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Joel Copling
Joel Copling's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Before Dawn (2024) |
There are no new ideas in Before Dawn.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jul 23, 2024
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Boneyard (2024) |
The culprit behind these murders has still never been found, which this screenplay mostly uses as fodder for a bit of psycho-thriller exploitation.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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Copa 71 (2023) |
The malevolent hypocrisy of many actions we see in Copa 71 are righteously angering, but here is a documentary that channels its anger toward setting right the official record.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Bad Behaviour (2023) |
One wishes that the forcefulness of Bad Behaviour's ideas matched the conviction Englert obviously had.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jun 18, 2024
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The Young Wife (2023) |
Poe is developing into a clear-eyed storyteller, whose films are about something real and tangible and unafraid of mess.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jun 06, 2024
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Songs of Earth (2023) |
The human part of this movie is a lesson in storytelling humility. When the camera turns to nature, it’s humbling in a very different way.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Taking Venice (2024) |
Wallach barely commits to a tone, beyond the superficially informative.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted May 23, 2024
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New Life (2023) |
The possibility of an anticlimax becomes something more akin to an inevitability.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted May 06, 2024
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Blood for Dust (2023) |
The details of this crime thriller are the stuff of pure formula, woven together in one note.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Apr 22, 2024
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Arcadian (2024) |
A strong focus on characters is what elevates Arcadian past its familiar genre trappings.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Apr 15, 2024
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Parachute (2023) |
The message of Parachute is sound, but as they say, the execution falters.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Apr 10, 2024
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DogMan (2023) |
It’s rather impressive how thoroughly Besson flubs handling the obvious potential of an insane premise in DogMan.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Mar 29, 2024
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Femme (2023) |
A gutsy, uneven dramatic thriller, Femme benefits from having exactly the right actors to convey the uneasy themes and uncomfortable story.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Mar 27, 2024
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State of Consciousness (2022) |
State of Consciousness eventually becomes an incoherent mess, but this is not any normal sort of incoherence.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Mar 19, 2024
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Accidental Texan (2023) |
The halfway point of Accidental Texan rather cleanly divides the film into two very different movies. Both are utterly cornball.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Mar 12, 2024
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Asleep in My Palm (2023) |
The film is a family affair in more ways than one.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Mar 06, 2024
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Amelia's Children (2023) |
Abrantes allows this absurd but utterly familiar horror story to coast on unrealized potential.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Mar 04, 2024
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The Monk and the Gun (2023) |
The Monk and the Gun is a spry and accessible comedy that gets some good laughs, and more than a few good ideas, out of its set-up.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Feb 09, 2024
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Disco Boy (2023) |
This double narrative of the French Foreign Legion develops an oddly detached rhythm as we get deeper and deeper into the story of one of its main characters.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Feb 08, 2024
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Junction (2024) |
Junction tackles a worthy subject, but storytelling requires more than simplistic nobility.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Feb 01, 2024
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Miller's Girl (2024) |
Miller’s Girl is bolstered, but not exactly strengthened, by its pair of central performances.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jan 26, 2024
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The Night They Came Home (2024) |
A Western captured with dimension-deprived scope that suggests little thought was put into or budget aimed toward the sort of visual language we usually attribute to the genre.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jan 17, 2024
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Lift (2024) |
Lift is a lackluster heist pic that plugs its characters into a formula and simply runs with the result.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Jan 16, 2024
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He Went That Way (2023) |
A movie adaptation that too eagerly turns the story into a road-trip comedy.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jan 09, 2024
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Call Me Dancer (2023) |
Manish Chauhan’s relationship with his eccentric instructor, Yehuda Maor, is central to Call Me Dancer; however, the film never moves beyond a superficial understanding of Chauhan, his admittedly charming family and his one-of-a-kind teacher.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Dec 18, 2023
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May December (2023) |
Engaging and sincere as an exploration of what the artistic process even means in the face of strange human tragedy.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Nov 20, 2023
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Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) |
It’s hard to fit within a set of expectations, and therefore feels perfectly aligned with how Woolf herself might imagine an exploration of her work to be.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Nov 16, 2023
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Rumble Through the Dark (2023) |
The movie is unconvincing. It all comes down to that – a feeling that what we have just watched is manipulative down to its very fiber.
- Spectrum Culture
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| Posted Nov 08, 2023
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Boudica: Queen of War (2023) |
The bloody and graphically violent action sequences in Johnson’s movie are diplomatically spaced out in the narrative so that we get a good amount of story to counterbalance them, but that efficiency eventually betrays Johnson’s ambition.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Nov 01, 2023
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Pain Hustlers (2023) |
A shallow true-crime comedy struggling to bust out of the staid drama it becomes.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Dangerous Waters (2023) |
There is a sense of comfort in its predictability, just as there is a sense of exasperation.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Oct 17, 2023
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Desperation Road (2023) |
Desperation Road is a mournful film about people sobered and haunted by their traumatic past.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Oct 10, 2023
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Head Count (2023) |
Head Count’s tangle of absurd detours, dark gags, foreshadowing and Kansas underworld figures does pay off.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Oct 05, 2023
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57 Seconds (2023) |
Everything about the characters is basic, from their motivations to what informs those motivations and their personalities, to boot.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Oct 04, 2023
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The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021) |
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is an act of frustrating evasion as a documentary.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Sep 27, 2023
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Robe of Gems (2022) |
Natalia López Gallardo’s feature directorial debut exists in a liminal space between clenched-jaw thriller and slice-of-life character study.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Sep 21, 2023
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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2022) |
One might be able to see the trajectory of this relationship from a mile away, but Alberto barely cares about our response to such obvious telegraphing.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Sep 11, 2023
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Perpetrator (2023) |
If trying too hard and not trying at all are both problems with one’s movie, perhaps that should act as a wake-up call.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Sep 01, 2023
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Blue Box (2021) |
Weits’ own agenda with the documentary lifts Blue Box above the typical success of the form.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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The Moon (2023) |
Lest one believe that only Hollywood can churn out a respectably mediocre piece of blockbuster entertainment, here is The Moon, a Korean import.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Aug 23, 2023
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Between Two Worlds (2021) |
This is as much a cautionary tale as it is a fairly tense examination of this working economy.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Aug 17, 2023
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A Compassionate Spy (2022) |
Eventually, we get a redundant portrait of a man via a third party, instead of a real sense of him through his own words.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Aug 08, 2023
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Mother, May I? (2023) |
Can a man love his wife-to-be if she's possessed by his recently deceased mother? Probably not.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jul 24, 2023
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The Miracle Club (2023) |
The Miracle Club becomes too much about the melodramatic conflict that threatens both these relationships and the lightness of the film’s whole constitution.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jul 14, 2023
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The YouTube Effect (2022) |
The YouTube Effect is a bit of a jumble of information and perspectives, but it’s also never less than entertaining.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jul 13, 2023
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Revoir Paris (2022) |
Winocour’s film is at its best when it simmers in this liminal space between trauma and healing.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jun 27, 2023
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Happer's Comet (2022) |
This is less an experimental film than it is an experiential one.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jun 20, 2023
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Scarlet (2022) |
A movie that winds up saying a lot less about these characters and this period in history than it intends.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jun 13, 2023
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Simulant (2023) |
Worthington’s performance is the most committed one here, or at least one hopes the apparent exhaustion on the actor’s face is a character choice.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jun 08, 2023
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Enter the Slipstream (2023) |
Enter the Slipstream is simply unengaging as a delivery device of this story.
- Spectrum Culture
Read More
| Posted Jun 01, 2023
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