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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    The Dinner
    In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    The Mountain
    To reveal much at all about the film’s abrupt change of register around two-thirds of the way in would be unfair. Suffice to say that if The Mountain has been a very austere, mid-life-male variation on Into The Wild up to now, it soon feels like we are watching a Gaspar Noé movie, with a little dose of Miyazaki thrown into the mix.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Alpha
    There’s a nicely intimate side to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh here, a ‘soft body horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal changes this adolescent girl is going through.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Disco
    It’s the empathy Syversen and her lead actress evoke for a free spirit battered into submission that is this tough little film’s greatest achievement.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    The Other Tom
    The resulting film is both warm and reticent at the same time, so keen to cleave to reality that it shuns dramatic fireworks – particularly in its gentle, muted ending.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Drift Away
    Starting sedately but promisingly, it sails (literally, in one respect) into a perfect storm of heavy-handed symbolism and sentimentality.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert
    In the end, there’s perhaps just too much sheen to this heartfelt portrait for it to really bite. But it remains a touching tribute to a woman who, von Trotta suggests, pitted a radical desire to question everything against the comfortable certainties of the men who surrounded her.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Wasp Network
    The latest film from the prolific Olivier Assayas’ makes for a genial, lolloping ride, but it’s also one that will frustrate those with little patience for the script’s casual attitude to coherence.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    The Journey
    Although it breaks no new ground, there’s heart, humour, charm and even a little healthy mischief in a film that re-imagines the rapprochement between the two former foes.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Lee Marshall
    Guest of Honour
    Egoyan is so impatient to cut through to the emotional truth that he asks us to take on board a series of lazy contrivances that will test even the most forgiving viewer.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    2073
    Does the alternation between documentary inserts and sci-fi superstructure work? Not always – more than once it’s a wrench to be dragged back to Ghost’s basement. But Kapadia and his co-scribe Tony Grisoni seem to understand that the pummelled audience can take only so much cinematic doomscrolling.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Parthenope
    There is no faulting the radiant performance of Celeste Dalla Porta in her feature debut. It’s the objectification of her character that’s the issue – plus Sorrentino’s trick, here indulged even more flagrantly than in The Great Beauty, of privileging flashy audio-visual tableaux over narrative coherence.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Lee Marshall
    Another End
    Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Journey to the Shore
    Kurosawa remains a master of twilight-zone atmosphere, but this extended metaphor for the grieving process relies too heavily on ambience alone.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    Oh Mercy!
    Rambling but strangely compelling, Oh Mercy!’s documentary bedrock gives the investigation at the heart of the film a real authenticity. From around its midpoint, this uneven film becomes a riveting, compassionate interrogation drama.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Lee Marshall
    Taurus
    With its uneasy and never-resolved conflict of interest between music star vehicle and music star drama and its lack of much at all to say about life, music or the creative process, Taurus ain’t rising anytime soon.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    La Syndicaliste
    What power it has derives from the knowledge that this shocking story actually happened. When that’s the case, it’s maybe good to have it served straight.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    War on Everyone
    War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    How To Talk To Girls at Parties shouldn’t work, as it feels at times like a film made by a talented student collective who overheard a ‘punk vs aliens’ elevator pitch. But work it does: it’s all a bit mad, but ultimately rather moving.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Crosscurrent
    A meandering, sluggish tale that offers moments of great beauty but ultimately feels like a ragbag, take-your-pick bundle of poetic and spiritual suggestions inspired by China’s great Yangtze River.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    Beautifully shot, with a deft command of period detail and a starry ensemble cast, Costner’s Civil-war set epic offers an old-fashioned celebration of the pioneer spirit – and a clutch of storylines that never quite have time to engage before the film moves on.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Lee Marshall
    Fuori
    The temporal leaps don’t distract us from the fact that the plot is threadbare in places.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Lee Marshall
    A Brighter Tomorrow
    Moretti has once again found a way to make a picture that creates edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy. Some will find the exercise wearyingly self-centred, but that’s to miss the point of a film which turns one man’s obsessions into a comedie humaine.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Rosebush Pruning
    This spiky black comedy is smart, cool and occasionally funny, in a bleakly cynical way, but it’s also surprisingly dull for long periods.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    DogMan
    Dogman may have a more intimate, reflective tone than much of his work – at least until its final man-versus-dog showdown – but it struggles to get past that initial cool pitch.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Brimstone
    What’s lacking here, mostly, is a clarity of vision and control of tone that would give this prestige Euro-Western’s mannerisms a focus.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Comandante
    Comandante is a film designed to make Italians feel good about being Italian – about pasta, sentimental songs and strongly demarcated gender roles – while also telling them how to be good Italians – chiefly by saving people at sea, not blindly following orders and getting on with other Italians whose dialects they don’t understand.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    Berlin Alexanderplatz
    The paradox is that in modernising Berlin Alexanderplatz, Qurbani has created an ambitious but also stridently melodramatic moral parable that seems oddly dated.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Lee Marshall
    In Dubious Battle
    A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Lee Marshall
    Shepherds and Butchers
    What stands out in relief from the film’s flat characters and pedestrian storytelling is its dramatic core: the killing machine that death row had become in South Africa by the end of the 1980s, with 164 executions taking place in Pretoria Central Prison in the year in which Shepherds And Butchers is set, 1987.
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