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The Ooh Tray

The Ooh Tray is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Ed Whitfield.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Zone of Interest (2023) Ed Whitfield It’s all filmed with Kubrickian distance – static camera, deep focus, clinical composition. That, you might think, is the right lens through which to view such a catastrophe – to see it the way it was seen, or rather unseen, by those on the fringe.
Posted Feb 25, 2024  Edit critic review
Madame Web (2024) Ed Whitfield Imagine if you will, a thriller without thrills. A sisterhood movie without any chemistry between the vulnerable girls. A comic book movie without laughs. A superhero movie without heroes.
Posted Feb 25, 2024  Edit critic review
Oppenheimer (2023) Ed Whitfield This is an old-school movie designed to make you think, and it succeeds, to the frustration of those who already suffer from insomnia and existential dread.
Posted Jul 23, 2023  Edit critic review
Barbie (2023) Ed Whitfield Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister in charge of the wartime German film industry, believed the most effective use of the medium was to bury the message in ostensibly innocuous genre fare. You sense he’d have found Gerwig’s film a bit much.
Posted Jul 23, 2023  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Ed Whitfield Suffers from “part one” syndrome. It’s a long setup to get to the movie you came to see – the one in which the laid pipe delivers the thrills. It’s deflating to get to the end of a 2h43m picture and hear the words, “this is only the beginning".
Posted Jul 11, 2023  Edit critic review
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) Ed Whitfield Mangold can’t find the visual gags in the setups, there’s no joy in the chase. His solidity as a director is a drag on the film’s quest to entertain with the zeal of old. Instead, it feels old. Indiana Jones was never meant to retire.
Posted Jun 30, 2023  Edit critic review
The Flash (2023) Ed Whitfield Andy Muschietti has no story to tell, so must be content with an overwrought comic restyling of old movie memorabilia, with the requisite corporate lacquer applied to ensure it’s as synthetic, witless, and wearying as possible.
Posted Jun 16, 2023  Edit critic review
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) Ed Whitfield Gunn falls prey to franchise imperatives and Marvel cultural mores. More is more, leaving less and less screen time for the human story.
Posted May 09, 2023  Edit critic review
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) Ed Whitfield We probably have Strange Things 4 to thank for this revival, but if it has birthed a new film franchise, that’s no chore if each instalment is as colourful and good natured as this one.
Posted Apr 02, 2023  Edit critic review
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) Ed Whitfield There’s something about the relentlessness of Wick’s ordeal that stands above the generic action pictures that clog up the contemporary market place. These movies are superficial but they have a personality and an intensity that lingers in the memory.
Posted Mar 26, 2023  Edit critic review
Scream VI (2023) Ed Whitfield One’s left with the sense that the series has some untapped potential.
Posted Mar 19, 2023  Edit critic review
Creed III (2023) Ed Whitfield You can replicate the character dynamics of the original series & its story beats – you can chuck in an exhilarating montage, and direct the climatic showdown with style. But without the heart that powered the original movies, it’s a mechanical pastiche.
Posted Mar 19, 2023  Edit critic review
Babylon (2022) Ed Whitfield If anything, Babylon is too good a recreation of late-silent era Hollywood – it’s self-indulgent, overwrought, underwritten, and following a full-frontal assault on the senses, peters out into irrelevance.
Posted Jan 22, 2023  Edit critic review
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) Ed Whitfield A fortune has been spent to return the movies to where they were a century ago.
Posted Dec 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) Ed Whitfield It’s a high-end game – a marble chess set.
Posted Dec 31, 2022  Edit critic review
Blonde (2022) Ed Whitfield An artful – sometimes pretentiously overwrought, and palpably aggressive attack on the male gaze and the portrait of a woman destroyed by the lust she induced in overstimulated males.
Posted Oct 02, 2022  Edit critic review
Jurassic World Dominion (2022) Ed Whitfield All concerned have made the audacious decision to relegate the dinosaurs – the marquee attractions, to the status of background extras.
Posted Jun 12, 2022  Edit critic review
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Ed Whitfield Top Gun’s appeal is built on US exceptionalism, on competitive machismo, on bread and butter heroics. The sequel offers it polished and unreconstructed.
Posted Jun 06, 2022  Edit critic review
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Ed Whitfield Once rampant, the movie cannot be tamed.
Posted May 07, 2022  Edit critic review
The Batman (2022) Ed Whitfield If the film falls short of greatness, because Reeves didnt know when to cut and run, it is, in its final extended form, a superior comic book adaptation and brooding thriller in its own right.
Posted Mar 05, 2022  Edit critic review
Scream (2022) Ed Whitfield Signals we've moved into a new era where legacy sequels, in a bid to keep the wolf of audience weariness from the door of indifference, refer to their conception while sticking to the strategy point for point. This, as Scream '22 notes, is fooling no one.
Posted Jan 16, 2022  Edit critic review
The Matrix Resurrections (2021) Ed Whitfield One of the most passive aggressive mainstream movies of recent years - a film that both mocks the expectations of its imagined audience and the crude franchise revival imperative of its financial backers.
Posted Dec 23, 2021  Edit critic review
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) Ed Whitfield It's all part of a knowing scheme that repurposes what came before to create an Endgame sense of anticipation and payoff. It's wholly unearned, but you have to give producer Kevin Feige credit - recycling has never been this profitable.
Posted Dec 19, 2021  Edit critic review
West Side Story (2021) Ed Whitfield West Side Story's the same old story and the same old tunes. It looks and sounds great - a stylistic upgrade - but it's still a movie struggling to make the case for its existence.
Posted Dec 11, 2021  Edit critic review
House of Gucci (2021) Ed Whitfield A vulgar picture is painted. Its resemblance to its subjects is a matter of debate.
Posted Dec 06, 2021  Edit critic review
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) Ed Whitfield Fans of the game will say it's an acceptable diversion. For the rest of us there is nothing.
Posted Dec 06, 2021  Edit critic review
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) Ed Whitfield Jason Reitman, with the best intentions, has inherited the mantle but misunderstood the appeal of his Dad's film. He's turned Seinfeld into Family Ties.
Posted Nov 20, 2021  Edit critic review
Eternals (2021) Ed Whitfield What might have been a fascinating interplay of psychologies and ideas, is rendered in broad, lifeless strokes.
Posted Nov 13, 2021  Edit critic review
Halloween Kills (2021) Ed Whitfield Excess not success.
Posted Oct 23, 2021  Edit critic review
Dune (2021) Ed Whitfield Put the word out - someone at Warners has a gambling problem.
Posted Oct 22, 2021  Edit critic review
The Last Duel (2021) Ed Whitfield It's funny that The Last Duel should be a film about bravery...because on the issue the story explores, namely truth, it dare not trust its audience.
Posted Oct 17, 2021  Edit critic review
No Time to Die (2021) Ed Whitfield A kind of pastiche of the series proper - with Craig's mirthless, fragile Bond, out of place as well as time.
Posted Sep 30, 2021  Edit critic review
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) Ed Whitfield Shang-Chi, from its flat composition and mechanical editing, to its low-key score, is a curiously muted offering.
Posted Sep 04, 2021  Edit critic review
The Suicide Squad (2021) Ed Whitfield James Gunn has spiced the broth but it's still thin and no substitute for a decent meal.
Posted Jul 31, 2021  Edit critic review
F9 The Fast Saga (2021) Ed Whitfield The lack of human interest stalls the engine and flips the vehicle.
Posted Jul 13, 2021  Edit critic review
Black Widow (2021) Ed Whitfield It's as if someone ripped out the movie's uterus.
Posted Jul 13, 2021  Edit critic review
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) Ed Whitfield It's barely a movie.
Posted Apr 04, 2021  Edit critic review
Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) Ed Whitfield The irresistible conclusion is that the film didn't need to be restored so much as remade; the first and most important stage in that reimagining being a new screenplay.
Posted Mar 22, 2021  Edit critic review
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) Ed Whitfield A breezy blockbuster, lacking any edge or character, is unlikely to convince millions to forsake the comfort of their living room and the known irritants in their household, for the unknowns of the multiplex.
Posted Dec 17, 2020  Edit critic review
The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990) Ed Whitfield Its sin, in keeping with the religiosity that permeates it, is that it pulls us in to a psychodrama centred on Michael's autumn years and the ties that bind, only to leave us exactly where Part II did, decades earlier. What then, was the point?
Posted Dec 11, 2020  Edit critic review
Mank (2020) Ed Whitfield It took a bold impresario, naïve enough to be brave, to make Citizen Kane, but it required the kind of guy who vomits up an expensive dinner and placates his host with the line, "relax, the white wine came up with the fish", to write it.
Posted Dec 11, 2020  Edit critic review
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Ed Whitfield Turns out that whatever Rufus told them, or whatever we were led to believe, back when men could be heroes, the Wyld Stallyns' real contribution to history were two lucky acts of ejaculation.
Posted Sep 19, 2020  Edit critic review
Cuties (2020) Ed Whitfield The audience may have some growing up to do.
Posted Sep 13, 2020  Edit critic review
Unhinged (2020) Ed Whitfield An unshoed nag with two broken legs that improbably became the star attraction on derby day.
Posted Aug 29, 2020  Edit critic review
Tenet (2020) Ed Whitfield If big entertainments want to be respected as intelligent entertainments, they must communicate with audiences clearly, not flit between the abstract and pretentious.
Posted Aug 29, 2020  Edit critic review
Peter's Friends (1992) Ed Whitfield What felt sincere and reassuring in 1992, seems indulgent and stilted today.
Posted Mar 29, 2020  Edit critic review
The Invisible Man (2020) Ed Whitfield A well-plotted thriller with horror trappings that deserves praise for finding a new and unsettling spin on an old premise.
Posted Feb 29, 2020  Edit critic review
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020) Ed Whitfield Content to be nihilistic and mean-spirited as an end in itself... it gives the audience not one character it can engage with emotionally or psychologically, leaving them adrift in a world of sensory overload and fetishized violence. In short, it's trash.
Posted Feb 09, 2020  Edit critic review
Bad Boys for Life (2020) Ed Whitfield I preferred the Boys when they were young and care free, and the characters understood it was better to burn out than fade away. Filmmakers used to understand that too. It's that understanding I'm nostalgic for.
Posted Feb 09, 2020  Edit critic review
The Lighthouse (2019) Ed Whitfield A gloriously bonkers two-hander.
Posted Feb 09, 2020  Edit critic review
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