2023  Edit critic review
Starship Troopers (1997) Adrian Martin Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is an odd and most distressing film.
Posted Mar 16, 2023  Edit critic review
5/5
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) Adrian Martin In terms of the aesthetic challenges of the musical genre, Minnelli and his collaborators went a long way here towards integrating singing and dancing into a whimsical, fairy-tale flow of incidents and scene changes.
Posted Nov 10, 2022  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Underground Inc.: The Rise & Fall of Alternative Rock (2019) Adrian Martin The animation is especially impressive in the way it compresses and conveys a great deal of information. The busy sound editing and design, by Alex Newport and Mark Bradridge, is another standout feature.
Posted Aug 12, 2022  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Go Fish (1994) Adrian Martin In a strange and compelling way, Go Fish is like a modern re-invention of certain Old Hollywood forms -- specifically the musical and the romantic comedy of manners.
Posted Aug 24, 2021  Edit critic review
Wild Grass (2009) Adrian Martin At the age of 88, former wunderkind Alain Resnais made his friskiest film in years with this astonishing comedy of unconscious desire.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
Pacific Heights (1990) Adrian Martin Paranoiac domestic thriller with confused ideas and hackneyed clichés, but some interesting moves and frissons.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
White Nights on the Pier (2015) Adrian Martin Working with his familiar ensemble of highly disciplined actors and technicians, Vecchiali creates touching, nocturnal dialogue scenes that are rigorously sculpted and magical.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
Special Effects (1996) Adrian Martin Every sequence is like a rough sketch for a film Larry Cohen would do properly if he had the time and the money. But what great ideas he has!
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
Body Melt (1993) Adrian Martin Cult Australian horror film (actually from 1993) superbly directed by polymath artist Philip Brophy. Don't miss it! A fave of Tarantino.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
The Silences (2016) Adrian Martin Margot Nash is among Australia's finest filmmakers, and this is a beautiful, probing, intimate documentary-essay-reflection.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
Raw (2016) Adrian Martin Raw jumps from body issues to family issues to social issues, and then does the full circle all over again. Overrated but intriguing.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
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