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Jordan Raup
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Rebel Ridge (2024) |
After the more moody, overwrought Hold the Dark, Rebel Ridge finds Saulnier firmly back in more streamlined Blue Ruin and Green Room territory, crafting a laser-precise story in which the audience is refreshingly one step behind our protagonist. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 04, 2024
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Just the Two of Us (2023) |
Donzelli and Audrey Diwan’s black-and-white, overworked script is missing the kind of nuance each lead exudes in their physicality as they navigate a suffocating relationship where the smallest action or word can unleash a monster. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jun 12, 2024
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Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024) |
One of the major takeaways is the devastating realization that Scorsese doesn’t have the resources or time to collaborate on similar documentaries for his numerous other cinematic idols. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jun 12, 2024
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Eephus (2024) |
With a gentle yet rigorous vision, Eephus coalesces into a reflective study of nostalgia: both for a game that has evolved and for a certain kind of American social life that is dwindling as fast as the sun fades. - The Film Stage
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| Posted May 19, 2024
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I Didn't See You There (2022) |
In many ways, I Didn’t See You There feels like his definitive statement and I look forward to seeing what other stories Davenport is hoping to tell. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 23, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024) |
The kind of movie made to stumble upon surfing cable at 2 am in a half-awake, half-intoxicated stupor, Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls aims for a lower artistic bar than anything the director has previously approached, which accounts for much of its charm. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Tendaberry (2024) |
A soulful coming-of-age story with far more on its mind than the here and now, Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s Tendaberry is an ambitious directorial debut mixing various storytelling forms to achieve its poetic patchwork of ideas. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 30, 2024
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Skywalkers: A Love Story (2024) |
It ends up doing more to glorify and celebrate their life-threatening, thrill-seeking actions than interrogate the complexity of why they have devoted their existence to an insane diversion that has seen many of their friends fall to their deaths. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 29, 2024
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Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024) |
Led by André Holland in an impressively anguished performance, the ensemble elevates a script that has its heart in the right place but feels lacking in layers of complexity that we see from the art on display. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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Good One (2024) |
Through an accumulation of minute details and uneasy glances, the drama becomes a portrait of increasingly crossed boundaries leading to an ultimate breaking point. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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Realm of Satan (2024) |
With an inquisitiveness based on ceremony and process rather than talking heads or investigative filmmaking, Realm of Satan requires no verbal declarations to convince what attracts one to follow this way of life. The images do all the talking. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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Sasquatch Sunset (2024) |
Sasquatch Sunset is a filmmaking oddity that doesn’t fully pay off. Rest assured, though: unless the Zellners make a sequel, there will never be another film like it. That originality is worth celebrating. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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My Old Ass (2024) |
In its comedy-first approach, My Old Ass yearns to go down easy and succeeds at such, but one wishes it dug a bit deeper into its Pollyannaish script and aesthetic. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) |
Tender yet rageful, quiet yet deafening, intimate yet expansive, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a towering achievement of total artistic freedom. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 24, 2024
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Between the Temples (2024) |
A screwball comedy that never forgets a dramatic weight, Silver’s latest feature is a hilarious, touching, and acerbic tale of picking one’s self back up and not being afraid to pursue what is truly desired. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 20, 2024
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Presence (2024) |
A funny, disturbing, and nimble genre exercise that further proves Soderbergh is one of the most inventive directors to play the game.
- The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 20, 2024
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Together 99 (2023) |
A reunion that, not unlike the similar gap in Twin Peaks, conjures questions of shattered ideals, rekindled romances, unhealed wounds, and the terrors of aging. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 18, 2023
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Sing Sing (2023) |
Beautifully showing the importance of healing through art, Sing Sing skirts the treacly traps of a feel-good crowd-pleaser by providing a detailed, authentic roadmap for restoring a life burdened by trauma. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 18, 2023
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Wicked Little Letters (2023) |
This 1920-set tale of a town turned upside-down when insulting letters start mysteriously arriving moves in the kind of amiable fashion that ensures no laugh is too daring, no emotional beat too deep, no shot anything but pleasantly lit. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 12, 2023
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Woman of the Hour (2023) |
Shot by Barbarian and The Eyes of My Mother cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, Woman of the Hour boasts an impressively cohesive visual schema that smartly helps bind the disparate tones. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 10, 2023
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The Settlers (2023) |
The riveting second half––including a chilling reckoning with others occupying the desolate land and a well-executed structural gamble––brings profound expansion to this chilling story of atrocity. - The Film Stage
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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The Thief Collector (2022) |
With its whirlwind, surface-level observations of fascinatingly complex lives, it's the kind of scattershot true-crime documentary that grips in the moment but, with reflection, is more entertaining to discuss than revisit for additional clues. - The Film Stage
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| Posted May 18, 2023
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Palm Trees and Power Lines (2022) |
While the narrative structure can fall into short-turned-debut-feature traps––stretching its central conceit to a breaking point––it works as a blunt cautionary tale and a strong showcase for McInerny in her first feature role. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Mar 01, 2023
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Linoleum (2022) |
An effective concoction of cosmic mystery and earnest emotion to elevate its small-scale, homespun design, Colin West’s Linoleum evolves into a nifty, heartfelt sci-drama. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 21, 2023
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Cinema Sabaya (2021) |
Exuding a documentary-like realism to excavate deeper truths, Israel’s Oscar entry examines how the unified pursuit of artistic fulfillment can break down cultural and religious barriers to invite conversations that otherwise may never take place. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 09, 2023
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Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023) |
Repeating the blissfully perfect, pure ode to pleasure that is Magic Mike XXL would be a fool’s errand, so nearly a decade later, cinema’s finest stripper-verse is closing out on a more gentle, familiar, innocuous note. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 07, 2023
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Cat Person (2023) |
Every so often the semblance of a promising adaptation peeks beyond the surface, but ultimately it all gets swallowed in a reductive muck of misguided choices that over-explains what the short story left up for discussion. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Passages (2023) |
As sensuality turns to cruel erraticism and narcissism swallows passion, Passages becomes a bitter pill, giving a psychological weight to the euphoric frivolity that came before. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) |
Daring in its formal gambits but universal for how it explores humanity’s connection with nature, loss, and love, it’s among few films in the history of Sundance that genuinely seems to advance the language and possibilities of cinema. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Flora and Son (2023) |
Despite the machinations to tug each heartstring and coerce each smile being apparent from a mile away, Carney’s lively energy, flippant humor, and embrace of earnestness makes his latest work sing. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 25, 2023
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Landscape with Invisible Hand (2023) |
The director seems out of his element at every turn, attempting to juggle its many ideas but failing to untangle a single one in a satisfying way. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 25, 2023
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Eileen (2023) |
The intriguing characterization so carefully crafted in the first half gives way to a sanded-down psychology that feels bludgeoning and abruptly truncated. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
Holofcener's gift for humor is undervalued, and her latest, You Hurt My Feelings, is as perceptive, insightful, and funny as her best work. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
It’s a warm, patient film culminating in a quietly powerful, reflective finale, though its sum is greater than its parts when the first two sections register a touch underdeveloped. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 23, 2023
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Earth Mama (2023) |
Brimming with an inner life and an authenticity that shouldn’t be undervalued due to its tough subject matter, Leaf’s debut is a film without a single false note. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 22, 2023
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Magazine Dreams (2023) |
A one-note powerhouse acting showcase for Majors, who ends up getting lost in the drawn-out second half as thematic points that initially sting get repeated ad nauseam and red herrings meant to shock become unnecessary side plots. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 21, 2023
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Fair Play (2023) |
Chloe Domont’s feature debut Fair Play cuts deep even as it comes dangerously close to careening off the cliff of plausibility with a screenplay that dips into sophomoric. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 21, 2023
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Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) |
If laudable for the ways in which it can find comedy in the banal, and for showing a new side of Ridley, one wishes Sometimes I Think About Dying ultimately left more of a finite impression considering its weighty, universal subject matter. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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M3GAN (2022) |
M3GAN works due to our own reliance on and ability to trust technology we don’t understand, taken to logical ends by the film’s willingness to ham up this story, go for big laughs, and succeed in finding them more often than not. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jan 09, 2023
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The Pale Blue Eye (2022) |
It’s a compelling endeavor to imagine what Edgar Allen Poe would do if he was a character in a world inspired by his own creation, but the artistic divide between Scott Cooper’s latest film and the macabre wonders of the author himself is quite a chasm. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Dec 22, 2022
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Babylon (2022) |
Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Retrograde (2022) |
In many ways, Retrograde acts as a necessary rejoinder to Hollywood depictions of the war such as American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Nov 11, 2022
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Pinocchio (2022) |
While a murky, laborious affair, Pinocchio never feels wholly inept with the consummate craftsman at the helm, yet it’s certainly the director’s laziest time behind the camera. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Sep 08, 2022
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My Donkey, My Lover & I (2020) |
A sun-kissed, transportive charmer that doesn’t bring much new to the table yet never hits a snag. In other words: the ideal summer watch. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Men (2022) |
Delightfully inscrutable in its strangest moments yet thematically simplistic and disappointingly misshapen on the whole. - The Film Stage
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| Posted May 09, 2022
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Inbetween Girl (2021) |
A well-observed debut that finds the heart in life-altering first experiences. - The Film Stage
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| Posted May 07, 2022
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The Northman (2022) |
With a strong sense of authenticity and purpose, The Northman is designed to unnerve and repel. In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Apr 11, 2022
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Ambulance (2022) |
Borrowing liberally from Heat, Speed, and John Q, Bay seems to be at his most comfortable and invigorated in years, milking the ridiculously heightened premise for all its worth while maintaining grounded stakes despite a few bumps along the road. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Apr 06, 2022
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The Bubble (2022) |
The film ends up feeling like a halfwitted, slighter version of Tropic Thunder, delivering a scattershot barrage of humor through thinly sketched characters that jump from skit to skit with very little to grasp. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Apr 01, 2022
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Kimi (2022) |
Once again Soderbergh has delivered a film that comes across as effortlessly constructed, which could only be achieved through immense consideration of every detail. - The Film Stage
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| Posted Feb 10, 2022
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