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Dwight MacDonald

Dwight MacDonald's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Biography:

(Photo Credit: Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images)

Publications:

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
The Sound of Music (1965) 83% EDIT “Pure, unadulterated kitsch, not a false note, not a whiff of reality; and every detail so carefully worked out... I came out full of goodwill toward all humanity.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Harlot (1965) EDIT “Warhol is the Ponzi of the movie world, a comparison he would probably enjoy if he knew who Ponzi was.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Last Year at Marienbad (1961) 93% EDIT “It is a charade, a masque, beautiful to the eyes -- I can't remember a film of more sustained visual delight -- and interesting to the mind, or at least to the crossword-puzzle-solving part of the mind, but curiously lacking in emotional affect.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Morgan! (1966) 65% EDIT “If Morgan! is supposed to be a comedy, and certain desperate attempts at slapstick suggest maybe it is, then I was not amused.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Dear John (1964) EDIT “Lars Magnus Lindgren avoids defects of his fellow-countryman, Bergman, but he also avoids his virtues; he is never pretentious and he is never imaginative.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Help! (1965) 86% EDIT “A witless orgy of expensive production that strangles the Beatles, so fresh and spontaneous in [A Hard Day's Night], in a laboriously foolish plot line and smothers them under tons of handsomely colored feathers.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review The Pawnbroker (1964) 88% EDIT “The Pawnbroker seemed to me a bore and a phony, a vulgarization of a serious theme, an exploitation of cinematic "effects" used without taste or intelligence.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Repulsion (1965) 96% EDIT “The purest exercise in homicidal mania yet made, and the most singleminded.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review Juliet of the Spirits (1965) 79% EDIT “Fellini's eye is as good as ever -- it is the mind, and the feeling, that somehow fails.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 14, 2019 Full Review This Sporting Life (1963) 96% EDIT “Anderson's use of the camera is either too flatly, clutteredly realistic or else too "indicative." Few Hollywood movies are as flimsily motivated as this allegedly realistic film.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review The Fiances (1963) 100% EDIT “Technically, Olmi seems to have made all the right choices... His photography is so right that after the first ten minutes of delight, one takes it for granted, forgetting past tortures inflicted on the retina.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review The Leopard (1963) 98% EDIT “To transpose a book into a movie means to destroy the form of the original in order to re-create the effect in another medium... Visconti has preserved the form without apparently suspecting it had any meaning.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Chushingura (1963) EDIT “I would compare it rather to the Colosseum, very big. It's a kind of Japanese Gone with the Wind, by which I intend only a small insult.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review La Terra Trema (1948) 82% EDIT “This one-way pathos trundles along for three hours slowly, glumly, predictably.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Sandra (1965) 100% EDIT “In general, [Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa] was quite good fun.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review The Loved One (1965) 47% EDIT “It is hard to understand how a witty, tightly organized extravaganza like the Waugh novel... could have resulted in such a queasy, humorless, formless botch.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Six in Paris (1965) 76% EDIT “As a nicely colored travelogue, not bad, but people and plots keep interfering, and they are much less interesting than the streets and buildings.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Mickey One (1965) 71% EDIT “Mr. Penn seems to think that by keeping it ambiguous, he can roam more freely on both planes, reality and fantasy. But the confusion -- are we inside or outside of Mickey's head? -- is merely confusing.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Shakespeare Wallah (1965) 89% EDIT “Everyone acts naturally and Mr. Ivory's direction is light and sensitive, managing to suggest the subtlety and comedy and pathos of Anglo-Indian relationships.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Walkover (1965) EDIT “Half the time you don't know what's going on and the other half you don't care.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Fists in the Pocket (1965) 93% EDIT “A mess and a bore, but one that suggested a lot of talent, which the director was too young to discipline his ambitions into art.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review The Shop on Main Street (1965) 100% EDIT “The Shop on High Street has modest but solid virtues. It treats seriously -- that is, with a quiet realism that doesn't exclude humor -- a theme I can't recall having been attempted before except in documentaries.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Gertrud (1965) 71% EDIT “[Carl Dreyer] has in his later years developed his less-is-more style beyond effectiveness into mannerism. Gertrud is a further reach, beyond mannerism into cinematic poverty and straightforward tedium.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Raven's End (1964) EDIT “There is a fine performance as the father by Keve Hjelm, but the rest is a slow retelling of a tale I have heard too often.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review Red Beard (1965) 73% EDIT “Cinema erupts a couple of times in those first two hours, but for the most part we are treated to lengthy scenes in which the characters talk lengthily to each other while the camera peers up into their faces like a faithful dog.” – Esquire Magazine Aug 13, 2019 Full Review
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