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Clarisse Loughrey
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Better Man (2024) |
Turns out, it’s a little easier to cope with the hard facts of it all when they’re being relayed by an ape in a suit. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 23, 2024
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Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) |
Unfortunately, finding the Jenkins in Mufasa is like putting a blindfold on in the Louvre and trying to feel your way to the Mona Lisa. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 17, 2024
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Queer (2024) |
Guadagnino has followed up this year’s triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a film that would seem miles apart, yet treats desire equally as a kind of supernatural possession. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 13, 2024
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Nightbitch (2024) |
Heller’s film is a fairytale, it’s not here to point fingers towards economic and political shifts. But when its conclusions end up so tidy and emotionally pat, you can’t but wonder what it’d be like if Nightbitch were actually allowed to run free. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 11, 2024
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Kraven the Hunter (2024) |
Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 11, 2024
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A Complete Unknown (2024) |
[The film] takes a reverent stance to Dylan’s artistry, populated by technically accomplished musical performances, and shot with a real sensitivity to the emotional landscape of each track. It’s dutiful work. But dutiful doesn’t really cut it with Dylan. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 10, 2024
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) |
The War of the Rohirrim is invested entirely into convincing you it’s just like the films you know and love. Yet, again and again, along comes that sinking suspicion this is just another corporate wolf in sheep’s clothing. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 09, 2024
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All We Imagine as Light (2024) |
It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 03, 2024
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Conclave (2024) |
Director Edward Berger allows us to peer in, like children planted at the doorway, to giggle at how pedestrian and mortally flawed it all is beneath the gilded finery and incense. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 03, 2024
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Nosferatu (2024) |
Nosferatu not only revitalises a classic monster, it reminds us why they matter at all. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Dec 02, 2024
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Wicked (2024) |
In theory, it's pure spectacle – its emotional resonance powered almost entirely by the lungs of lead Cynthia Erivo, as she nails those notorious high notes on "Defying Gravity". - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Nov 19, 2024
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Emilia Perez (2024) |
There’s a slight whiff of reductive gender essentialism here: the notion that womanhood is purity manifest, that Lady Macbeth was always clear of her damned spots. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Nov 14, 2024
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Gladiator II (2024) |
At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn’t be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster. It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Nov 11, 2024
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Bird (2024) |
It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Nov 08, 2024
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Paddington in Peru (2024) |
Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2024
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Heretic (2024) |
While Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 31, 2024
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Anora (2024) |
Anora is a small film that feels much larger, elevated by humour, chaos, and human tenderness. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 31, 2024
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) |
Vengeance Most Fowl is proof the traditional can still thrive – not only in how a film looks, but even in the barrage of puns and corny dad jokes. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 30, 2024
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Venom: The Last Dance (2024) |
It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 23, 2024
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The Apprentice (2024) |
The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait... a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 17, 2024
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The Wild Robot (2024) |
Such dark humour is a rare sign of respect for its pint-sized audience, whose intelligence and curiosity have increasingly been undermined by major studios. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Timestalker (2024) |
Lowe lets all these ideas brew in a frothy, funny, pastel-tinged concoction. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Blitz (2024) |
It’s a period documented, honoured, and reinterpreted a hundred times on screen before. Yet it’s what [Steve McQueen] sees and how he sees it, as one of Britain’s most extraordinary filmmakers, that makes Blitz feel monumental. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 09, 2024
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A Different Man (2024) |
Pearson commandeers the frame, possessing an immaculate British cordiality, of the intellectual who never takes himself all too seriously. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Oct 04, 2024
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The Outrun (2024) |
The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 26, 2024
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The Substance (2024) |
The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent... Cinema can only benefit from having a figure like Fargeat within its ranks. Sometimes, all that’s needed in art is an unfiltered, guttural scream. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 20, 2024
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His Three Daughters (2023) |
Maybe the movies will never get it quite right, but His Three Daughters is as honest about grief as one can be. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 20, 2024
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Will & Harper (2024) |
Nothing here is inauthentic or dishonest, but both subjects are storytellers by nature, and they’re never fully disconnected from the camera in front of them. They know the kind of story that needs to be told, and what vulnerability is demanded from them. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 13, 2024
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The Critic (2023) |
I wouldn’t expect relatability in this case, but I do expect substance. Here, it’s largely absent. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 13, 2024
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Speak No Evil (2024) |
While this might be a flashy, American production, it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director. And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 10, 2024
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Starve Acre (2023) |
It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 07, 2024
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Firebrand (2023) |
Firebrand exceeds in capturing the way mundanity can slip so easily into terror; how a feast or a jest... can descend into hell at the turn of one man’s emotions. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Sep 07, 2024
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Maria (2024) |
Larraín has a way to make what feels absurd on paper read as poignant on screen. Edward Lachman’s cinematography allows the transitions between reality and unreality, colour and black and white, to melt into one beautiful, sad dream. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 29, 2024
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Kneecap (2024) |
It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 22, 2024
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Blink Twice (2024) |
For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 22, 2024
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Cuckoo (2024) |
Singer shoots it all with a puppet master’s tightness of control, never pushing a single sequence too far, and leaving room for the monstrous chill of suggestion. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 22, 2024
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Alien: Romulus (2024) |
Alien: Romulus has the capacity for greatness. If you could somehow surgically extract its strongest sequences, you’d see that beautiful, blood-quivering harmony between old-school practical effects and modern horror verve. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 14, 2024
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Borderlands (2024) |
It’s dragged us back to a time when studios used to make these with all the grace and acuity of a drunk person attempting to place a 3am chicken nugget order. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2024
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It Ends With Us (2024) |
It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 07, 2024
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Dìdi (2024) |
It’s all the better for feeling so immediate. Dìdi is a memory with barely a scratch on it. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Aug 01, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
Good allegories, of course, feel infinite. And I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 26, 2024
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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) |
Deadpool & Wolverine is as much fun as you can conceivably have at a corporate merger meeting. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 23, 2024
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Janet Planet (2023) |
We understand every word and action here to have symbolic value, and Janet Planet is not afraid of its own artificiality. It’s sparse in narrative, but thick with implications. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 19, 2024
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Longlegs (2024) |
For my (perhaps already cursed) sensibilities, Longlegs isn’t some unshakeable artefact of malevolence, and more like a knife in the back -- nasty, precise, and unexpected. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 12, 2024
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Fly Me to the Moon (2024) |
The biggest problem, though, is the odd way Fly Me to the Moon insists on making a statement, and getting teary-eyed, over its own fake history. We’re left with a series of violent tonal switches. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 10, 2024
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Twisters (2024) |
Twisters, thankfully, is a sequel that actually remembers the capable, rational scientist heroes of its Nineties predecessor. It suggests Hollywood might finally come to its senses when privileging brawn over genuine smarts and expertise. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 10, 2024
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Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) |
The film has the confidence to poke fun at the franchise’s infamously bad third entry, yet comes to the table with nothing to prove, nothing to say, and nothing for Murphy to work with. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jul 02, 2024
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A Family Affair (2024) |
It certainly has none of the breezy, relaxed maturity of The Idea of You. And none of its chemistry, either. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jun 28, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness (2024) |
Kinds of Kindness lives in a place equal in ideas and riches to The Favourite or Poor Things’s ruffled luxuries -- it’s just not as immediately welcoming to the viewer. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) |
It’s not scary anymore, but it’s stressful in the way that makes you dig your nails into your palm. - Independent (UK)
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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