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Raphael Abraham
Raphael Abraham's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Publications:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) |
Joker still has a trick up its sleeve — even a serious subtext. The best moment comes late on in an incendiary scene... - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 04, 2024
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The Room Next Door (2024) |
The film gets better as it goes along. Moore in particular brings a welcome warmth to the screen as the empathetic Ingrid, bolstered by the gentle presence of John Turturro... - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 03, 2024
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The Brutalist (2024) |
It is the boldest and best film so far at this year’s Venice Film Festival: a life writ large on the screen that deserves such maximalist treatment. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Babygirl (2024) |
Many of us wondered whether the erotic thriller was even still viable in the moral minefield of 2024. Babygirl proves that the form may have matured, but it still has some moves. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Queer (2024) |
This complex churn of emotions demands much from Craig, and he proves equal to the task. It is a pleasure to see him so loosey-goosey after his tightly controlled 15-year turn as 007 and he gives possibly his finest performance to date. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 03, 2024
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Maria (2024) |
Overall, there is too much tell, not enough show in this picture of a caged songbird. - Financial Times
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| Posted Aug 30, 2024
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Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024) |
Twelve Final Days is big on PR but low on actual tennis. Talking heads hymn the beauty of Federer’s silky, seemingly effortless technique but analysis of what made it so is fleeting. - Financial Times
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Emilia Perez (2024) |
Yes, this is a hard-boiled and bloody cartel thriller with a transgender twist. Oh, and it’s a musical. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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The Apprentice (2024) |
The Apprentice gives us a relatively safe portrait of a deeply contentious figure, one that is unsettling mostly for how little it unsettles. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 21, 2024
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Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie (2024) |
It is hard to warm to this wildly contradictory anti-hero, who rails against both liberalism and authoritarianism -more so when you find out where his political allegiances lay in later life- but that is also what keeps the film so uncomfortably engaging. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 20, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness (2024) |
For a film called Kinds of Kindness, benevolence is thin on the ground, Lanthimos and Filippou toying with their protagonists like fickle gods manipulating the fates of unsuspecting humans. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 17, 2024
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Bird (2024) |
For all of Bird’s youthful spirit and surprising swerves, Arnold eventually alights on a sweetly sincere ending — the movie equivalent of dad music. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 17, 2024
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Megalopolis (2024) |
Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about Megalopolis is that it will probably remain largely unwatched and be quickly forgotten. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 17, 2024
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The Girl with the Needle (2024) |
At times the film could do with a lighter touch... But with fine acting all round, this is a grimly compelling piece of Danish gothic whose seams are largely kept hidden under the cover of darkness. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 16, 2024
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The Second Act (2024) |
The Second Act, a soufflé-light meta-comedy that rises delightfully before collapsing somewhat without being fully cooked. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 15, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist (2023) |
... The teasing title gradually insinuates itself, the film evolving in its final shots into something unexpected, fraught and troubling. - Financial Times
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| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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How to Have Sex (2023) |
It’s all guided with a sure hand by first-time director Molly Manning Walker and anchored by a performance by Mia McKenna-Bruce that is as eye-catching as the film’s title. - Financial Times
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| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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All of Us Strangers (2023) |
Two of Ireland’s brightest screen stars are paired to fine effect in the achingly melancholic All of Us Strangers. - Financial Times
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| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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Four Daughters (2023) |
... A haunting documentary with the uncomfortable intimacy of group therapy. - Financial Times
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| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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Poor Things (2023) |
No other mainstream director today is making movies this visually bold and brilliantly realised. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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El Conde (2023) |
Larraín's satire isn't always subtle and it becomes scattershot as the film wears on; for the skewering of a monstrous figure, it's not quite a stake through the heart. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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Maestro (2023) |
A Star Is Born was wildly overpraised, but Maestro is the real deal: the rousing, complex and heartbreaking rhapsody its subject deserves. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 02, 2023
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DogMan (2023) |
Besson stretches credulity in places with a narrative that combines Taxi Driver with lashings of Lassie but gives his film the grimy sheen of a graphic novel. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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Ferrari (2023) |
Ferrari is another movie about a brilliant creative figure who was scrupulous in the professional realm but sloppy in his personal life. Yet the script... shies away from fully exploring the dark side of Enzo. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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Comandante (2023) |
It’s a bad sign when the highlight of a film involves men making chips — here members of the Italian navy looking on in awed wonder as Belgian rescuees slice potatoes. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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The Old Oak (2023) |
... The subject matter is bracingly contemporary and loaded with thorny complexity, the xenophobic rhetoric masking grievances that have been allowed to fester. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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Perfect Days (2023) |
This is an ode to life’s little pleasures... - Financial Times
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
It’s guaranteed to delight devout Wes-heads but unlikely to convert those who have strayed from the faith, even if it’s an improvement on The French Dispatch. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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May December (2023) |
Haynes tries to have his cake and eat it too, asking us to take the troubling subject of a marriage founded on statutory rape seriously while making ironic gestures towards the soapy excesses of telenovelas. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Triet builds a taut did-she-do-it tension while also working in discomfiting questions about marital power dynamics and how much an artist’s work really reveals about their character. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Monster (2023) |
This use of shifting and conflicting perspectives inescapably brings to mind the Rashomon effect and Akira Kurosawa, whose daughter Kazuko is credited here as costume designer (it could be a coincidence but nothing else in the film seems to be). - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Strange Way of Life (2023) |
Almodóvar cracks the whip and the whole thing rattles along like an episode of Bonanza with more shots of bare bottoms. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Homecoming (2023) |
Pleasantly languid but a little aimless, Catherine Corsini's film is lifted by finely tuned performances, especially by the fiery Gohourou. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) |
Gladstone is the film’s quiet centre, often inscrutable yet exuding a subtle power while the white men chatter away endlessly in this dialogue-heavy movie — “blackbird talk” as the Osage call it.
- Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane — by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Firebrand (2023) |
We all know how the story plays out and yet writers Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth allow themselves enough liberties to tear up the school textbook and give the 1540s a feminist freshness. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
What’s vexing is the nagging feeling that there’s a much better Indiana Jones film buried in there somewhere. But it would require a feat of archaeology — or at least a rewrite and some judicious editing — to excavate it. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 22, 2023
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Jeanne du Barry (2023) |
While Maïwenn’s boldest moves are to cast herself as the mistress who won the king’s heart and to retell history through the eyes of this “fallen woman”, Jeanne du Barry soon settles into the familiar mode of plodding royal procedural. - Financial Times
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| Posted May 18, 2023
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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) |
... With previous D&D screen ventures mostly forgotten, Honour Among Thieves represents that rare thing: a new big-budget Hollywood franchise built almost from scratch. - Financial Times
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| Posted Mar 30, 2023
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Tetris (2023) |
In the spirit of 1980s Americana, a high-five ending is assured and eventually everything slots neatly into place. - Financial Times
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| Posted Mar 30, 2023
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Alcarràs (2022) |
Achieves a satisfying sweetness without sugar-coating, finding notes of bitterness in inner family tensions and dealings with a not always co-operative agricultural co-operative. - Financial Times
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| Posted Jan 06, 2023
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The Enforcer (2022) |
The Enforcer stays firmly in its well-furrowed, cliché-filled lane before making itself scarce after a scant 83 minutes. - Financial Times
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| Posted Jan 06, 2023
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Bones and All (2022) |
An exquisite gothic romance in the tradition of Dracula and Frankenstein... It’s a queasy watch but it’s also unexpectedly thought-provoking and even touching. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 06, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) |
If you’re usually immune to McDonagh’s blarney you’re unlikely to be any more bewitched by his Banshees, but with Gleeson and Farrell on fine form, it’s pleasant enough company for a couple of hours the next time your drinking pals snub you. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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The Whale (2022) |
Body horror takes a new form in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which chronicles the long, slow suicide of a morbidly obese man with pitiless candour but an abundance of empathy. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) |
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed serves as a kind of memorial but also as a reminder of what can be achieved by those who take pain and turn it into truth. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022) |
It’s hard to shake off the cloying sense of self-indulgence and self-pity. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 02, 2022
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Tár (2022) |
[Todd Fields] plays it icy cool, shooting Berlin in elegantly muted tones and orchestrating his drama with a surgical precision worthy of peak Michael Haneke. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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White Noise (2022) |
[A] canny adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about an “airborne toxic event” that first manifests itself as a black plume over a small community in unspecified America. - Financial Times
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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My Old School (2022) |
Jono McLeod’s film is admirably unsensationalist: what could be easy fodder for summary character assassination becomes reflective and, as MacKinnon’s real life story is revealed, flecked with empathy. - Financial Times
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| Posted Aug 18, 2022
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