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Robert Abele

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Film Critic, LA Weekly

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Miroirs No. 3 (2025) 94% EDIT “Somewhat miraculously, we’re carried out of this consequential collision of hearts and minds on the lightest of notes, with the sense that our capacity to rediscover harmony will always be beautifully mysterious.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 19, 2026 Full Review Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025) 97% EDIT “Absorbing this well-chosen album is a treat, and a chance to appreciate the delicate mortality that thrives in a place simultaneously enormous, eternal and ephemeral.” – Los Angeles Times Mar 13, 2026 Full Review Heel (The Good Boy) (2025) 86% EDIT ““Heel” is Tolstoy’s happy-family maxim cooked in a mad scientist’s lab. ” – Los Angeles Times Mar 9, 2026 Full Review Two People Exchanging Saliva (2024) EDIT “An uneven Euro-art bath of unrealized intimacy and casual violence but is given exquisite tautness by the elegant, unrequited swooniness of stars Zar Amir and Luàna Bajrami.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 24, 2026 Full Review Midwinter Break (2026) 61% EDIT “Modest to a fault, “Midwinter Break” seems to float like something cautious and wishful, hoping along with the audience that this union’s individual strains will fall into harmony once more.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 23, 2026 Full Review Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025) 98% EDIT “Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. ” – Los Angeles Times Feb 19, 2026 Full Review Calle Málaga (2025) 97% EDIT “There is, after all, a reckoning for Maria’s situation we can’t help but keep in the back of our mind. Because our first brief glimpse of Clara is a sympathetic one, we know “Calle Málaga” won’t settle for a tidy resolution.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 19, 2026 Full Review Natchez (2025) 97% EDIT “Natchez is full of quietly charged moments in dreamily scenic surroundings, one result of Noah Collier’s lush cinematography, deployed like a deliberately performative nostalgia that lets us know there’s always more to see if we look closely enough.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 9, 2026 Full Review The Love That Remains (2025) 94% EDIT “This is a delicate, confidently imagined fiction made with the eyes of a naturalist, the heart of a believer in family, and a sensibility with room for both the Pythonesque and the Lynchian.” – Los Angeles Times Feb 9, 2026 Full Review A Poet (2025) 100% EDIT “That you’re never entirely sure if Oscar is going to be the adult or the child in any given scene creates a wonderfully funny tension. It’s one of the best performances of this past year and if Rios never acted again, it’d be a one-off for the ages...” – Los Angeles Times Jan 30, 2026 Full Review A Private Life (2025) 81% EDIT “It also leaves one realizing that “A Private Life,” despite the commanding leading lady holding its center, is a bit mixed up by design.” – Los Angeles Times Jan 16, 2026 Full Review The Chronology of Water (2025) 90% EDIT “What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and “The Chronology of Water,” arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish. ” – Los Angeles Times Jan 10, 2026 Full Review The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) 95% EDIT “What is being presented instead is a remembrance and a plea to keep the fires of moral urgency lighted. ” – Los Angeles Times Dec 19, 2025 Full Review Is This Thing On? (2025) 87% EDIT “The highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 19, 2025 Full Review La Grazia (2025) 84% EDIT “Most assuredly, though, this is a duo of director and star once more moving in concert together, maybe not as confidently as with some previous efforts, but with a knowing intelligence.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 15, 2025 Full Review Zodiac Killer Project (2025) 90% EDIT “Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 8, 2025 Full Review Merrily We Roll Along (2025) 95% EDIT “There are lessons to be learned from the modest goals of this “Merrily We Roll Along”: to bring a movie audience to the life of the stage and, in so doing, to those thorny stages of life.” – Los Angeles Times Dec 8, 2025 Full Review Eternity (2025) 76% EDIT “As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.” – Los Angeles Times Nov 26, 2025 Full Review Out of Plain Sight (2024) EDIT ““Out of Plain Sight” doesn’t need to be earthshaking filmmaking to relay a valuable ongoing story about a hidden nightmare for all of us. ” – Los Angeles Times Nov 24, 2025 Full Review Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (2025) 98% EDIT “You’ll feel loss, but the afterimage of this singular woman’s belief in finding light is what will burn.” – Los Angeles Times Nov 19, 2025 Full Review Christy (2025) 67% EDIT “It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.” – Los Angeles Times Nov 10, 2025 Full Review Peter Hujar's Day (2025) 91% EDIT “The result is a window into the pleasures of friendship and those days when the minutiae of your loved ones seems like the stuff that true connection is built on.” – Los Angeles Times Nov 7, 2025 Full Review Dracula (2025) 68% EDIT “As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained. ” – Los Angeles Times Nov 3, 2025 Full Review Shelby Oaks (2023) 55% EDIT “The horror greats always knew how to mix the schlocky and the soul-churning. Let’s just say Stuckmann is still in the training-wheels phase.” – Los Angeles Times Oct 24, 2025 Full Review Good Fortune (2025) 78% EDIT “It’s got heart, kind eyes, a wry smile and some funny lines, but no teeth when you really need things bitten into, chewed up and spit out.” – Los Angeles Times Oct 17, 2025 Full Review
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