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The Monthly (Australia)

The Monthly (Australia) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Anwen Crawford, Keva York, Lauren Carroll Harris, Luke Goodsell, Michael Sun.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Card Counter (2020) Keva York These sequences are all the more arresting for the sense of their aggressive stylisation being a new trick and Schrader an old bulldog. It's always a thrill when the writer-director indulges his experimental streak.
Posted Dec 10, 2021  Edit critic review
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) Anwen Crawford Eliza Hittman's drama is marked by the emotional solidarity of its teen protagonists...
Posted Nov 17, 2021  Edit critic review
Annette (2021) Luke Goodsell Its highs are so very high, and just as strange as any in Carax's filmography, which means they run cartwheels (set to fireworks) around so much in recent cinema.
Posted Oct 15, 2021  Edit critic review
Kajillionaire (2020) Craig Mathieson Kajillionaire is both sublimely funny and deceptively heartfelt. In an end-of-the-road age, Old Dolio is a fitting heroine, an unwitting pawn who intuitively wants something more than a disinformation campaign.
Posted Jan 09, 2021  Edit critic review
The Dry (2021) Craig Mathieson As he traverses Kiewarra, Aaron occasionally catches a glimpse of red: the glow of a bushfire on the horizon at night, or blood splatter baking under the relentless sun. Maybe, the film suggests, no one can leave this land unscathed.
Posted Jan 09, 2021  Edit critic review
Happiest Season (2020) Anwen Crawford Who among a queer viewership will want to watch a comedy in which the leading queer characters spend all their time making each other truly miserable?
Posted Dec 18, 2020  Edit critic review
On the Rocks (2020) Luke Goodsell Murray and Jones, who shared a scene in Coppola's Netflix throwaway A Very Murray Christmas, are swell company, whistling and warbling and cooking up crackpot schemes as they chase Dean across Manhattan like they're in some gumshoe mystery.
Posted Oct 16, 2020  Edit critic review
The Translators (2019) Anwen Crawford A bonkers and very bad film that isn't even willing to be properly silly, and instead skids in and out of patches of spiritless violence.
Posted Sep 25, 2020  Edit critic review
First Cow (2019) Anwen Crawford Nothing here is simple -- alliances are constantly shifting.
Posted Aug 07, 2020  Edit critic review
Monos (2019) Luke Goodsell The fresh thrill of chaos -- of teenage abandon bearing down on a broken system -- courses through this dreamy, violent third feature from Colombian-Ecuadorian writer-director Alejandro Landes.
Posted Jun 26, 2020  Edit critic review
The Trip to Greece (2020) Anwen Crawford All this metatextual cleverness might be unbearable in another, tighter sort of comedy, but one lasting pleasure of the Trip series has been its utter shagginess.
Posted May 22, 2020  Edit critic review
The Lighthouse (2019) Luke Goodsell There's plenty of fun to be had here, to be sure, but at a certain point it feels insufficiently unhinged to conjure the giddy seasickness to which it strives.
Posted Feb 07, 2020  Edit critic review
Uncut Gems (2019) Luke Goodsell Uncut Gems burns itself right to the wire, leading to an astonishingly tense and funny climax...
Posted Feb 01, 2020  Edit critic review
Atlantics (2019) Luke Goodsell Atlantics is transformative, in that true magical sense.
Posted Dec 05, 2019  Edit critic review
The Report (2019) Anwen Crawford [Scott Z. Burns] personalises the villains and, in doing so, diminishes the scope of US power and the extent to which that power has been abused.
Posted Nov 15, 2019  Edit critic review
Blinded by the Light (2019) Anwen Crawford In its devotion, Blinded by the Light does something to convey the sheer desperate quality of obsessive fandom.
Posted Oct 25, 2019  Edit critic review
Judy (2019) Anwen Crawford This is the same old cautionary tale of a woman whose appetite for love exceeds what custom decrees she should settle for, and with the same conclusion: her hunger is its own inevitable punishment.
Posted Oct 17, 2019  Edit critic review
3/5
The Other Side of the Wind (2018) Craig Mathieson But even a compromised Orson Welles film is a welcome release. It's far from exemplary, but nonetheless fascinating in parts and instructive of how Welles saw his career and the movie industry.
Posted Oct 13, 2019  Edit critic review
The Goldfinch (2019) Luke Goodsell Destined to irritate fans of the book and bore those who aren't familiar, The Goldfinch ends up a perplexing, unloveable artefact.
Posted Sep 26, 2019  Edit critic review
Animals (2019) Luke Goodsell This untamed depiction of female friendship moves beyond basic binaries of freedom and control.
Posted Sep 16, 2019  Edit critic review
Amazing Grace (2018) Anwen Crawford The first night has the intimacy, and intensity, of something more or less private that we happen to be fortunate enough to peek in on. But the second night is charged with public expectation...
Posted Aug 29, 2019  Edit critic review
Midsommar (2019) Luke Goodsell Throws enough at the wall to convince that Aster's gestures towards the super-feminine might be real, or at least really well researched.
Posted Aug 16, 2019  Edit critic review
Booksmart (2019) Anwen Crawford If you can deal with its unflagging zest -- for some I suspect it will grate like nails down a blackboard in the classroom of their nightmares -- then you may enjoy watching Booksmart. I did.
Posted Jul 12, 2019  Edit critic review
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) Luke Goodsell There's so much of the filmmaker's soul and craft in the finished product, so many of Gilliam's fascinating, clashing impulses - visionary excess, blundering self-sabotage - bouncing off walls in ways that refuse to be tamed.
Posted Apr 11, 2019  Edit critic review
Destroyer (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Destroyer isn't interested in providing comfortable solutions to spiny problems. Kusama and Kidman lock us into Erin's physical and emotional torment until the end.
Posted Mar 21, 2019  Edit critic review
The Challenge (2016) Keva York The film is meditative rather than informative; it is an aesthetic rather than explicitly critical exercise.
Posted Mar 15, 2019  Edit critic review
Rat Film (2016) Keva York Zigzagging between historical, scientific and philosophical modes, between archival materials, clunky computer-game imagery and interviews with locals, Rat Film shows Baltimore to be a city divided along racial and economic lines.
Posted Mar 15, 2019  Edit critic review
Vox Lux (2018) Luke Goodsell For all its sound and fury, Vox Lux ultimately signifies very little.
Posted Feb 21, 2019  Edit critic review
Let the Sunshine In (2017) Annabel Brady-Brown It could all be rather grim - if only it weren't so funny.
Posted Feb 21, 2019  Edit critic review
3.5/5
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Craig Mathieson The Coens have used the anthology structure to not just tell a spread of stories but also chart a transition from the ridiculous to the sublime: the codes of the Western are first mocked and then dissected.
Posted Dec 19, 2018  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Roma (2018) Craig Mathieson Roma makes the vast feel granular, while allowing an extended family's travails to illustrate a nation's fractious clashes. Its seamlessness is masterful, the resulting vision compelling.
Posted Dec 19, 2018  Edit critic review
Colette (2018) Luke Goodsell Washmoreland has the right kind of deviant sensibility to take the film beyond stuffy historical piece. He gives Knightley range to move outside the period straightjacket.
Posted Dec 06, 2018  Edit critic review
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Luke Goodsell It's refreshingly unusual, to say the least, for a major studio picture to deliver an empathetic portrait of a bitter, middle-aged lesbian that has little interest in a redemptive character arc.
Posted Dec 06, 2018  Edit critic review
I Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story (2018) Anwen Crawford They've been dismissed and patronised, but Beatlemaniacs, Directioners and other fangirls are very self-aware about their boy band "affliction."
Posted Dec 03, 2018  Edit critic review
Widows (2018) Luke Goodsell The film's sense of its own importance also proves to be its undoing.
Posted Dec 03, 2018  Edit critic review
Suspiria (2018) Anwen Crawford "No one is alone" becomes the film's concluding moral, which feels false, in so far as it cuts against a harder truth suggested elsewhere by the pile-up of symbols and subplots.
Posted Nov 09, 2018  Edit critic review
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) Luke Goodsell With such a cultural purview, who's to say that Bohemian Rhapsody - which aspires to little beyond simply entertaining its audience in the most generalist way - isn't successful?
Posted Nov 02, 2018  Edit critic review
3.5/5
A Simple Favor (2018) Craig Mathieson The tone has an elastic quality: it stretches through tart humour, sudden revelations, and camp asides before snapping back into place with a sobering sting.
Posted Sep 24, 2018  Edit critic review
You Were Never Really Here (2017) Joanna Di Mattia It's Phoenix's small gestures - like carefully straightening the bed linen after a mission - and not the explosive ones that show us most clearly who Joe is.
Posted Sep 06, 2018  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) Luke Goodsell Even as Fallout marches to a surprisingly generic ticking-clock-and-explosive climax, the action is energised by Cruise's wild zeal.
Posted Aug 03, 2018  Edit critic review
Whitney (2018) Anwen Crawford Musical history is the film's weak spot and the consequence of that, despite Macdonald's clear affection for his subject, is to underplay Houston's impact by depriving her artistry of its proper context.
Posted Aug 02, 2018  Edit critic review
McQueen (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Emerging from the interplay of life story and artistic mission is an intelligent, often deeply moving conversation between McQueen, his garments, and the people who were closest to him and his work.
Posted Jul 27, 2018  Edit critic review
The Gospel According to André (2017) Joanna Di Mattia The Gospel According to André is a decidedly shy examination of an exuberant life.
Posted Jul 27, 2018  Edit critic review
RBG (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Stylistically it's routine, but the intertwining of Ginsburg's personal and professional lives is deftly handled and given a political context through her experience as a female law graduate in the early 1960s
Posted Jul 27, 2018  Edit critic review
Whitney (2018) Joanna Di Mattia Whitney's form becomes increasingly garish and chaotic once it enters the period when Houston's life spirals downward... What should be sad, uncomfortable viewing instead feels voyeuristic.
Posted Jul 27, 2018  Edit critic review
Brothers' Nest (2018) Shane Danielsen What it is, refreshingly, is smart - not only in terms of its plotting, the steady drip-feed of information and clarification, but also in the intelligence it extends to its characters.
Posted Jul 09, 2018  Edit critic review
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Luke Goodsell Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom might be the first film in the series that breaks the mould of its predecessors, ditching the tenuous social concern of Michael Crichton's cautionary original in favour of a gleeful contempt for humanity's failings.
Posted Jun 26, 2018  Edit critic review
Ocean's 8 (2018) Anwen Crawford The script is woeful: eight leading parts and not a single memorable character; every actor squandered.
Posted Jun 08, 2018  Edit critic review
Tully (2018) Lauren Carroll Harris The finest moments of Tully play like an insight to this female future of storytelling.
Posted Jun 08, 2018  Edit critic review
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) Luke Goodsell The film is cohesive, zippy and confident to a fault, an interlocking piece of an ever-expanding - or should that be contracting - universe where most of the spontaneity has been relegated to the bad press.
Posted May 25, 2018  Edit critic review
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