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Robbie Collin
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) |
It’s largely thanks to Ridley’s finely judged performance that this all works quite as well as it does. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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Rebel Moon: Part Two - The Scargiver (2024) |
In place of storytelling, though, it’s built on unwieldy lore dumps: we’re given hundreds of details about this galaxy far far away, but no reasons to care about any of them. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 20, 2024
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The Three Musketeers: Part II - Milady (2023) |
As yarns go, it is all comfortingly chunky and luxuriantly spun -- winter comfort viewing that treats its audience as gallantly as its heroes treat their mission, while taking itself just seriously enough. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 19, 2024
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Challengers (2024) |
Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far. Like a great tennis match, it’s a clash of sleekly honed bodies and minds, and the question of who finally comes out on top is irrelevant to the fun of the struggle itself. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Apr 12, 2024
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Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) |
The script is just as pallid. There’s lots of hackneyed comic repartee but no real vocal chemistry between the players, a trio of cutesy prepubescent hoodlums that may feel awkwardly familiar to anyone who’s seen Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) |
It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Civil War (2024) |
Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 26, 2024
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Robot Dreams (2023) |
While adult viewers may or may not opt to bring some kids along, a wad of Kleenex is non-negotiable. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Road House (2024) |
Perhaps it’s a pity that the original’s sleazy gleam is gone, and Dalton’s romance with doctor Ellie (Daniela Melchior) is conspicuously chaste. But this is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) |
There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 20, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024) |
Meanwhile, all the heavy-handed progressive messaging around sex has an embarrassing-parents quality that often had me grinding my teeth: at points I felt as if Coen and Cooke were grinningly handing me a strip of contraceptives... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 15, 2024
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Io Capitano (2023) |
The films of Italy’s Matteo Garrone always bloom at the meeting point of two different realisms: social and magic. They’re alive to the hardships of ordinary life, but also its comedy and strangeness... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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The Teachers' Lounge (2023) |
It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Origin (2023) |
It’s a pity the film doesn’t add up, as parts of it are decent: the lower-key moments of domestic drama are often beautifully acted, not least Isabel’s interactions with her cuddly husband Brett (Jon Bernthal). - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Lisa Frankenstein (2024) |
Cody comes up with some spiky lines... But if ever a film was in need of a 10-gigawatt jolt through the neck, it’s this one. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Mar 02, 2024
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Perfect Days (2023) |
Wenders’ obvious affection for Tokyo itself, his keen feel for texture and neat avoidance of cliché all suggest Perfect Days is likely to age well as a portrait of a great city’s everyday side. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Wicked Little Letters (2023) |
The dark dynamic between Colman’s Edith and her controlling father (Timothy Spall) is a poor fit with the whimsical tone elsewhere – imagine watching Midsomer Murders with occasional scenes cut in from a Michael Haneke film... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024) |
The technology here is magic: something to be felt in your soul, not puzzled out in your head.
- Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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This Is Me... Now: A Love Story (2024) |
I was vibrating to the tips of my fingers regardless, because whatever this is – movie, music video, open-door therapy session, entirely insane CG-drenched R&B cheese dream – it is a modern-day pop-art tour de force. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Madame Web (2024) |
What an unreservedly hopeless film this is: a sort of two-hour explosion in a boringness factory, in which the forces of dullness and stupidity combine in new and infinitely perturbing ways. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Bob Marley: One Love (2024) |
In a richer or more rousing film, [Ben-Adir's] work here might have been talked about for awards. In this one, it’s reason enough to watch. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 08, 2024
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American Fiction (2023) |
Diversity as a machine for laundering progressive bourgeois guilt is a sound target for a satirical kicking, and American Fiction would be a hoot if that were all it had on its mind. But the film goes one better... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Argylle (2024) |
It feels like an achievement of sorts that while no one in Argylle can actually pronounce the name Argylle properly, this would not make a list of the 50 most annoying things about the film. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jan 31, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024) |
Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jan 23, 2024
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Mean Girls (2024) |
While you don’t have to be doused in Mean Girls lore to enjoy it, it carries itself like a sing-a-long tribute, with every classic gag delivered like an applause line and every key scene overplayed with lip-smacking relish. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jan 11, 2024
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Good Grief (2023) |
Everything feels very honest and from the heart. - Kermode and Mayo's Take (YouTube)
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| Posted Jan 09, 2024
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Night Swim (2024) |
Nothing in Night Swim will change how you feel about horror, or even swimming, but it fulfils its brief with efficiency and style. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Jan 04, 2024
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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) |
It felt like entire clumps of grey matter were giving up the gig in disgust and abseiling out of my ears. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 21, 2023
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Next Goal Wins (2023) |
Here was an open goal for a likeable, low-stakes romp – and whoops, there it goes, spooning off into the neighbours’ bushes. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 20, 2023
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The Color Purple (2023) |
This is an all-singing, all-sobbing weepie with sequins, featuring comedy, uproarious choreography, and a suite of soul R&B and gospel numbers that will have you bopping along in your seat. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 19, 2023
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Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire (2023) |
That even after a reported 20 years in the making the film still feels fundamentally pointless isn’t just disappointing, it’s entirely bewildering. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 15, 2023
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Wonka (2023) |
Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 04, 2023
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Genie (2023) |
Genie is a sugar-only zone. But then, it is Christmas. Or near enough. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Dec 01, 2023
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Leave the World Behind (2023) |
Leave the World Behind might often have the air of a noughties throwback, but you wouldn’t want it to be a minute more up to date. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 29, 2023
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Wish (2023) |
[It] feels like an attempt, after a wobbly decade, to return the brand to first principles. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a self-portrait of an altogether less flattering type – a sort of Corporate Identity Crisis: The Movie. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Napoleon (2023) |
Only a true master general could corral a piece of cinema this rolling and rich. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 15, 2023
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The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) |
If your stomach has been rumbling these past eight years for another portion of The Hunger Games, Lionsgate have rustled one up from Suzanne Collins’s 2020 prequel novel, and the vibe is very much: sorry, but this is what we had in the fridge. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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The Marvels (2023) |
“Higher, further, faster” ran the original Captain Marvel’s rousing tagline. “Have we reached the bottom yet?” would be an apt one for this. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 08, 2023
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Fingernails (2023) |
Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 03, 2023
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Dance First (2023) |
Dance First presents an uninspired clod-hop through its subject’s life, while showing barely a flicker of interest in the extraordinary plays, poems and prose that it yielded. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Nov 02, 2023
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Trolls Band Together (2023) |
But while the plot often has a trudgy, through-the-motions feel, the same can’t be said for the animation itself, especially in the musical interludes. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 20, 2023
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Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) |
This uproarious sequel to the Bristol studio’s beloved debut feature... takes what mercifully no one has yet labelled the Chicken Run Cinematic Universe and moves it on precisely one cultural notch. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 14, 2023
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One Life (2023) |
[A] handsome and soberly stirring period piece... - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 13, 2023
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The Miracle Club (2023) |
The Miracle Club’s own maneuverings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation... justifies the trip. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 13, 2023
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The Holdovers (2023) |
... A gentle audiovisual prod in the ribs – reminding the viewer that even though it may be decades out of practice, mainstream American cinema is still allowed to elevate, probe and delight in ordinary lives like these. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 13, 2023
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Foe (2023) |
... The thinness of its plot leaves the film itself feeling somewhat like another’s blank-slate doppelgänger: the mood persuades, but sci-fi cannot live by vibes alone. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 11, 2023
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The Boy and the Heron (2023) |
In its giddy resistance to being pinned down, it reminds you of Miyazaki himself: the stern traditionalist still delightedly pushing back the bounds of his craft. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 10, 2023
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The Bikeriders (2023) |
Nichols’s film is less interested in telling a story than pinning down a particular time, place and attitude – and does so with such pungent precision, you can all but smell it. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 09, 2023
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Saltburn (2023) |
The film’s secret ingredient, though, is its sheer, nude-bungee-jumping-level fearlessness. British cinema hasn’t been this badly behaved since the days of Nic Roeg and Ken Russell, and was frankly in need of the shake-up. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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Fair Play (2023) |
Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf. - Daily Telegraph (UK)
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| Posted Sep 28, 2023
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