Jonathan Romney

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Los Angeles Times, Screen Daily, The Guardian, The Observer (UK)
For 296 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jonathan Romney's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 The Other Side of the Wind
Lowest review score: 30 Woodshock
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 217 out of 296
  2. Mixed: 75 out of 296
  3. Negative: 4 out of 296
296 movie reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    What Does That Nature Say to You
    What Does That Nature Say To You may be a touch disappointing for lovers of the director’s wry understatement, as certain themes feel uncharacteristically emphatic and even, in a last-act discussion scene, too explicitly stated. Otherwise, a group of regular Hong players mesh with seemingly effortless grace in a way that is bound to click with fans and with the director’s regular international outlets.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    A Magnificent Life
    It feels like a gorgeous, decidedly dewy-eyed heritage hagiography.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may not be that fresh or substantial – it’s basically comfort food for long-term Burton fans – but it’ll be hard for viewers to repress a pleased smile, or graveyard rictus.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Freedom on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Mixing often horrifying war footage with testimonies from a wide range of Ukrainians of varying ages, Freedom on Fire is an urgent, somewhat hectic, at times cluttered film – but that’s partly explained by the fact that Afineevsky has been able to assemble it so rapidly, only six months after the invasion began.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Perfect Days
    For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Final Portrait
    Effectively a chamber piece spiked with musings on the difficulty of art, the piece is by nature a little stagey as well as talky.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Official Competition
    Essentially a frothy bagatelle, and sometimes overworking the slightest of jokes, nevertheless this lively, sleekly executed farce from the Argentinian makers of black comedy The Distinguished Citizen offers comic and visual pleasures alike, plus crisp acting from its lead trio.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Beanpole
    The film displays intense emotional seriousness and is finely performed and directed; but further shaping could have revealed the more focused work that’s begging to emerge.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Crazy, Not Insane
    The film offers an engrossing overview of the painstaking, insightful investigations carried out over the years by Lewis and associates.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Stars at Noon
    The result – something like a female-fronted version of Antonioni’s The Passenger - isn’t likely to entirely satisfy anyone in either the arthouse or mainstream camps. But if taken as an oblique tropical reverie, the film definitely has pleasures to offer – not least an oddball but often riveting lead performance by Margaret Qualley.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Youth (Spring)
    The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    The Young Girls Turn 25
    Best of all, though, the film is a reminder of how deliriously odd Les Demoiselles was, with its MGM-style dance routines, kitschy pastels, and Gene Kelly as honoured guest hoofer. [21 May 1993, p.4]
    • The Guardian
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Human Factors
    This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Amanda
    Hers’s stamp as a contemplative miniaturist with an eye for the inner life is unmistakeably on display in this involving, typically graceful piece.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Tantura
    Tantura makes for a fascinating, troubling watch, although it doesn’t altogether come across as rigorously objective, given rhetorical touches in both music (ominous ambient drones, ironically boisterous kibbutz songs) and visuals (thriller-style close-ups of Katz’s cassettes playing, a pointed insert of a see-no-evil monkey statuette).
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Ex-Husbands
    With a vibrantly charming lead from Griffin Dunne, and enough melancholic worldly wisdom to leaven the humour, Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Romney
    Homecoming
    Taut, no-frills execution – notwithstanding some gorgeous but altogether untouristic landscape photography by Jeanne Lapoirie – helps to foreground the performances poignantly and compellingly.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Victoria and Abdul
    The film’s lavish production values and a comic register more impish than truly acerbic makes this a surprisingly cosy piece of luxury heritage cinema.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Halloween Kills
    Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys harks back to the 70s golden age of revisionist detective thrillers, but the result feels too knowingly déja vu, rather than bringing a truly fresh angle.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    American Honey
    While American Honey exudes ample energy, this episodic piece doesn’t muster much narrative drive over its daunting running time of two and three quarter hours. There’s probably a stronger, tighter film in here, but fair game at least to Arnold in her commitment to following the winding back roads of filmic experiment rather than the well-mapped highway of storytelling.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Day of the Fight
    Beautifully shot, impressively cast, and revolving round a charismatic lead from long-time US indie favourite Pitt, the film otherwise comes across as a derivative, solemn affair with a look that suggests a retro gloss finish on generic material.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Woman and Child
    The film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Exit 8
    The drama’s underlying theme of social and personal conscience clearly lifts Exit 8 beyond the more mechanical aspects of its gaming origins, although Kawamura doesn’t quite handle it without a certain mawkishness.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    At Eternity's Gate
    Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Bergman Island
    It’s a film made with honesty, integrity and a certain grace, but it can’t quite overcome an earnestness that was never a problem in Hansen-Love’s best films, which carried their literary and cinematic inspirations lightly.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Mansfield 66/67
    An oddball hybrid that’s part documentary, part stylistic mish-mash, but wholly celebratory of Mansfield’s often derided ‘blonde bombshell’ image.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Ema
    At once a visually expressionistic hymn to female agency and liberation, a psychological thriller that always stays one step ahead of the viewer and a flamboyant reggaeton dance musical, Ema will strike some as a heady celebration of a movie, while leaving others bemused by stylistics that sometimes overpower narrative and psychological plausibility.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Two Pianos
    Here, however, his bravura conducting of relatively conventional melodrama material doesn’t affect us as much as his best earlier works. In any case, it’s the actual music that often does the heavy lifting here – with selections from Chopin, Bartok and Bruch, not to mention Grégoire Hetzel’s score, spiralling saxophone capturing the vertiginous register of the whole affair.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    The Perfect Candidate
    The film never entirely transcends its nature as a polemical pamphlet - and despite strong presence in those scenes where Maryam speaks truth to power, Alzahrani doesn’t quite have the charisma to make her substantially more than a representative figure.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Rifkin's Festival
    By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    No. 7 Cherry Lane
    The film is sometimes stylishly executed, but its hyper-aesthetic, even rarefied approach, together with a confusing dream-tinged narrative and a general sense of narcotised sluggishness, will make for limited appeal beyond Asian markets and the fanbase for traditional drawn animation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    There’s no denying the film’s urgency, and audiences will certainly leave with plenty to chew over, but Peck doesn’t aid the thinking process by overloading us, where a more focused reading of Orwell’s key ideas could have yielded a much more cogent argument.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    The Image Book
    The Image Book if nothing else, is inestimable, in that it defies normal estimation or assessment; to encounter a film this intransigently confrontational by an artist who shows no sign of softening will be a nightmare for many, but yes, for many a privilege and a pleasure.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Okja
    Okja is fun, if sometimes over-egged, as an adventure romp, but flounders in overstatement when it comes to satirical intent.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Memory
    Sarsgaard is characteristically impressive, his gentle performance holding onto its mysteries and maintaining a dry delicacy that eschews Hollywood demonstrativeness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Marcello Mio
    By turns flippant and poetic, demystifying and just a touch reverent, the film thrives on whole-hearted collaboration from Deneuve and the other luminaries playing themselves.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Suspended Time
    Unfortunately, however confidently Macaigne works his genially shambling nerd persona, the comedy of manners never comes across as sharply as you would hope from a director whose comic mode can be relishably trenchant.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    The Nightingale
    There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Django
    Unimpeachably honest intentions and a solid, laid-back lead performance by star Reda Kateb mean that at least the film won’t be derided as Django Untuned.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Lost Illusions
    It’s a shame that Giannoli’s film, while ambitious, confidently executed and more than honourable, nevertheless feels like something of a relic.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Close to You
    While we understand Sam’s back story and present situation, we too rarely get a sense of who he is when not struggling against misunderstanding and harsh weather.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Our Time
    A film of considerable visual poetry and, at times, grandeur, Our Time is unmistakably the work of the ambitious, visionary director behind Battle In Heaven and Stellet Licht, but as a Bergmanesque drama of emotional anguish, the solemn, militantly downbeat Our Time often makes oppressive viewing and at times struggles to justify its nearly three-hour length.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Synonyms
    The result is mixed: buoyantly energetic at times, manically unamusing at others and decidedly overstretched.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Happyend
    This depiction of young people facing up against school and state authoritarianism lacks a certain urgency, despite its manifest intelligence and craft.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Paddington In Peru
    Older children will appreciate the brisker pace and peril, so the overall strategy may be a smart commercial move – but this is the least striking of the series so far.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    Whatever the film’s flaws, this is certainly the most unrepentantly confrontational work we’ve yet seen from Jude - and perhaps from any Romanian director. And, as the beleaguered, improbable figure of scandal at the centre of it all, stage actress Pascariu impresses with a crisply reserved performance.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Joan of Arc
    Joan of Arc is in some ways a more conventional drama than its predecessor, but is still intransigently individual. Yet even with a subject as eternally popular as Joan, it’s hard to imagine the film making waves with a mainstream audience or bringing new revelations to Dumont’s long-term followers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Leto
    The film’s energy and passion (and no doubt, eye for detail) can’t be faulted, but a tighter film could have more pointedly made the connection between the subjects’ brief lifespans and the fate of a young culture of refusal that arguably died when the system it questioned was replaced by a differently oppressive social order.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Night in Paradise
    You just wish that director Park had managed to execute the film as a whole with the crisp efficacy of some of his individual sequences.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Romney
    Black Tea
    The film’s eclectic ambitions and increasingly eccentric construction get the better of it, resulting in a very uneven brew.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Unsane
    Admirers of Soderbergh’s experimental tendency will applaud the film’s execution – it was shot on the iPhone 7 Plus – while this story of a tenacious woman fighting all odds should have added appeal in this #MeToo moment. For a mainstream genre piece, however, the narrative execution is a little too cavalier to guarantee audience satisfaction.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Dog Eat Dog
    One thing that can be said about brazen crime comedy Dog Eat Dog is that it’s a full-blooded venture in every respect, with Schrader and his leads Cage and Willem Dafoe clearly enjoying the gore-soaked frenzy. But the film also feels like a too- familiar reheating of in-your-face Tarantino-style crime tropes.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Animale
    Although the narrative ultimately goes off the rails, Amamra’s magnetically pugnacious lead gives Animale a consistent pull, while director Benestan’s work with cinematographer Ruben Impens – who also shot Titane – is bustling and kinetic, and intimate when it needs to be.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Serpent's Path
    One thing that can be said for revenge thriller Serpent’s Path, by Japanese genre maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is that its French remodelling stands coherently enough on its own terms, although the result is a murky, over-extended affair.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    France
    This satire about media, emotional alienation and – need it be said? – the state of the nation makes its point quickly and forcefully before going on to make it again and again, with different modulations, for over two hours. It’s a shame, because somewhere within this sprawling piece is something audacious and playful.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Back to Black
    In Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black, Winehouse’s brief, brilliant life is essentially pared down to a tale of poisoned romance.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Asako I & II
    While Higashi proves adept at embodying both extremes, Karata proves a rather insipid centre to the film, not just because of the actress’s bland pertness but because of the passivity of the character.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    All the Dead Ones
    The film shows plenty of ambition and imagination delivered with considerable visual elegance, yet still ends up feeling somewhat airlessly conceptual.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Enfant Terrible
    Enfant Terrible is somewhat repetitive – ever more shouting, more hedonism, more tainted glory – but it’s never boring. It’s just not very insightful – full marks for the style, but the substance is best found in the books, and in the various documentaries about the man.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    DAU. Natasha
    Natasha certainly proves that Khrzhanovsky is a risk-taker, and his actors even more so. But it’s a puzzling, inconclusive drama that doesn’t quite hold its own outside the parameters of the overall project.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Mainstream
    Not so much bleeding edge as screeching edge, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a frenetic piece of pop-art social satire that strives to be super-current but feels oddly traditional beneath its eye-searing, pixel-popping surface.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Loving Pablo
    The awkwardly executed English-language Loving Pablo is a brash but ultimately anonymous, sub-Scorsesean number from Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Memories of My Father
    Above all, there is the generous, often mischievous performance by Cámara, with a promisingly vivid juvenile lead from Nicolas Reyes as young Quinín, and a nice ensemble buzz from other family members, including Patricia Tamayo as mother Cecilia; otherwise it all comes across as a fondly soft-focus blur.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    The Empire
    It is hard to decide whether Dumont is treating his genre borrowings with belittling contempt, or getting a kick out of the possibilities offered; it seems safe to assume both. And while the overall weirdness has charm and shock effect, once you’ve got over the surprise of Dumont being this flippantly outre the pleasure wears thin.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Triangle of Sadness
    There are flashes of the incisive, caustic insight of his Force Majeure and Palme d’Or-winning art-world satire The Square. But this rather laborious take on the excesses of capitalism, depicted as a luxury yacht headed inexorably for farcical disaster, lacks the pitiless ironic cool that made those two films so memorable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Origin
    This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Malmkrog
    For all its directorial mastery, this austere cine-symposium feels like an artistic blind alley, and one that recklessly presumes an audience of committed chin-strokers with a preternatural attention span.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    The Most Precious of Cargoes
    In the film’s favour, it is not afraid of telling bitter truths about violence, hatred and death.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Minamata
    Altogether solemn in tone, the film is undeniably handsome, with DoP Benoît Delhomme steeping the Japanese landscape in melancholy atmospherics, but Minimata tends to over-aestheticise its material, not least in the too-elegant recreations of Smith’s black and white imagery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    No Time to Die
    There’s plenty to gawk at, and to argue over, in this episode - yet No Time To Die is oddly lacking in pleasure or real wit.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    In the Earth
    By the time Wheatley, who also edited, concludes with a full-on eye-searing weird-out, it’s hard not to feel that he is retreading old ground – that this isn’t a more arboreally lavish A Field in England 2.0.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    A Radiant Girl
    This is a film with some grace and exuberance, but a cavalier attitude to period verisimilitude only adds to the impression that, when it comes to facing ugly historical reality, Kiberlain’s approach is naïvely inadequate.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    In Between Dying
    Personal and committed as the film clearly is, it won’t come across as a revelation for adepts of this pensive brand of slow-burning visual poetry - of which this seems a reticent and somewhat old-fashioned example.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.
    Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Romney
    Slack Bay
    This knowingly excessive brew of cartoonish knockabout and macabre comedy horror just isn’t that funny.
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