Lee Marshall

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Screen Daily
For 229 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 57% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Lee Marshall's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 Dogman
Lowest review score: 20 The Painted Bird
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 165 out of 229
  2. Mixed: 62 out of 229
  3. Negative: 2 out of 229
229 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Sunset
    Can a film be baffling and rewarding at the same time? Can a stimulating cinematic experience co-exist with the suspicion that the filmmaker has deliberately set out to frustrate the audience? For all who believe the answer to those questions can be ‘yes’, then Sunset (Napszállta), second film by Son of Saul director László Nemes provides a rich seam to explore.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Gully Boy
    Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film that smuggles some urgent social themes in under the cover of a hoary old fable about a handsome pauper who gets the stardom and the girl.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    The Audition
    Weisse puts her own, distinctive spin on this film, keeping the audience guessing about whose story this really is, feeling its way slowly towards a bracing, risky dramatic conclusion that suddenly reshuffles the cards we’ve been dealt.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    The Unknown Girl
    If the intimate frame and dour, matter-of-fact aesthetic suggest a return to the raw territory of La Promesse or The Son, what is new here is a flirtation with genre that lends an extra dose of resonance to a finely-scripted story.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Adagio
    Strip the neo-noir style and attitude away from Stefano Sollima’s latest, and you get a not particularly original tale . . . But there is one very attractive bonus, aside from the moody Roman settings: the casting of Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Downsizing
    There’s something for everyone in Downsizing - just not a full meal.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    The History of Sound
    Reticence is also the keynote of The History of Sound’s two riveting central performances.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Butterfly Vision
    Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s debut feature is a sensitive, nuanced meditation on war and its effects on the psyche of individuals and nations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    The Young Karl Marx
    A spry romp through the seven years leading up to the drafting of the Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s biopic of Karl Marx’s early years feels like a mix between a prestige BBC drama and a Marx For Dummies primer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    American Dharma
    The result is a fascinating but also in some ways frustrating film, a game of tag that looks resoundingly cinematic but feels like more of a cable or VOD prospect - not least because it lacks the killer punch, the Bannon stumble or revelation that would make American Dharma newsworthy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Yakuza Apocalypse
    Often laugh-out-loud funny, even (or rather especially) as the silliness escalates in the final half hour, this is a cult cineaste’s treat which rampages gleefully through a china shop of genre conventions. Only killjoys who demand narrative coherence will fail to respond.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Cinderella the Cat
    Gatta Cenerentola is on one level a noirish spin on a popular fable, but its real resonance derives from its stimulating contribution to a long-running dialogue...about the good creative and evil destructive demons that pull southern Italy’s largest city alternately towards hope and despair.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Lee Marshall
    The Bad Batch
    After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Dead for A Dollar
    Dead for a Dollar is a revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Until the Birds Return
    There’s an observational authenticity that is refreshing in an audiovisual culture whose attempts at self-analysis are too often skewed by melodrama. It’s also heartening to see such delicate stories of ordinary people come to the fore in a country whose filmmakers faces enormous hurdles; technical, financial and bureaucratic.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Port Authority
    Mixing tough US social realism with butch femme poses is an intriguing exercise, although this small, sincere drama never quite resolves the awkwardness of the meld.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Lee Marshall
    Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Sure, there’s a strong element of arch playfulness in the exercise, but that doesn’t make the end result any less tiresome. In Eisenstein In Guanajuato, Greenaway is good at making us look, but not at making us care.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Lee Marshall
    Wolfs
    Director Jon Watts’ self-penned script possesses a faultless sense of timing, and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving in the hands of Clooney, Pitt and a fine supporting cast.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    The Line
    It’s a story with a brilliant conceptual framework that never quite coalesces into a satisfying drama.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    A Perfect Day
    The humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Finally Dawn
    Set in Rome’s sprawling Cinecittà studios in their 1950s heyday, Finally Dawn is a rich, shape-shifting fairy tale, an odyssey of empowerment about a vulnerable girl navigating her way through a day and night of enchantments and dangers, using her weakness as a kind of magic shield.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Amnesia
    This plodding drama, centring on the friendship between a young German DJ and an ageing expatriate, never shakes the dust off the pages.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
    Kechiche has developed an almost unique ability to give surfaces depth through his manipulation of dramatic beats and a quality of empathy that seems built into the roving camera eye.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Lost in the Night
    Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Lee Marshall
    Natural Light
    Natural Light is a tough, slow film that makes demands on its audience – though much of the real horror is as just-off-screen for us as it is for Corporal Semetka. But it’s also an absorbing, beautifully crafted, thought-provoking addition to the new Hungarian cinematic wave.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Hounds
    The circle of life and death may be warped and buckled in Hounds, but nobody can stop it turning.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Blue Bayou
    It is both a passionate exposé of a serious injustice and a big emotional ride that is also prepared to take some interesting risks in its journey towards a old-school tear-jerker finale.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Mr. Six
    Staying just on the serious side of funny, Feng’s Mr Six is a fine, savoury creation.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Piranhas
    Piranhas feels a bit like a teen movie that just happens to have a Cammora backdrop, rather than a serious, nuanced drama about the paranza system – essentially, the grooming of underage kids as drug runners and Mafia footsoldiers.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    The Burnt Orange Heresy
    For all the commitment that Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki bring to the central roles, their characters never really emerge as autonomous beings from the faintly preposterous story they’re trapped in.
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