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Rachel Cooke

Tomatometer-approved critic
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Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Mountainhead (2025) 74% EDIT “The dialogue is sharper than a premium Japanese knife, and often very funny. ” – New Statesman Jun 2, 2025 Full Review Men Up (2023) 78% EDIT “This turns out to be the most delightful of presents: think The Full Monty meets Masters of Sex, with a few light top notes of Gavin & Stacey.” – New Statesman Dec 29, 2023 Full Review Partygate (2023) 91% EDIT “This film by Joseph Bullman, who writes and directs, is surprisingly affective. Don’t be taken in by its slight, rather flimsy appearance. It made me angrier than I’ve felt for ages. It also made me weep.” – New Statesman Oct 6, 2023 Full Review The Light We Carry: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey (2023) EDIT “It’s little a bit Hallmark card, and it’s a little bit Susan “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” Jeffers, and watching it, I’ve never felt more righteously British in my life.” – New Statesman Apr 26, 2023 Full Review My Name Is Leon (2022) 88% EDIT “It all seems, if not utterly preposterous, then platitudinous and sentimental. ” – New Statesman Jun 9, 2022 Full Review Raising a School Shooter (2021) EDIT “The message of their searching and ultimately profoundly moving documentary being not only that life must (and does) go on even after something unimaginably terrible has happened, but that human survival often depends on the humdrum.” – New Statesman Jul 7, 2021 Full Review Together (2021) 71% EDIT “Its underlying emotional message, its special pleading for tatty compromise and pathetic half-shares of love, struck me as bogus.” – New Statesman Jun 17, 2021 Full Review Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes (2020) 91% EDIT “Above all, I thought it was so clever, the way that Catz's film mirrors aspects of its homespun, meagerly funded subject.” – New Statesman May 19, 2021 Full Review Caroline Flack: Her Life and Death (2021) 100% EDIT “This is an old story, and a sad one, but it's also, I'm afraid, the nature of the beast.” – New Statesman Mar 18, 2021 Full Review The Windermere Children (2020) 100% EDIT “Watching it, I came to regard its longueurs as necessary breathing spaces and its lapses into sentimentality as forgivable.” – New Statesman Jan 30, 2020 Full Review Untouchable (2019) 87% EDIT “As horrifying as it was to hear of Weinstein's abject pathology and all the disgusting ways in which it operated, what I most admired about [Ursula] Macfarlane's film was its subtle placing of him in a wider culture.” – New Statesman Sep 3, 2019 Full Review The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On (2019) 100% EDIT “The Rushdie affair has many ongoing repercussions, and chief among them, I think, is the confusion and fear that now almost inevitably trails the notion of offence.” – New Statesman Feb 28, 2019 Full Review Sleeping With the Far Right (2019) 50% EDIT “What a wasted opportunity. Sen's universe is far more profoundly weird than at first it appeared, and yet Levine hardly cared to probe it.” – New Statesman Feb 26, 2019 Full Review Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story (2019) 100% EDIT “Ruth Mayer's dash through Venezuela's recent history wasn't a radical piece of film-making, but it worked brilliantly. How quickly a state can fail.” – New Statesman Jan 18, 2019 Full Review Brexit (2019) 80% EDIT “Utterly and completely Benedict Cumberbatch's show... What an irresistible performance he turns in: weird, committed, minutely observed” – New Statesman Jan 2, 2019 Full Review The Interrogation of Tony Martin (2018) 80% EDIT “Where there should have been dramatic tension, we got only muddle and hesitation; where we might have hoped for psychological insight, we had only the self-justification of one lonely, paranoid man.” – New Statesman Nov 26, 2018 Full Review Farther and Sun: A Dyslexic Road Trip (2018) EDIT “All the different ways in which human beings are wired grow ever more fascinating to me the older I get, and this film captured, with great gentleness, some aspects of these contrasts and incongruities.” – New Statesman Oct 3, 2018 Full Review Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes (2018) 83% EDIT “Manson: The Lost Tapes really is disquieting: a trip and a half of purest horror dressed up as social history.” – New Statesman Sep 27, 2018 Full Review Against the Law (2017) 100% EDIT “Here was all of the wit and compassion you find in Wildeblood's prose, combined with emotions I'd hitherto only been able rather half-heartedly to imagine: bewilderment, fear, agonising pain.” – New Statesman Sep 12, 2018 Full Review Mark Gatiss on John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art (2018) EDIT “Threaded with tenderness and fellow-feeling, and resolutely determined not to fixate on the painter's suicide in 1957 at the age of 39.” – New Statesman Aug 17, 2018 Full Review Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar (2018) EDIT “Praised reverentially for an hour by a series of largely grim-faced American scholars, afterwards I could think of [Sylvia Plath] only in black and white: the colours of a PhD thesis, or a dry academic paper.” – New Statesman Aug 17, 2018 Full Review The Ice King (2018) 100% EDIT “With its attention to family and changing attitudes both to gender and sexuality... this was social history of the best, by which I mean the slyest, kind.” – New Statesman Jul 11, 2018 Full Review Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know (2018) 71% EDIT “Their enthusiasm - for music, art, clothes, for everything, in fact - is braided with a seriousness that is both touching and comical.” – New Statesman Jun 29, 2018 Full Review The Many Primes of Muriel Spark (2018) EDIT “Kirsty Wark took us smartly through the novelist's several reinventions, pausing only occasionally to wonder at her restless bravery, those techniques for survival that must sometimes have seemed to others like nothing so much as casual cruelty.” – New Statesman Jun 20, 2018 Full Review Nothing Like a Dame (2018) 98% EDIT “Its slow unfurling allowed us to imagine we were eavesdropping. Here was fame, but here, too, was intimacy.” – New Statesman Jun 6, 2018 Full Review
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