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Grant Watson

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Grant Watson is a film critic based in Melbourne, Australia. He currently reviews contemporary and classic film for his own website FictionMachine, as well as the film review websites FilmInk and VCinema. Between 2003 and 2009 he wrote the film column The Bad Film Diaries for the science fiction journal Borderlands; for which he was awarded the William Atheling Jr Award for Science Fiction Criticism and Review on two occasions. He has also previously worked as the screen events manager at Western Australia's Film and Television Institute, where he curated numerous film programs and retrospectives.

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Space Station 76 (2014) 68% 6/10 EDIT “A lot of viewers will likely bounce straight off the piece. A select few, however, will embrace it.” – Fiction Machine May 7, 2026 Full Review Hamnet (2025) 87% 8/10 EDIT “Any viewer expecting a biographical focus on Shakespeare will potentially be disappointed, but the emotional and highly resonant meditation on motherhood and grief that Zhao does offer up is remarkable.” – Fiction Machine May 5, 2026 Full Review Greenland 2: Migration (2026) 49% 4/10 EDIT “That deeply personal edge in the original film now feels badly blunted. Stars Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin both return, but this time their race for survival feels perfunctory. Worse than that: it feels dull.” – Fiction Machine May 5, 2026 Full Review Cube (2021) 6/10 EDIT “It is questionable whether it has any strong creative thrust of its own, but if you like the concept and are bored watching the Canadian version I suppose it may have some novelty appeal?” – Fiction Machine May 3, 2026 Full Review The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) 12% 3/10 EDIT “A firm and unavoidable recipe for disaster.” – Fiction Machine May 1, 2026 Full Review Seven Snipers (2026) 6/10 EDIT “This is deliberately straight-forward action cinema, and its target market will hopefully enjoy the journey over its destination.” – Fiction Machine Apr 28, 2026 Full Review Wolfram (2025) 96% 10/10 EDIT “Warwick Thornton, who with the retirement of Peter Weir is almost certainly Australia’s best living director, has a palpable understanding of the Australian bush.” – Fiction Machine Apr 28, 2026 Full Review The Snow Woman (1968) 7/10 EDIT “An evenly-balanced mixture of period drama and supernatural horror.” – Fiction Machine Apr 27, 2026 Full Review A Moment of Romance (1990) 7/10 EDIT “It is, stylistically and narratively, a clear contribution to 1980s-founded heroic bloodshed cinema. At the same time it shows off distinctive roots of something more complex and character-focused.” – Fiction Machine Apr 23, 2026 Full Review The Client (1994) 78% 5/10 EDIT “The film as a whole reverts from decent to mediocre, and a lot of time, effort, and talent is wasted in the process.” – Fiction Machine Apr 21, 2026 Full Review Ilya Muromets (1960) 6/10 EDIT “Something of a viking epic retold as medieval drama and filtered through the communist state.” – Fiction Machine Apr 20, 2026 Full Review Electric Dragon 80,000 V (2001) 8/10 EDIT “This is muscular, gloriously pretentious, pure cinema.” – Fiction Machine Apr 16, 2026 Full Review The Invisible Witness (2018) 6/10 EDIT “It offers gaudy thrills in the moment, but as soon as the credit roll the viewer’s lingering questions will blow the house of cards to pieces.” – Fiction Machine Apr 15, 2026 Full Review Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) 48% 6/10 EDIT “Jokes come thick and fast, in the form of snappy dialogue, eccentric behaviour, weird line deliveries, and a near-perpetual stream of film and pop culture references.” – Fiction Machine Apr 13, 2026 Full Review Heads or Tails? (2025) 89% 8/10 EDIT “John Ford’s seminal The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) famously claimed that ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. Head or Tails? plays beautifully in the liminal space between the two.” – Fiction Machine Apr 12, 2026 Full Review Rental Family (2025) 88% 7/10 EDIT “A satisfying, enormously watchable film, and only frustrates around the edges. Viewers are likely to come away with a better understanding of Japan’s distinctive, complex culture than they had when they started.” – Fiction Machine Apr 9, 2026 Full Review The Great Arch (2025) 89% 7/10 EDIT “There is an immediate expectation of a punchline to the joke, only that punchline never quite comes. Instead it is a case of absurdism without humour, and it leaves much of the film as something ambivalent and uncomfortable” – Fiction Machine Apr 6, 2026 Full Review Special Delivery (2022) 7/10 EDIT “Possibly not the most inventive of films, but it spins up near-guaranteed satisfaction for its target audience.” – Fiction Machine Apr 4, 2026 Full Review Rebirth of Mothra II (1997) 3/10 EDIT “Kids know trash when they see it, and with limited experience is cinema they deserve the best they can get. Rebirth of Mothra II should not just be a disappointment to them; it’s an insult to them as well.” – Fiction Machine Apr 4, 2026 Full Review Arachnophobia (1990) 94% 7/10 EDIT “In the middle of the Venn diagram between PG and horror, there is Frank Marshall’s 1990 film Arachnophobia.” – Fiction Machine Apr 2, 2026 Full Review Cruel Gun Story (1964) EDIT “A muscular, unrelenting film. The body count is high, and there is a strong sense of fatalism to its characters.” – Fiction Machine Mar 30, 2026 Full Review Sheena (1984) 11% 4/10 EDIT “About as close to an objectively terrible film as one could make: ridiculous, unbelievable, inconsistent, and weirdly cheap-looking while also visibly having had quite a lot of money spent on it.” – Fiction Machine Mar 29, 2026 Full Review Bugonia (2025) 87% 8/10 EDIT “The film is dominated by an unsettled tone, and an unwillingness to sit neatly with a single style.” – Fiction Machine Mar 27, 2026 Full Review Tora-san, His Tender Love (1970) 6/10 EDIT “Perhaps not quite as good as its predecessors, Tora-San, His Tender Love is still a charming and wholly satisfying light comedy with touches of drama and a beautiful showcase for late 1960s Japan.” – Fiction Machine Mar 25, 2026 Full Review Good Boy (2025) 90% 7/10 EDIT “The idea is a terrific one, and that unprecedented perspective alone is sufficient reason to give the film a try.” – Fiction Machine Mar 24, 2026 Full Review
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