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Everything is Horrible (Substack)

Everything is Horrible (Substack) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Noah Berlatsky.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Beetlejuice (1988) Noah Berlatsky Beetlejuice famously presents itself as a joyride of mystical weirdness. But when you actually rewatch it, it comes across as an oddly sincere embrace of drab suburban conventionality.
Posted Jan 16, 2026  Edit critic review
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Noah Berlatsky I can’t begrudge it the many accolades it’s received. But while I think it’s worth seeing, I was also in the end somewhat disappointed.
Posted Jan 08, 2026  Edit critic review
Weapons (2025) Noah Berlatsky Self-aware misogynist scapegoating doesn’t stop being that because the person deploying it thinks it’s fun or entertaining or a cool jump scare delivery system.
Posted Dec 31, 2025  Edit critic review
KPop Demon Hunters (2025) Noah Berlatsky The disjunction between message and follow through in Kpop Demon Hunters makes it hard for me to want to sing along.
Posted Dec 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Noah Berlatsky It takes part in the long Hollywood tradition of films that are entertaining if you don’t think about them that hard—a tradition that is, unfortunately, especially ill-suited for our current christofascist moment.
Posted Dec 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Die My Love (2025) Noah Berlatsky The biggest failure of the film is that, for all her impassioned scene-chewing, Jennifer Lawrence never stops being Jennifer Lawrence, super star, emoting for the awards committee.
Posted Dec 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Bugonia (2025) Noah Berlatsky For all its snark and absurdity and despair, Lanthimos’ message, like those of misanthropes before him, is uncomfortable not because it’s callous, but because it’s uncomfortably sincere.
Posted Dec 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Materialists (2025) Noah Berlatsky The movie asks you to care about them for real failures and real flaws, which makes Song’s belief in love more, rather than less, sweeping.
Posted Dec 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Good Boy (2025) Noah Berlatsky Good Boy isn’t a great horror movie. It’s got a core of sadness, though, that is hard to leave behind.
Posted Nov 16, 2025  Edit critic review
The Naked Gun (2025) Noah Berlatsky The very fact that the movie has no actual moral commitment beyond the next punchline allows it to at least at times come closer to an actual critique of police and policing than virtually any other American film or television narrative.
Posted Nov 12, 2025  Edit critic review
The Machine Girl (2008) Noah Berlatsky What’s most remarkable, and most exhilarating, about Machine Girl, is the extent to which it’s gratuitously gratuitous. It’s almost like the Naked Gun movies, but with decapitations replacing the stupid gags.
Posted Sep 28, 2025  Edit critic review
28 Weeks Later (2007) Noah Berlatsky Screenwriter Alex Garland’s willingness to get weirder and more mean-spirited in his follow-up is an unusual and admirable choice.
Posted Sep 02, 2025  Edit critic review
Bound (1996) Noah Berlatsky The Wachowski sisters gleefully make the queer subtext of noir into more-than-text.
Posted Aug 31, 2025  Edit critic review
Thunderbolts* (2025) Noah Berlatsky The stale jokes and tired fight scenes would be bad enough. The endless shoveling of amnesiac inspiration, though, pushes the film past tedious and on into actually offensive.
Posted Aug 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Ash (2025) Noah Berlatsky Add in Flying Lotus’ soundtrack of semi-ambient squish and skitter and even if you won’t be surprised by most of the twists, it’s still satisfying to let the thing grab hold.
Posted Aug 24, 2025  Edit critic review
When Harry Met Sally... (1989) Noah Berlatsky When Harry Met Sally hangs its romance on two of the least appealing main characters Hollywood has ever commanded audiences to embrace.
Posted Aug 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Relay (2024) Noah Berlatsky It’s difficult to be enthusiastic about a film that so determinedly refuses to follow up on its own potential.
Posted Aug 21, 2025  Edit critic review
The Night of the Hunter (1955) Noah Berlatsky Where Hitchcock locates horror in mothers, queer people, and a disordering of the patriarchal order, Laughton’s killer is the Christian patriarch himself.
Posted Jul 31, 2025  Edit critic review
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) Noah Berlatsky Unusually emphatic in its giggling assault on the young and all they stand for—sex, dreams, hopes, high spirits, and, in particular, the supplanting of their elders.
Posted Jul 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Noah Berlatsky Coogler suggests, art—whether music or movies—can gives us, however briefly, however compromised, a vision of a better world.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Switchblade Sisters (1975) Noah Berlatsky Switchblade Sisters for all its goofiness, is a film with some surprising depths.
Posted Jul 03, 2025  Edit critic review
But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) Noah Berlatsky But I’m a Cheerleader insists on being big and weird and fake and sexual and joyfully itself.
Posted Jun 25, 2025  Edit critic review
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) Noah Berlatsky King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has nothing particularly earth-shattering to say; it's not a profound or innovative film. But it's full of joy and energy and ridiculous nonsense.
Posted Jun 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Side Effects (2013) Noah Berlatsky Side Effects, like Psycho before it, is a carefully wrought engine of hate.
Posted May 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Life (2017) Noah Berlatsky Life copies the Alien body, but leaves out the grimy soul
Posted May 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Companion (2025) Noah Berlatsky The way the film just insists first, last, and in the middle that Iris is a person, not a robot, no matter the ostensible high concept, feels like a necessary intervention.
Posted Apr 13, 2025  Edit critic review
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) Noah Berlatsky A searing, bleak exploration of sexual assault, sexism, misogyny, and enforced family silence.
Posted Mar 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Noah Berlatsky Though it was pilloried in the past as incomprehensible, it’s past time to see Fire Walk With Me for what it is: Lynch’s most straightforward film, his saddest, and his best.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Blue Velvet (1986) Noah Berlatsky Lynch’s first noir is also, inevitably, his first meta-noir.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Wild at Heart (1990) Noah Berlatsky Unless your heart is a big old lump of rock, you’ve got to swoon at least a little when Sailor serenades Lula with “Love Me Tender” at the close.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Mulholland Dr. (2001) Noah Berlatsky The movie is about Hollywood and the process of assembling movies out of money, more or less fortunate actors, dreams, and the spackle of happenstance.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Eraserhead (1977) Noah Berlatsky David Lynch’s stunning debut remains a weird touchstone for art cinema snobs and lovers of the surreal everywhere.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
The Straight Story (1999) Noah Berlatsky If you're a sucker for sentimental Americana, this is of significantly higher quality than the genre usually manages.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Inland Empire (2006) Noah Berlatsky The movie's studied, deliberate refusal to develop interesting characters, provide a plot, or to say anything gets old after three hours.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Lost Highway (1997) Noah Berlatsky Lynch refuses to commit to any clear theme beyond the standard misogynist noir trope that women who have sexual autonomy are evil and maybe deserve to be murdered.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
The Elephant Man (1980) Noah Berlatsky The lethargic plot wanders between voyeuristic disgust and smug satisfaction at the film’s broad-mindedness. Lynch never made another film as tedious and tone-deaf.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Strange Darling (2023) Noah Berlatsky Strange Darling isn’t a bad movie. It features some excellent performances and delivers the expected genre pleasures in a novel and unexpected way.
Posted Jan 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Daughters (2024) Noah Berlatsky The film, and documentaries like it, are a bleak reminder of just how powerful prison is, as an institution and an ideology.
Posted Jan 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Queer (2024) Noah Berlatsky Desire and fulfillment, bodies and disembodiment, are queer things, out of which Queer makes a strange, sad film about hopelessness and hope, writhing together under a single skin.
Posted Jan 12, 2025  Edit critic review
Handling the Undead (2024) Noah Berlatsky It’s not about a descent into apocalypse, or the loathsome human tendency to eat ourselves. Instead, it’s a slow story about the blank, numb emptiness of grief.
Posted Jan 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Noah Berlatsky The slapstick is only improved by the film’s Pythonesque less-is-more approach to effects.
Posted Dec 31, 2024  Edit critic review
Nightbitch (2024) Noah Berlatsky Nightbitch is an imperfect mess, but so, the film suggests, is motherhood.
Posted Dec 28, 2024  Edit critic review
Cuckoo (2024) Noah Berlatsky If you ever wanted to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers liquefy into a vague, indistinct metaphor for autism, this is the (very strange) film for you.
Posted Dec 27, 2024  Edit critic review
Anora (2024) Noah Berlatsky The lead performance by Mikey Madison as Anora is incandescent.
Posted Dec 18, 2024  Edit critic review
We Live in Time (2024) Noah Berlatsky The excess of classiness, and the competition genre cameos, suggest that you need a certain level of polish and meritocratic success before your tragedy can matter.
Posted Dec 13, 2024  Edit critic review
Alien: Romulus (2024) Noah Berlatsky As blockbuster franchises go, Romulus isn’t a bad film. But it suffers from the perennial blockbuster problem, which is that it doesn’t believe in its own world or its own themes.
Posted Dec 10, 2024  Edit critic review
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) Noah Berlatsky Rather than a smart send-up, the movie functions as a dreary distillation of the worst excesses of the MCU and its apparently endless offshoots.
Posted Dec 08, 2024  Edit critic review
The People's Joker (2022) Noah Berlatsky It’s a movie that refuses to wear anything but the weird, lumpy, ill-fitting self it is. As such, it becomes the glorious, villainous scheme even Batman can’t crack.
Posted Dec 07, 2024  Edit critic review
The Wild Robot (2024) Noah Berlatsky A mess of a movie, which claims that it’s wild even as it follows its rigid programming to its lackluster and inevitable end.
Posted Dec 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Heretic (2024) Noah Berlatsky The power of Grant's performance can only take a film so far, and soon enough we are back with the genre tropes of endless hectoring and improbable manipulation—first by the bad guy, but even more egregiously by the ham-fisted directing duo.
Posted Dec 01, 2024  Edit critic review
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