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Paul Byrnes
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Spaceballs (1987) |
Nobody laughs louder at his own jokes than Mel Brooks. That's why his films are so often uneven -- he has no sense of proportion.... That's also what makes him occasionally one of the funniest men alive, because he'll try anything to make us laugh. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Almost Famous (2000) |
Almost compulsory, man. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 25, 2024
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Forrest Gump (1994) |
It's part elegy for a nation that likes to gun down its leaders, part Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd comedy... The mix is kind of irresistible, because comedy with such texture is rare. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Quiz Show (1994) |
Michael Ballhaus's camera gives us a ravishingly stylish New York, where postwar prosperity is at its height. Redford's great achievement is to take us inside the new medium that feeds on that prosperity, at the moment vulgarity triumphed. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 10, 2024
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Traffic (2000) |
The stories cover supply, demand, addiction, treatment, corruption, enforcement, courts, and policy-making, and Soderbergh keeps all of it flowing with the pace of a thriller. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Moulin Rouge (2001) |
Kidman and McGregor sparkle together; some songs enchant, a fine supporting cast give us some laughs, but it's not enough. There is nothing to savour, to reflect on. It's a film where style is in search of an idea. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Sep 05, 2023
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Godland (2022) |
Like all the best movies, we can’t tell where this is going. When it arrives, the finale is worthy of all that has come before. Nobody makes movies like this any more -- except that some do. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Aug 17, 2023
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Alcarràs (2022) |
Alcarras reminds us of what we’ve been missing. It’s a beautiful, sad, authentic depiction of the drama within one extended family facing a kind of oblivion. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jul 28, 2023
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The Matrix (1999) |
This is a film so gorged on computer game aesthetics that the theatre seats ought to have joysticks... It's already a hit after one weekend in the U.S., but for me, "Game Over" was a long time coming. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Other People's Children (2022) |
The film concerns itself with quotidian life, confident that this is enough to keep us interested. In this writer and director Rebecca Zlotowski is proven right: it is more than enough. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jul 06, 2023
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Magnolia (1999) |
Anderson writes like a playwright, building character so that he can give an actor a moment of blazing intensity, but he's also an instinctively daring filmmaker, as these experiments with time show. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 30, 2023
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Back to the Future (1985) |
Despite the frequent laughs, I came out of the movie vaguely dissatisfied. I expected something more original from this... and from Zemeckis, who proved in Romancing The Stone that he can produce fresh, witty and entertaining pictures. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 27, 2023
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Driving Madeleine (2022) |
Madeleine’s story has many twists, going to a dark place. Renaud plays her as a survivor; someone who learned to endure. Her warmth is utterly irresistible. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 22, 2023
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Armageddon (1998) |
Michael Bay, directing his third film for Bruckheimer, knows what the boss wants and supplies it, though he's probably capable of better. Both men came to film via Madison Avenue, and what they're seeing here is just another product. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Extraction 2 (2023) |
The second Extraction is more grandiose, full of pace and action, and dull as a box of rocks. It follows all the bad rules of sequels -- bigger, louder, dumber. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 17, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
The film achieves intimacy, rather than mere arousal. That’s just one of the ways in which it offers a certain grandeur. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 09, 2023
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Bank of Dave (2023) |
Director Chris Foggin builds another English “feel-good” movie, the latest in a line that goes back well into the last century... It also has a whiff of truth that saves the day. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jun 01, 2023
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Limbo (2023) |
A quiet but powerful meditation on how far we have not come in this country. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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The Color Purple (1985) |
[Steven Spielberg] trips over his own love of movie theatrics... The fact that the movie still manages to be moving is in large part due to some fine performances, led by the amazing Whoopi Goldberg. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023) |
Movies about illness are so often vehicles for easy sentiment: isn’t he or she brave, or thank god I am not like that. This one is funny, full of sharp insight and unusually frank language. It’s also doggedly unsentimental. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 11, 2023
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The Survival of Kindness (2022) |
It won’t be everyone’s cup of historical parable, but there’s an elemental purity to this replanted Dutchman’s work. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 04, 2023
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Mascarade (2022) |
Vacth is a discovery. Her combination of brass and vulnerability, sexuality and comedic timing, suggest resources greater than anyone suspected. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 04, 2023
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The Innocent (2022) |
The Innocent is a delicious hybrid, like Garrel’s other films -- a drama, because the emotions are played straight; a romance, because the characters are looking for love; and above all a comedy, because Garrel pushes it quietly towards logical mayhem. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Apr 13, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) |
It is like seeing a dear old friend. Indiana once made us all feel we could be stronger and braver, if we tried. And he wasn't a silly modern superhero, just a guy who combined a thirst for knowledge with great courage and ingenuity. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Apr 12, 2023
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EO (2022) |
The film, by Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski, is both moving and puzzling, a story about an innocent done in a style that doesn’t always have the same innocence. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Apr 06, 2023
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Broker (2022) |
Screenwriters are always told to simplify and clarify: Hirokazu doesn’t hold with such rules. His films get stranger and more beautiful as they go. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 30, 2023
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Linoleum (2022) |
West has made a number of sci-fi inclined shorts and two short features, but Linoleum could be considered a feature debut, were it not for the fact that it feels more like an over-extended short. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 30, 2023
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The Portable Door (2023) |
All in all, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg -- good in parts. Sam Neill and Christoph Waltz bring fine comic energy to the spectacular design, but the story bends itself in knots trying to be inventive. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 23, 2023
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Living (2022) |
The film itself is like eating a rich dessert: you marvel at all the constituent parts, but when it’s over, you may have regrets. It is lush and richly textured, like the old colour footage of London that we see in the credits, but just a little pushy. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 16, 2023
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To Leslie (2022) |
Riseborough’s performance is spectacular -- a high-wire act, from despair to repair and everywhere in between. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 10, 2023
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All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) |
This new adaptation of a classic book about young German soldiers in the First World War does everything well, except keep faith with Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 10, 2023
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) |
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed lives up to its promise. It’s a brilliant, compelling, confronting examination of Goldin’s work through the years. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Aftersun (2022) |
Somehow, without its effects becoming obvious, Wells brings us to the gravity of what she is remembering. The accumulation of small details builds a strong sense of who these characters are. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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Sharper (2023) |
In Sharper, we have to figure out who is conning whom and that puts a lot of pressure on the script. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Close (2022) |
Close is beautiful, sad, tender and wrenching, a towering achievement both at the level of craft and theme. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Your Place or Mine (2023) |
Witherspoon and Kutcher achieve gender equality for the romcom -- not an insignificant task -- but it hardly matters when the film is so listless. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Corsage (2022) |
Vicky Krieps, in a spectacular performance, illuminates a rather trudging narrative. Sisi spends much of the film gasping for breath; the rest she spends pining, weeping, brooding and rebelling. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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True Spirit (2023) |
This is a family-friendly picture, wholesome and tailored for the American market -- although I suspect that director Sarah Spillane also shaped it to inspire teenage girls, in particular. And she does a good job within the constraints. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Shotgun Wedding (2023) |
The script, by Mark Hammer, falls under the category of modern screwball, or perhaps it's a pirate romance, with actual violence on top. Either way, it's neither fully one way or the other. There's enough to cut a good trailer, but precious little more. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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You Can Go Now! (2022) |
A powerful piece of work, with all the anger, recrimination and hurt that we see in his art. Bell is a provocateur, a poet, a piss-taker, maybe even a prophet. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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The Big Lebowski (1998) |
Bridges, Goodman and Buscemi are so good together as the bowling zeroes that they paper over the film's many cracks. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 21, 2023
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My Old School (2022) |
The film achieves a Rashomon-like complexity of viewpoint, although it’s a lot funnier than Kurosawa’s classic film. It’s partly the Scottish sense of humour, so rich in its understanding of human frailty. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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The Amazing Maurice (2022) |
Funny, wacky, fast-paced and somewhat hollow. It’s a tad shrill and exhausting, especially when non-stop talker Malicia arrives inside the frame, bouncing around like a caffeine-fuelled teen know-it-all. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 12, 2023
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Transfusion (2023) |
If the script has more depth than a run-of-the-mill actioner, it is partly because of Worthington’s intense performance and partly because Nable’s direction is confident and careful. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Jan 05, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness (2022) |
For Östlund, subtlety is overrated. Triangle of Sadness shows us why he has a point. It’s a spectacular demolition of modern life, a disruptor movie full of ideas and nuance, as violent in its way as a Pieter Bruegel painting. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Dec 23, 2022
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The Lost King (2022) |
Frears has made many great films. This is not one of them. It’s too slippery with the facts to have any standing when it comes to the truth, too ready to find villainy as it proclaims that Richard was no villain. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Dec 23, 2022
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Carnifex (2022) |
Don’t let anyone say they don’t make movies like they used to. Carnifex is a textbook 1970s-era monster mash-up. We don’t need no stinking budget; we got imagination, we got someone in a fur suit, let’s put on a show! - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Dec 13, 2022
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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) |
Some may find it long at almost two hours. That will depend on whether del Toro’s imagination has done its work. I found it spellbinding. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Nov 30, 2022
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Margrete: Queen of the North (2021) |
It’s a big, dark, roiling cauldron of politics and emotion, and satisfying as all that -- even if a lot of it is speculation. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Nov 30, 2022
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Poker Face (2022) |
Crowe’s direction is efficient at best, intrusive at worst... None of this really matters if you’re grooving with the plot, but that’s a big if. For a film about poker players, it’s all a bit obvious. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Nov 30, 2022
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