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National Review

National Review is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Armond White, Kyle Smith, Matthew Lickona, Megan Basham.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Nouvelle Vague (2025) Armond White The ultimate delight of Nouvelle Vague recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: Linklater appreciates that even as early as Breathless, Godard held in his head “the whole equation” of cinema and business, art and politics, exploitation and morality.
Posted Jan 08, 2026  Edit critic review
Eephus (2024) Armond White Sports is the subject of Eephus, a surprisingly good movie for 2025, which was an exceptionally poor year for American films.
Posted Jan 06, 2026  Edit critic review
Father Mother Sister Brother (2025) Armond White These themes are recognizable, sometimes amusing, without ever being convincing. Too many rhyming quirks and coincidences prove Jarmusch’s poor dramaturgy.
Posted Jan 06, 2026  Edit critic review
Marty Supreme (2025) Armond White None of this tells us anything new beyond confirming the insidious, treacherous, bad character traits that the millennium so far has showcased.
Posted Dec 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Song Sung Blue (2025) Armond White Diamond’s mysterious craft is the secret charm that makes Song Sung Blue so very moving.
Posted Dec 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Wild Reeds (1994) Armond White Its vision of political and humanist harmony remains great enough to instruct this era’s discordance.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Armond White Lee has no interest in portraying the reality of black American economics but misreads the black bourgeoisie in terms of his own partisanship.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Merrily We Roll Along (2025) Armond White When the show’s trio cheers itself, it recalls why the Tony Awards broadcast has become unwatchable.
Posted Dec 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Hamnet (2025) Armond White Everything about Hamnet is condescending, just as everything is literalized in today’s movies because Hollywood has thoroughly abandoned outreach.
Posted Dec 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Dracula (2025) Armond White There’s undeniable brilliance throughout the nearly three hours. But Dracula is also [Radu Jude's] most infuriating and least disciplined film, because he doesn’t understand global disaster so much as he is simply, brazenly, cynical.
Posted Dec 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Wicked: For Good (2025) Armond White Erivo and Grande both sing with so little personality that their friendship just seems like a tired gimmick. And the Easter egg ending that contradicts the story’s original moral lesson is not happy.
Posted Dec 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Nuremberg (2025) Armond White The mix of sentimentality and skepticism defeats the movie.
Posted Nov 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballad of a Small Player (2025) Armond White Ballad of a Small Player is a modern version of an international co-production -- what once was a common feature of post-WWII filmmaking shared among nations. Using exotic locales, this production represents globalist insecurity.
Posted Nov 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Frankenstein (2025) Armond White Del Toro’s movie begins with a premise intended to fascinate. But it’s merely a banal excuse for his usual generic specialty: macabre pseudoscience and outlandish violence.
Posted Nov 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Hedda (2025) Armond White Quoting the ancient Greek comic dramatist Antiphanes in the prologue of Hedda, a new update of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, does not prove writer-director Nia DaCosta’s sophistication; it announces her inanity.
Posted Nov 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Auction (2024) Armond White Subtlety is rare in pop fiction, but it distinguishes Auction’s depiction of the art world.
Posted Oct 31, 2025  Edit critic review
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (2025) Armond White A House of Dynamite is not a work of realism. Bigelow’s style of headlong scenes, brief interactions, worried facial expressions, and a deluge of wonky acronyms simulates naturalism in place of actual governmental disclosure.
Posted Oct 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) Armond White It’s an unreliable and politically dishonest film, a showbiz version of Hamilton.
Posted Oct 27, 2025  Edit critic review
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Armond White Panahi clearly tests the market for political clichés. The fundamental problem is that the unseen torture and uncertain identification of Eghbal creates an over-projection of Iranian fascism and paranoia that seems to lie within...
Posted Oct 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Blue Moon (2025) Armond White The pity-party approach of Blue Moon betrays its subject... Hart’s perfectionist demand for “hard-earned joy, unsentimental joy” becomes a hipster cop-out.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Honey Don't! (2025) Armond White Refusing to understand others when you can merely ridicule them, Coen and Cooke over-politicize their own conceit.
Posted Oct 18, 2025  Edit critic review
After the Hunt (2025) Armond White After this supposition -- that the smartest people in the world are in conflict with their human frailties -- the filmmakers refuse to hold the nation’s elite accountable for making the world miserable.
Posted Oct 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Happy Gilmore 2 (2025) Armond White Sandler’s bar-mitzvah-banquet genre is the closest American movies get to the emotional amplitude of France’s Jean Renoir.
Posted Oct 04, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Armond White Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.
Posted Sep 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Megadoc (2025) Armond White A significant report on the self-destructive tendencies of Millennial cinema.
Posted Sep 26, 2025  Edit critic review
The History of Sound (2025) Armond White Hermanus and Shattuck forget that the word “history” derives from the Greek term that means “learning or knowing by inquiry.” The History of Sound is so aesthetically arid that it embraces repression.
Posted Sep 19, 2025  Edit critic review
Riefenstahl (2024) Armond White Veiel’s judgmental view raises the riddle of artistic heroism and provokes more ethical questions than he can answer.
Posted Sep 19, 2025  Edit critic review
The Roses (2025) Armond White None of the couple’s success, failure, or fame reflects the unsatisfying ups and downs of these times. Roach and McNamara cheat us of understanding ourselves. The Roses plays like a hoax. Hollywood can’t go on making movies like this.
Posted Sep 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Twinless (2025) Armond White If Twinless isn’t a popular hit, our movie culture doesn’t deserve to have hits.
Posted Sep 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Caught Stealing (2025) Armond White It’s a low-pressure thriller. Aronofsky’s intellectual pretenses prevent him from making a pell-mell action movie; he simply goes through the motions.
Posted Aug 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Little Buddha (1993) Armond White Little Buddha is peak Bertolucci, which is to say, peak cinema, opulent and awesome, with camera movement that follows thought so that our reception of information provides the joy of learning.
Posted Aug 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Suspended Time (2024) Armond White Distinctive yet rather infuriating.
Posted Aug 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Weapons (2025) Armond White Cregger expands social catastrophe without offering spiritual enlightenment.
Posted Aug 15, 2025  Edit critic review
An Officer and a Spy (2019) Armond White The battle between right and wrong, honor and pride, is perfectly physicalized by Polanski -- elegant, yet just bloody enough.
Posted Aug 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Night of the Juggler (1980) Armond White Night of the Juggler is a psychological thriller that uses realism to document civic rot.
Posted Aug 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Eddington (2025) Armond White Eddington is so solemnly goofy that its vision of polarized America might as well not be a satire.
Posted Jul 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Wild Diamond (2024) Armond White The film is compelling not because its story is so credible but because Liane’s problem feels urgent. Her self-abasement is almost horrifying.
Posted Jul 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Armond White Gunn’s objective is to banalize the very concept that Snyder sought to elevate. He demeans Superman’s virtue.
Posted Jul 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) Armond White Hearts of Darkness helps us understand the complications that Vietnam evokes in American consciousness, complexities that other filmmakers of Coppola’s generation eventually got right.
Posted Jul 07, 2025  Edit critic review
F1 The Movie (2025) Armond White Watching Brad Pitt play a Millennial duke of hazard causes dissatisfaction, especially when Sonny’s flaws are as superficial as Cruise’s in Maverick. For all the film’s commotion, its vicarious “excitement” is unmoving.
Posted Jul 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Final Insult (1997) Armond White Though not as fully imagined as Killer of Sheep, it is consistent with its heartfelt pessimism.
Posted Jun 27, 2025  Edit critic review
The Annihilation of Fish (1999) Armond White As an American neorealist, drawn to depict historic spiritual struggle, Burnett just can’t lie, which makes The Annihilation of Fish an awkward presentation of the discordant elements in Hollywood race ideology.
Posted Jun 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballerina (2025) Armond White Its purpose is action, and Ballerina (like ballet) exists for the aesthetics of movement, timing, and form, beyond the moral satisfaction usually equated with stories about violence.
Posted Jun 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Tornado (2025) Armond White Maclean goes film-school and poetic, quoting Arseni Tarkovsky... Tarkovsky père isn’t Tarkovsky fils, and Tornado isn’t serious or intelligent enough.
Posted Jun 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) Armond White You have to fool yourself to sit still and enjoy any of it as fresh or inventive. The purpose of hype is to make us accept the predictable as surprising or fascinating, while admiring Cruise’s personal derring-do.
Posted Jun 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Armond White Anderson works in miniature, and The Phoenician Scheme is a miniature masterpiece.
Posted Jun 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Dahomey (2024) Armond White It is Diop’s academic background that makes Dahomey a more creditable venture in the diasporic art craze that we are currently witnessing.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Henry Johnson (2025) Armond White Mamet’s austerity and sparseness hold these three sequences together.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Thunderbolts* (2025) Armond White Thunderbolts* is so unrelentingly mediocre that it confirms Marvel’s contemptuous refusal to offer anything better.
Posted May 02, 2025  Edit critic review
The President's Wife (2023) Armond White The President’s Wife is a low-key comedy but outstanding for this period of humorless politics.
Posted May 01, 2025  Edit critic review
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