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Stream on Demand is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Sean Axmaker.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Sorcerer (1977) Sean Axmaker Friedkin gives the jungle a primal quality, an aliveness that makes their journey feel like a trip through an alien world waiting to swallow them up.
Posted Jul 21, 2024
Bridge of Spies (2015) Sean Axmaker Hanks... carries the film as a kind of Cold War Atticus Finch, a husband and father and an American idealist who refuses to betray his client simply because he’s a Soviet spy, and he portrays Donovan’s essential integrity and loyalty without sentiment.
Posted Jul 21, 2024
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) Sean Axmaker [Dana Andrews'] chiseled face made him convincing as both a working class cop and a master of industry and paired nicely with [Gene] Tierney’s sculptured features: scar tissue and smooth glamour brought together by violence.
Posted May 04, 2024
Try and Get Me (1950) Sean Axmaker ... one of the most interesting lynch mob movies ever made and most caustic social commentaries of anxiety and fear.
Posted May 04, 2024
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014) Sean Axmaker At a brisk, dense 90 minutes.. it is an excellent introduction the life and work of the Welles with a focus on the creative.
Posted May 04, 2024
X2 (2003) Sean Axmaker At 135 minutes it never feels long, thanks to a driving pace, rapid crosscutting between parallel stories, and spectacular action scenes that never forget about the characters at the center.
Posted May 04, 2024
Gun Crazy (1950) Sean Axmaker ... the greatest of the criminal lovers-on-the-run thriller, explodes onto the screen in a fury of sex and guns and love and violence... a masterpiece of style and a blast of cinematic ecstasy on a budget barely bigger than a B movie.
Posted May 04, 2024
Wild Tales (2014) Sean Axmaker [Filmmaker Damián] Szifrón is all about emotion over reason. He just doesn’t find much to celebrate about passions unleashed. He does, however, find a mordant humor in it all, and he has the wit to pull it off.
Posted May 04, 2024
The File on Thelma Jordon (1949) Sean Axmaker ... an understated noir, slower and more subdued than such classics as The Maltese Falcon or Siodmak’s own The Killers, but elegant and compelling and even genuinely tragic in its own right...
Posted May 04, 2024
Pickpocket (1959) Sean Axmaker [Robert Bresson's] austere style, emotionless direction, and minimalist scripts can become frustrating if you don’t connect. But there’s a purity in his ambition to pare away everything but the essential elements of cinema.
Posted May 04, 2024
A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) Sean Axmaker Ultimately [Sergio] Leone’s epic of the Mexican revolution is a portrait in disillusion grounded in ambiguity and contradictions and the most eccentric and touching friendships in Leone’s cinema.
Posted May 04, 2024
Mon Oncle (1958) Sean Axmaker [Jacques] Tati’s style is effortless as he conducts a complex comic symphonies of sight gags with elegant ease and his gangly performance is deceptively deft and graceful.
Posted May 04, 2024
The Great Train Robbery (1978) Sean Axmaker It’s an old-school caper film with a modern sense of humor. [Filmmaker Michael Crichton] brings a droll humor to the project, which the three leads play with a light touch, but keeps the caper scenes tight and suspenseful.
Posted May 04, 2024
Die Another Day (2002) Sean Axmaker The over-reliance on epic CGI effects results in a few chinks in the spectacle (the tidal wave looks like a video game effect), but the thrill-topping succession of death-defying disasters and unbelievable battles... just don’t stop coming.
Posted May 04, 2024
Your Name (2016) Sean Axmaker It’s a contemplative and introspective film that uses the body-swapping gimmick to explore growing up and experiencing life from another perspective, and it celebrates how connections to culture and family shape who we are.
Posted May 04, 2024
49th Parallel (1941) Sean Axmaker ... a prime example of wartime propaganda turned into rousing entertainment with (Powell and Pressburger's) smart writing, engaging characters, and creative cinema.
Posted May 04, 2024
Listen Up Philip (2014) Sean Axmaker It would be insufferable if it wasn’t so sharp and witty.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
I Am Legend (2007) Sean Axmaker ... focuses on the visceral experience of roaming an empty New York City, a metropolitan ghost town slowly being reclaimed by foliage and wildlife (ostensibly escaped from the zoo and running wild through the abandoned streets).
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Peeping Tom (1960) Sean Axmaker Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities ...
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Point Blank (1967) Sean Axmaker ... a surreal, abstracted crime drama, splintered with short, sharp shards of memory and driven by an unstoppable sentinel who may be more than flesh and blood.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
The Wrestler (2008) Sean Axmaker “Warm” and “human” are not two words you associate with Darren Aronofsky, but in 'The Wrestler' he is both, thanks in large part to the heartbreakingly open and vulnerable performance from Mickey Rourke, the comeback story of 2008.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) Sean Axmaker It’s violent and cruel and shrouded in darkness, filled with the complicated backstories and the weirdly incestuous origin details from the comic books that [are] confusing and confounding and no substitute for a story.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
The Silent Partner (1978) Sean Axmaker It’s a smart, well-plotted tale scripted by future Oscar-winner Curtis Hanson, adapted from the Danish novel 'Think of a Number,' but as a thriller it can get slack at times.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
The Vikings (1958) Sean Axmaker [C]inematographer Jack Cardiff turns his Norway locations into a lush Valhalla on Earth and journeyman director Richard Fleischer, faced with an absurd story, goes for the gusto in brawling Viking parties, furious sieges, and clanging broadsword battles.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Cold Water (1994) Sean Axmaker Assayas creates a ragged beauty.... He appreciates the texture of time passing in a way rarely seen in American films and the expressive moments and the edgy mix of intimacy and disconnection creates an undertow of tension...
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Dead-End Drive In (1986) Sean Axmaker Australian genre filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith’s mix of science fiction, gearhead action, and social commentary, is drive-in social satire in a Mad Max world.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Pulp Fiction (1994) Sean Axmaker ... a film that twists and turns and double backs on itself with the sheer delight of a narrative magician.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Chicago (2002) Sean Axmaker A couple of songs were left behind and I find the rat-a-tat editing distracting from the performances and musical numbers.... [T]he mercenary spirit and the splashy musical numbers, however, give the entire cast their moment in the spotlight
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Drunken Master - The Beginning (1978) Sean Axmaker The infectious mix of slapstick sequences and amazing martial arts moves breathes new life into the old school of Hong Kong action.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Blood Simple (1984) Sean Axmaker Bodies are shot, stabbed, dragged, and buried, blood is spilled and wiped up, evidence planted, swiped, and swapped, and nobody really knows what the story is. Except the audience, and we’re generally a beat behind.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Lawman (1971) Sean Axmaker ... it’s not so much cynical as sorrowful in its clash of ideals, and never less than clear-eyed in the presentation of harsh frontier realities.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Ray (2004) Sean Axmaker It’s an inspired performance that creates a complex character out of the pop music legend.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
24 Hour Party People (2002) Sean Axmaker Director Michael Winterbottom’s sprawling, jagged film is happily, even willfully unreliable as history and it embraces the tug-of-war between factual events and the stories and legends that have around them.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) Sean Axmaker This modern bohemian take on the classic screwball comedy (complete with amnesia, mistaken identity, and a stolen treasure treated as second-hand jewelry) is also a great time capsule of the New York street culture of the 1980s.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
In This Corner of the World (2016) Sean Axmaker ... for all the loveliness of the imagery and the tenderness of the drama, director Sunao Katabuchi never denies the loss and destruction of the war.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
The Great Debaters (2007) Sean Axmaker It’s an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity that plays the debate competition like an underdog sports movie, complete with the cheering crowds celebrating each win, and the plotting of their road to victory is too neatly designed.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) Sean Axmaker ... it is exciting to imagine, and that imagination is what powers the film: the sense of artistic freedom, idealism, freewheeling creativity at work in the preparation, and the excitement he raised in his warriors...
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972) Sean Axmaker The fights are savage—blades slash, limbs fly, and blood spurts like geysers—but in addition to the swordplay, violence, nudity, and earthy sexuality, the film also offers a tender, loving father under the gruff exterior of the pitiless warrior.
Posted Apr 06, 2024
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) Sean Axmaker Director Norman Foster and cinematographer Russell Metty offer up an unusually dark portrait of post-war life both visually—night dominates Bill’s life—and thematically.
Posted Mar 09, 2024
Event Horizon (1997) Sean Axmaker ... he screenplay is not nearly as inventive as the production design and it turns into a woefully inconsistent psychic monster movie that sacrifices mood for tepid shocks.
Posted Mar 09, 2024
RoboCop (1987) Sean Axmaker The savagely funny satire of modern capitalism in the Reaganomics era hasn’t lost its edge over the years. Verhoeven’s stylish satire manages to be funny and intelligent amidst the carnage ...
Posted Mar 09, 2024
Odd Man Out (1947) Sean Axmaker ... one of the great British films of the 1940s and a powerful drama of one man’s long dark night of the soul ...
Posted Mar 09, 2024
The Hurricane (1999) Sean Axmaker ... Jewison’s most passionate work in years; his indignation powers the film.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Lured (1947) Sean Axmaker This stylish Victorian melodrama/murder mystery is less a thriller than a witty cat-and-mouse game played with both the audience and the target.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Code 46 (2003) Sean Axmaker It’s less science fiction that speculative social commentary.... You don’t have to dig deep to find echoes of Gattaca, 1984, and Brave New World sounding through the dispassionate study in alienation, social regimentation, and economic disparity.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Oppenheimer (2023) Sean Axmaker For a film so enmeshed in ideas and loaded with meeting and conversations and debates (scientific and moral), it is as visually compelling as it is narratively.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Fury (2014) Sean Axmaker [Director David] Ayer is all about conflict and collisions, between and within groups of violent men, and has consistently made the violence in his cinema visceral and vivid.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Heaven Can Wait (1943) Sean Axmaker Ernst Lubitch’s first film in color is a gorgeous evocation of idealized Americana through three generations and a charming if meandering romantic comedy.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Fox and His Friends (1975) Sean Axmaker ... one of Fassbinder’s most affecting, accomplished, and personal films and he delivers a sweet, wounded performance as the proletariat Fox in a den of cultured, upper-class hounds.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
12 Years a Slave (2013) Sean Axmaker What’s most impressive about the film is the way it shows how slavery distorts humanity on all levels.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
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