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Nuke the Fridge

Nuke the Fridge is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Fred Topel.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Darkman (1990) Fred Topel I loved Darkman the first time I saw it and have ever since.
Posted Aug 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Entourage (2015) Fred Topel Vince still has no arc. He doesn't have to do anything. The whole movie happens around him, just like the show always did. E and Ari just have to convince everyone how great Vince is. Again.
Posted Jun 01, 2015  Edit critic review
Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) Fred Topel Aca-better
Posted May 12, 2015  Edit critic review
Pound of Flesh (2015) Fred Topel Heavy Van Dammage!
Posted May 11, 2015  Edit critic review
Hot Pursuit (2015) Fred Topel A very bad sign is when the film has to explain what calling shotgun is, in case the audience doesn't get the sophisticated double entendre.
Posted May 05, 2015  Edit critic review
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) Fred Topel This is Joss Whedon's riff on the trope of a darker sequel. Joss Whedon never met a cliche he couldn't deconstruct so this is a wonderful approach to a shared universe superhero team up.
Posted Apr 29, 2015  Edit critic review
Maggie (2015) Fred Topel The ugliest movie I can remember seeing since The Divide. It's so underlit you can barely even see anything. That's because there's no electricity any more so everyone uses lanterns. It's source lighting gone wrong.
Posted Apr 23, 2015  Edit critic review
The Water Diviner (2014) Fred Topel A surprising number of technical mistakes for a major film released by a studio.
Posted Apr 20, 2015  Edit critic review
The Dead Lands (2014) Fred Topel Because of some of the familiarity of narrative, I wasn't totally invested in the story of The Deadlands but when Hongi sprang into action I appreciated this take on the classic tale.
Posted Apr 15, 2015  Edit critic review
Furious 7 (2015) Fred Topel There won't be a faster, more furious movie this year.
Posted Mar 31, 2015  Edit critic review
White God (2014) Fred Topel I want to hug all the dogs in White God, as well as thank them for their performances in this intense and moving drama.
Posted Mar 25, 2015  Edit critic review
Ex Machina (2014) Fred Topel The real question may be: can our philosophies about artificial intelligence evolve with our stories?
Posted Mar 25, 2015  Edit critic review
The Gunman (2015) Fred Topel The Gunman needs to be Taken to task.
Posted Mar 12, 2015  Edit critic review
Danny Collins (2015) Fred Topel The symbolism of Danny's self-destruction is so blatant it's aesthetically offensive. The last scene can't even help telegraphing the final minute of the movie, and it has to completely invent something brand new to pull it off.
Posted Mar 12, 2015  Edit critic review
Cinderella (2015) Fred Topel Making such a traditional Cinderella film really illustrates what a weak story Cinderella is to begin with.
Posted Mar 05, 2015  Edit critic review
Frozen Fever (2015) Fred Topel Franchise Fred approves Frozen Fever.
Posted Feb 28, 2015  Edit critic review
Focus (2015) Fred Topel Focus may have solved the conundrum of the con artist movie. Writer/directors Glenn Ficara and John Requa pulled off the ultimate prestige.
Posted Feb 25, 2015  Edit critic review
My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn (2014) Fred Topel I always meant to give Only God Forgives a second chance... but now I've seen the film about the making of Only God Forgives twice.
Posted Feb 25, 2015  Edit critic review
Green Street 3: Never Back Down (2013) Fred Topel While it would be fun to see Adkins unleash his flips on unsuspecting soccer firms, he stays on the ground for the most part. It's still electric to see him fight.
Posted Feb 24, 2015  Edit critic review
The DUFF (2015) Fred Topel Feels like grown-ups so desperate to appear hip to social media, they make sure to mention every app they've ever heard of, including We Heart It and Whatsapp.
Posted Feb 18, 2015  Edit critic review
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) Fred Topel Enjoys its basest fantasies without even acknowledging that they're base. A wink or a nudge indicating some glimmer of maturity could turn the third act into a masterpiece of rebellion, but it's all bravado.
Posted Feb 12, 2015  Edit critic review
Experimenter (2015) Fred Topel Anything abstract intrigues me, especially when it's done well. But the subject of Stanley Milgram makes a fascinating story anyway so Experimenter is a success on many levels.
Posted Feb 04, 2015  Edit critic review
The Nightmare (2015) Fred Topel I'm sure sleep paralysis is truly horrifying to the people who experience it. A documentary filled with cheesy re-enactments of it is not.
Posted Feb 04, 2015  Edit critic review
The End of the Tour (2015) Fred Topel The End of the Tour is a sequel to Almost Famous because it is about another Rolling Stone writer getting embedded with a celebrity. Perhaps the third in that trilogy can have Rolling Stone hire me to live with Vin Diesel for a year.
Posted Feb 03, 2015  Edit critic review
Don Verdean (2015) Fred Topel Fans of Napoleon Dynamite will still recognize a sort of awkward whimsy in Don Verdean, but if that style was too niche for some audiences, Don Verdean puts more emphasis on making as many jokes as possible.
Posted Feb 03, 2015  Edit critic review
Advantageous (2015) Fred Topel Like the best science fiction, Advantageous asks questions that apply to us today. It is a cautionary tale about the dangerous of technology, but it seems the dangers are mostly human.
Posted Feb 03, 2015  Edit critic review
The Mask You Live In (2015) Fred Topel The Mask You Live In is an important movie but it's not a "take your medicine" kind of important movie. Rather, it empowers a man to be the person he wants to be, not the one others are pressuring him to be.
Posted Feb 03, 2015  Edit critic review
The Bronze (2015) Fred Topel There are some amazing set pieces and I know exactly what this film's red band trailer is going to be.
Posted Jan 27, 2015  Edit critic review
Top Five (2014) Fred Topel For a movie trying so hard to challenge the notion of what we expect from celebrities, I was surprised how many times Top Five followed the conventional Hollywood formula.
Posted Dec 03, 2014  Edit critic review
Big Eyes (2014) Fred Topel Big Eyes does Margaret Keane justice. Adams is so emotional you feel her heartbreak in the earliest simple betrayals, let alone when it gets more intense. Waltz is whimsical and charming, tragic and frightening.
Posted Dec 03, 2014  Edit critic review
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 (2014) Fred Topel We'll never know if there was a more visual way to convey this story. The filmmakers didn't have to. They just got the time to throw everything at the screen.
Posted Nov 18, 2014  Edit critic review
Dumb and Dumber To (2014) Fred Topel This reunion feels like Carrey and Daniels may not actually remember the characters they're playing, so instead of returning to Lloyd and Harry, they are doing brand new impressions of what they think dumb characters would be like.
Posted Nov 14, 2014  Edit critic review
Inherent Vice (2014) Fred Topel A modern day The Big Sleep. If you've seen The Big Sleep, you'll recall it's very well done with great performances, but you'd be hard pressed to explain how Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) solves the mystery.
Posted Nov 11, 2014  Edit critic review
Interstellar (2014) Fred Topel The human qualities that can corrupt the perfect science experiment, it's heartbreaking yet life affirming. We will ultimately triumph over cold science precisely because of, not in spite of, our humanity.
Posted Nov 05, 2014  Edit critic review
Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show (2014) Fred Topel I'm sure there are hours of outtakes of showrunners sharing gold, but the pieces Des Doyle compiled illustrate both the micro and macro concepts in a compelling narrative for both casual fans and industry insiders.
Posted Oct 31, 2014  Edit critic review
Big Hero 6 (2014) Fred Topel The story hits all the familiar origin beats: vengeance as a motivator, training, discovering one's powers, and some stuff at the end you'll recognize. It will be some kids' first time ever seeing this though.
Posted Oct 30, 2014  Edit critic review
Ouija (2014) Fred Topel There are worse made movies, but those reveal some interesting attempts and failures. This is just competent enough to remind you they had all the resources, but stuck to the most generic version of the story.
Posted Oct 24, 2014  Edit critic review
Girl House (2014) Fred Topel Builds to an intense final act that pays off everything its established about the house and the girls. It has a great riff on the classic 'look behind you' moments of horror movies. It takes Scream to the next level.
Posted Oct 22, 2014  Edit critic review
Preservation (2014) Fred Topel Preservation is a great survival action movie, and I'd love to see Wrenn Schmidt become the new badass heroine.
Posted Oct 22, 2014  Edit critic review
The Book of Life (2014) Fred Topel While it's a tad busy and overloaded at first, it all pays off so nicely that I appreciate the total package.
Posted Oct 14, 2014  Edit critic review
Fury (2014) Fred Topel Viscerally, it works completely, but intellectually it takes some short cuts to achieve that visceral momentum.
Posted Oct 13, 2014  Edit critic review
See No Evil 2 (2014) Fred Topel The kills are bloody as hell, and filmed beautifully. The Soskas know how to make blood spray look pretty, and tragic.
Posted Oct 11, 2014  Edit critic review
Dracula Untold (2014) Fred Topel This untold story basically amounts to Vlad signed a contract with a return policy but ended up stuck with the bill... Perhaps a better name for the film would be The Three Days of the Vampire.
Posted Oct 08, 2014  Edit critic review
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) Fred Topel Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon shoots The Town that Dreaded Sundown brilliantly, getting a lot of shots from within the environment so we feel like we're in there.
Posted Oct 07, 2014  Edit critic review
Tokyo Tribe (2014) Fred Topel Tokyo Tribe is a Japanese rap opera. That's it, that's all you need to know. If that's not everything you ever wanted to see in a movie, I can't help you.
Posted Oct 07, 2014  Edit critic review
St. Vincent (2014) Fred Topel When St. Vincent gets serious, it's pretty cloying. For some reason, the film withholds a lot of basic information about character identities so that it plays as a surprise when the relationships are revealed.
Posted Oct 07, 2014  Edit critic review
The Judge (2014) Fred Topel Not a boring movie, so it's perfectly reasonable time-filling entertainment, but you can feel it aspiring to more and not getting there.
Posted Oct 07, 2014  Edit critic review
Annabelle (2014) Fred Topel What is this, Charles Lee Ray? Voodoo was kitschy in the '80s. We're certainly not going to take it seriously now.
Posted Oct 03, 2014  Edit critic review
Left Behind (2014) Fred Topel My version was the Jerry Bruckheimer Nicolas Cage running around an apocalyptic wasteland saving the world from the Antichrist. That's not what Left Behind is.
Posted Oct 02, 2014  Edit critic review
Nightcrawler (2014) Fred Topel Apparently we won't stop enabling the MEDIA to sell us fear, so maybe getting to know the people who deliver it will help.
Posted Oct 02, 2014  Edit critic review
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