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Luke Goodsell
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Location:
LA
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Smile 2 (2024) |
A striking 21st century pop fable, connecting its grinning curse to the malevolent effects of superstardom. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024) |
While Super/Man is largely a conventional documentary portrait, there’s no doubt that it’s a moving one. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 12, 2024
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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) |
Folie à Deux might avoid populist kicks, but it also reveals the limit to Phillips’s subversion of our expectations. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 03, 2024
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Megalopolis (2024) |
It's a bold, beautiful portrait of humanity in all of its paradox, and if it does turn out to be Coppola's swan song, then it's as vital a piece of filmmaking as his greatest work. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 27, 2024
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Jung Kook: I Am Still (2024) |
What emerges is a portrait of an artist in search of his identity, driven by a desire to satisfy his audience while yearning to break free as a solo performer.
- ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 24, 2024
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) |
In place of the playful, anything-goes abandon of the first movie, the sequel has a much more calculated, plot-heavy design. The gags are there, but they feel less organic. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 13, 2024
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Blink Twice (2024) |
Kravitz's stranger, more unruly instincts might have gotten lost in a familiar tale of revenge, but Blink Twice is evidence of a filmmaker feeling out some prickly, powerful terrain. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Aug 22, 2024
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It Ends With Us (2024) |
Whatever its faults, there’s something to be said for the way in which it gets to the essence of its source material, delivering an emotional experience that manages to be both clear-eyed and thorny in its complexity. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Aug 08, 2024
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Trap (2024) |
An inventive, improbable and sometimes very funny little thriller, with enough tonal swerves to keep its audience hooked. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Aug 05, 2024
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Fly Me to the Moon (2024) |
As old-school throwbacks go, it makes for pretty good in-flight entertainment. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 16, 2024
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Twisters (2024) |
It's Powell and Edgar-Jones who remain the real attraction. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 15, 2024
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The Bikeriders (2023) |
There’s no seduction to Nichols' storytelling to draw us in, and no real sexiness; he doesn’t tease out the melodrama in the conflict, nor bring the inherent eroticism to the fore. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 09, 2024
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The Promised Land (2023) |
A film that builds toward a rousing and romantic conclusion, capping the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned movie we don't see enough of anymore. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Mothers' Instinct (2024) |
It has little sense of the disreputable, or the willingness — even with an admirably twisted finale — to let the material get sufficiently dark and unhinged. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 13, 2024
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Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) |
An uneasy, if hardly unprecedented mix of brutal, unflinching violence and overripe sentimentality — a dynamic that has only become more extreme as this series settles deep into middle age. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 07, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
What was once spare and brutal has become cluttered and over-extended — even if the soul is still there, rattling around somewhere in the engine. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted May 24, 2024
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) |
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has its moments, but its insistence on playing things down the middle feels like a betrayal of the series' bitter, satirical origins. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted May 10, 2024
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La Chimera (2023) |
It’s a movie that beguiles as it haunts, touched by both magic and madness. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 17, 2024
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Scoop (2024) |
Does a nice job of whipping things along at a buzzy, compelling clip — even if it occasionally betrays an air of self-congratulation typical of the genre. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) |
For a movie that features Kong and Godzilla going up against a super-ape riding a radioactive dinosaur, it’s surprisingly dull — devoid of much in the way of wonder, soul, or the genuinely strange. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Priscilla (2023) |
It’s an exquisitely calibrated piece of filmmaking, at once dreamy, melancholy and threaded with quiet power. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) |
Any movie teeming with fantastical ocean creatures, neon-streaked underwater metropolises and Nicole Kidman riding a cybernetic shark should be a blast of escapism, but the Lost Kingdom never transcends the tedium of its weightless green screen action. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Migration (2023) |
Illumination’s latest feature is bright and bouncy and largely pitched to audiences who’ve only recently learned to waddle, with plenty of sight gags that will quack up undemanding audiences. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Wish (2023) |
A grab bag of storytelling tropes, generic characters and musical styles from the well-thumbed Disney playbook. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Leo (2023) |
The star’s childlike naïveté is well suited to this pre-teen world, where the tone meets kids on their own terms — and the life lessons are delivered with a refreshing lack of sentimentality. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Foe (2023) |
A film bravely, and admirably, committed to the kind of big emotional swing that unfortunately proves to be its undoing. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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Asteroid City (2023) |
In a career that now spans nearly 30 years, Anderson's latest film – a carousel of astronomers, aliens and singing cowboys; of mid-century madness, deadpan soul and signature melancholy – might just be one of his finest. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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The Tiger's Apprentice (2024) |
Despite the film's generic take on its source material, there's more than enough colour, energy and rapid-fire action to keep younger viewers engaged. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 04, 2024
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Perfect Days (2023) |
Working closely with his Tokyo-based co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki and a largely Japanese crew, [Wenders[ has crafted a lovely piece of late-career poetry that's equal parts meditative and melancholy. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 27, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
If this studious, spectacular shot at Herbert's saga can't always reconcile its warring impulses -- to dazzle and critique in equal measure -- then it's all part of the package, if not the point. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Madame Web (2024) |
As Ms. Webb tells her colleague at one point, "I just wanna go home and watch Idol." You and me both, Dakota. You and me both. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Feb 15, 2024
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Triet interrogates society's inherent prejudices -- especially when the accused is a woman, and a cultural outsider -- and the ways language can shift meaning. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 31, 2024
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The Iron Claw (2023) |
This is a stylistically rich and rewarding film, worth seeing not just for wrestling fans, but for anyone with a taste for the dark underside of American pop spectacle -- the cracked mirror image of the era's flashy, megawatt spandex stardom. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 19, 2024
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The Holdovers (2023) |
It's formula, to be sure, especially coming from Payne, who's done this sort of thing many times before. But it's so finely delivered -- so droll and funny and warm -- that it's hard not to succumb to its charm. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 12, 2024
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Ferrari (2023) |
Ferrari is a film in which triumph and tragedy are twinned, where the ghosts of the past can appear as vivid as the living. For fans of Mann's singular body of work, it's ultimately quite moving. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 04, 2024
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Maestro (2023) |
Cooper is a warm, generous actor; it shines through in his portrayal of a man who was bursting with vitality, who was eager to please everyone around him -- even when it came at the expense of loving himself. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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The Boy and the Heron (2023) |
Like Miyazaki's best work, The Boy and the Heron isn't merely nostalgic for its creator's childhood. It's a challenge to that next generation to rethink the way the world works. That's what keeps him vital, seven decades into his career. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 07, 2023
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The Marvels (2023) |
There's no escaping the fact that most of this is better intended than executed. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Dumb Money (2023) |
Dumb Money is slick, admittedly entertaining stuff but, in reconfiguring whatever fleeting battle was won as a series of fist-pumping financial figures, it merely confirms that the system wins in the long run. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 27, 2023
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The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) |
For Morris, a filmmaker who is frequently drawn to complicated subjects who move in morality's liminal spaces, le Carré -- and his existential grasp of human deceit -- proves to be a perfect foil. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 20, 2023
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) |
It's yet another sign that Anderson is only getting weirder, and more wondrous, the further he plunges into middle age. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 05, 2023
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The Creator (2023) |
The Creator is a film dedicated to empathising with technology that gets undone by human cliché. That might be a comfort in this charged AI climate, but doesn't always make for great science fiction. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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A Haunting in Venice (2023) |
Perhaps the fundamental problem is that the screenplay, with its deference to Christie's logic and reason, refuses to seriously entertain the mysteries of the unknown, keeping the film firmly rooted in the dreariness of the real. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) |
The result is a cinematic pizza-with-the lot: a family platter with something for everyone. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 07, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
The film's directness, its relative storytelling simplicity, is also its asset. Past Lives unravels at a rhythm that weaves a slow-burning spell, one that allows an audience the space to project their own experience onto the screen. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Talk to Me (2023) |
Talk to Me announces a pair of horror filmmakers with great promise. It'll be exciting to see where they go from here. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 28, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
By the film's final moments it has, often by sheer force rather than any kind of elegance, cemented itself as an enormous, ugly-beautiful object infused with as much melancholy as bombast. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 21, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) |
Cruise's commitment to delivering breakneck action remains, and on that front, the movie does not disappoint. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 14, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
Dial of Destiny can't help but be a simulacrum of the series' past glories; even with its admirable attempts to wrestle with time and legacy, the film's lack of imagination undoes its ambition. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 29, 2023
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The Flash (2023) |
When the inevitable multiverse cameos arrive – even those canonical embarrassments now reclaimed as easter eggs for fans – it's difficult to engage beyond a level of fleeting, nostalgic amusement. - ABC News (Australia)
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| Posted Jun 15, 2023
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