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Rachel Cooke
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Men Up (2023) |
This turns out to be the most delightful of presents: think The Full Monty meets Masters of Sex, with a few light top notes of Gavin & Stacey. - New Statesman
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| Posted Dec 29, 2023
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Partygate (2023) |
This film by Joseph Bullman, who writes and directs, is surprisingly affective. Don’t be taken in by its slight, rather flimsy appearance. It made me angrier than I’ve felt for ages. It also made me weep. - New Statesman
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| Posted Oct 06, 2023
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The Light We Carry: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey (2023) |
It’s little a bit Hallmark card, and it’s a little bit Susan “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” Jeffers, and watching it, I’ve never felt more righteously British in my life. - New Statesman
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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My Name Is Leon (2022) |
It all seems, if not utterly preposterous, then platitudinous and sentimental. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jun 09, 2022
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Raising a School Shooter (2021) |
The message of their searching and ultimately profoundly moving documentary being not only that life must (and does) go on even after something unimaginably terrible has happened, but that human survival often depends on the humdrum. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jul 07, 2021
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Together (2021) |
Its underlying emotional message, its special pleading for tatty compromise and pathetic half-shares of love, struck me as bogus. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jun 17, 2021
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Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes (2020) |
Above all, I thought it was so clever, the way that Catz's film mirrors aspects of its homespun, meagerly funded subject. - New Statesman
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| Posted May 19, 2021
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Caroline Flack: Her Life and Death (2021) |
This is an old story, and a sad one, but it's also, I'm afraid, the nature of the beast. - New Statesman
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| Posted Mar 18, 2021
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The Windermere Children (2020) |
Watching it, I came to regard its longueurs as necessary breathing spaces and its lapses into sentimentality as forgivable. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Untouchable (2019) |
As horrifying as it was to hear of Weinstein's abject pathology and all the disgusting ways in which it operated, what I most admired about [Ursula] Macfarlane's film was its subtle placing of him in a wider culture. - New Statesman
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| Posted Sep 03, 2019
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The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On (2019) |
The Rushdie affair has many ongoing repercussions, and chief among them, I think, is the confusion and fear that now almost inevitably trails the notion of offence. - New Statesman
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| Posted Feb 28, 2019
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Sleeping With the Far Right (2019) |
What a wasted opportunity. Sen's universe is far more profoundly weird than at first it appeared, and yet Levine hardly cared to probe it. - New Statesman
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| Posted Feb 26, 2019
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Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story (2019) |
Ruth Mayer's dash through Venezuela's recent history wasn't a radical piece of film-making, but it worked brilliantly. How quickly a state can fail. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jan 18, 2019
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Brexit (2019) |
Utterly and completely Benedict Cumberbatch's show... What an irresistible performance he turns in: weird, committed, minutely observed - New Statesman
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| Posted Jan 02, 2019
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The Interrogation of Tony Martin (2018) |
Where there should have been dramatic tension, we got only muddle and hesitation; where we might have hoped for psychological insight, we had only the self-justification of one lonely, paranoid man. - New Statesman
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| Posted Nov 26, 2018
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Farther and Sun: A Dyslexic Road Trip (2018) |
All the different ways in which human beings are wired grow ever more fascinating to me the older I get, and this film captured, with great gentleness, some aspects of these contrasts and incongruities. - New Statesman
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| Posted Oct 03, 2018
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Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes (2018) |
Manson: The Lost Tapes really is disquieting: a trip and a half of purest horror dressed up as social history. - New Statesman
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| Posted Sep 27, 2018
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Against the Law (2017) |
Here was all of the wit and compassion you find in Wildeblood's prose, combined with emotions I'd hitherto only been able rather half-heartedly to imagine: bewilderment, fear, agonising pain. - New Statesman
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| Posted Sep 12, 2018
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Mark Gatiss on John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art (2018) |
Threaded with tenderness and fellow-feeling, and resolutely determined not to fixate on the painter's suicide in 1957 at the age of 39. - New Statesman
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| Posted Aug 17, 2018
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Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar (2018) |
Praised reverentially for an hour by a series of largely grim-faced American scholars, afterwards I could think of [Sylvia Plath] only in black and white: the colours of a PhD thesis, or a dry academic paper. - New Statesman
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| Posted Aug 17, 2018
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The Ice King (2018) |
With its attention to family and changing attitudes both to gender and sexuality... this was social history of the best, by which I mean the slyest, kind. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jul 11, 2018
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Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know (2018) |
Their enthusiasm - for music, art, clothes, for everything, in fact - is braided with a seriousness that is both touching and comical. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jun 29, 2018
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The Many Primes of Muriel Spark (2018) |
Kirsty Wark took us smartly through the novelist's several reinventions, pausing only occasionally to wonder at her restless bravery, those techniques for survival that must sometimes have seemed to others like nothing so much as casual cruelty. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jun 20, 2018
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Nothing Like a Dame (2018) |
Its slow unfurling allowed us to imagine we were eavesdropping. Here was fame, but here, too, was intimacy. - New Statesman
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| Posted Jun 06, 2018
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George Michael: Freedom (2017) |
The film wanted for grit, and for context. Where we needed Johnny Marr, we got only James Corden. Where we could have done with a Simon Reynolds-style figure, we had to make do with a nodding Mark Ronson. - New Statesman
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| Posted Oct 23, 2017
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King Charles III (2017) |
A perfect 90 minutes of television. - New Statesman
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| Posted May 11, 2017
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The Master (2012) |
After an hour, I was baffled. After two, I was bored stiff. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2012
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For a Good Time, Call ... (2012) |
Tedious and repellent: avoid. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2012
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Excision (2012) |
I liked this teen comedy-horror flick an awful lot. But then I'm warped. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2012
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Call Me Kuchu (2012) |
Such horror, such bravery. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2012
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Rust and Bone (2012) |
Cotillard is the beating heart of this film; she's all you need. - Observer (UK)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2012
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