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Matt Brennan

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

LA Weekly film critic.

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Paterno (2018) 69% EDIT “Paterno's most grimly compelling through line [is in] the ways in which the Paternos, Penn State officials, the campus, the community, the media, the culture at large wall themselves off from -- blind themselves to --the reality of the situation.” – Paste Magazine Apr 5, 2018 Full Review Lion (2016) 84% 2.5/4 EDIT “Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.” – Slant Magazine Nov 23, 2016 Full Review Christine (2016) 88% 1/4 EDIT “It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.” – Slant Magazine Oct 10, 2016 Full Review The Birth of a Nation (2016) 72% 2/4 EDIT “Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.” – Slant Magazine Oct 2, 2016 Full Review Deepwater Horizon (2016) 82% EDIT “A masterful, muscular actioner, one with an understanding of human stakes that puts most studio tentpoles to shame.” – Brooklyn Magazine Sep 27, 2016 Full Review Queen of Katwe (2016) 94% 3/4 EDIT “It's a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.” – Slant Magazine Sep 22, 2016 Full Review Goat (2016) 79% 2/4 EDIT “The film's understanding of the brittleness that begets the "traditions" of frat culture is altogether shallow.” – Slant Magazine Sep 18, 2016 Full Review Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016) 77% 2/4 EDIT “Jeff Feuerzeig isn't skeptical enough of Laura Albert's explanations and rationalizations to reveal any more than she wants us to know.” – Slant Magazine Sep 5, 2016 Full Review Spa Night (2016) 96% 3/4 EDIT “It recombines elements of the emigrant saga and the coming-of-age story into a searching, fresh-faced portrait.” – Slant Magazine Aug 14, 2016 Full Review Little Men (2016) 97% 3.5/4 EDIT “Director Ira Sachs transforms the smallest blip on life's radar, a childhood friendship, into a momentous occasion.” – Slant Magazine Aug 1, 2016 Full Review Looking: The Movie (2016) 89% 3/4 EDIT “The movie is a lovely, bittersweet coda to HBO's underappreciated series.” – Slant Magazine Jul 19, 2016 Full Review Tickled (2016) 94% 2.5/4 EDIT “There's no sustained effort to answer the first question any editor or J-school instructor worth his or her salt would ask: So what?” – Slant Magazine Jun 12, 2016 Full Review The Idol (2015) 84% 2.5/4 EDIT “The film's clichs ultimately contain both too little conviction and too little complication.” – Slant Magazine May 1, 2016 Full Review The Invitation (2015) 90% 3.5/4 EDIT “A charged, unnerving turn of the screw, The Invitation is consumed by the fear of forgetting--and, in the end, of not being able to.” – Slant Magazine Apr 4, 2016 Full Review Eye in the Sky (2015) 95% 3/4 EDIT “Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.” – Slant Magazine Mar 8, 2016 Full Review Jane Got a Gun (2016) 42% 2/4 EDIT “It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichs that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.” – Slant Magazine Jan 31, 2016 Full Review 45 Years (2015) 97% 4/4 EDIT “It's the summative effect of the story's modest exchanges, unspooling one after another in long, tranquil shots, that lends the film its profound sense of loss.” – Slant Magazine Dec 10, 2015 Full Review Tom at the Farm (2013) 77% 3.5/4 EDIT “Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man's perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.” – Slant Magazine Aug 8, 2015 Full Review Cas & Dylan (2013) 31% .5/4 EDIT “The film simply mucks up its earnest take on the buddy movie with undercooked characters and on-the-nose writing.” – Slant Magazine Apr 26, 2015 Full Review The Water Diviner (2014) 63% 2/4 EDIT “In straining for the profound, the film ultimately loses its way in a veritable no-man's land of ill-conceived stylistic choices and narrative switchbacks.” – Slant Magazine Apr 19, 2015 Full Review Woman in Gold (2015) 58% 2/4 EDIT “The film evades all but the most careful commonplaces about the relationship between the viewer and the work of art at its center.” – Slant Magazine Mar 31, 2015 Full Review Effie Gray (2014) 43% 3.5/4 EDIT “It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.” – Slant Magazine Mar 28, 2015 Full Review The Last Five Years (2014) 59% 2/4 EDIT “The film mostly skirts any connection to musical theater as though it were faintly embarrassed.” – Slant Magazine Feb 6, 2015 Full Review Big Eyes (2014) 72% 1.5/4 EDIT “In style as in content, it offers neither the granular detail of more subtle period pieces nor enough of Tim Burton's spirited eccentricity to register as anything other than what one character derides as "that representational jazz."” – Slant Magazine Dec 8, 2014 Full Review The Normal Heart (2014) 94% 3.5/4 EDIT “Flawed but terrifically moving, The Normal Heart is a boldly corporeal expression of gay political consciousness.” – Slant Magazine May 23, 2014 Full Review
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