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Ty Burr's Watch List (Substack)

Ty Burr's Watch List (Substack) is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Ty Burr.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
4/4
The Devil Is Busy (2024) Ty Burr Directors Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton do their best work profiling the nurses, doctors, and security officers who understand the mission, calculate the dangers and remember who they’re there for day after day after day.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
4/4
All the Empty Rooms (2025) Ty Burr The film's great power comes from naming the dead and briefly bringing each unique child back to life, with tiny details that can wreck you with their specificity. It's a movie to fill a viewer with freshened loss and renewed resolve.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (2025) Ty Burr A stirring reminder of the increasing threat to journalists around the globe.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3/4
Children No More: Were and Are Gone (2025) Ty Burr A powerful and complex portrait of a society desperately holding its fingers in its ears.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Perfectly a Strangeness (2024) Ty Burr Pretty to look at, evocative in a muzzy way, it vanishes pleasurably from the memory upon viewing.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Two People Exchanging Saliva (2024) Ty Burr Written and directed by the team of Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, the film gathers strength as it goes and plays like a “Twilight Zone” remake of Todd Haynes’ “Carol.”
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Jane Austen's Period Drama (2024) Ty Burr Silly and clever in alternating doses, it benefits from pitch-perfect production values and Samantha Smart as the heroine’s panic-stricken sister Labinia.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Butcher's Stain (2025) Ty Burr A tough, infuriating tale of a no-win situation.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
The Singers (2026) Ty Burr Funny, humane and mysteriously potent, this lifts off from a simple premise – a crew of old rummies at a dive bar engage in an impromptu singing contest – and it travels just far enough to linger in the memory.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
2.5/4
A Friend of Dorothy (2025) Ty Burr Overwritten sentimental overkill and a shameless hambone of a performance.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
4/5
Retirement Plan (2024) Ty Burr This Irish short about a complacent fellow (voiced by Domhnall Gleeson) who imagines all the things he’ll do when he no longer has to work moves calmly from the mundane to the cosmic and accumulates a sweetly existential power.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
4/5
Butterfly (2024) Ty Burr A nearly perfect marriage of subject, style and sound, and an emotional killer.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3/4
The Three Sisters (2024) Ty Burr It ain’t Chekhov, but it’s fun.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
2.5/4
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (2025) Ty Burr “Girl” offers a harsh Dickensian tale of penury, greed, love and regret, features characters who look like haunted bobbleheads and eventually disappears up its own narrative hindquarters.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
2/4
Forevergreen (2025) Ty Burr It’s an independent labor of love that tells a simple, mawkish story with a vague ecological theme.
Posted Mar 17, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Sirāt (2025) Ty Burr The cast of mostly first-time actors is unforgettable, each face elemental in its own way, and it’s wonderful to see López in a sympathetic role.
Posted Mar 12, 2026  Edit critic review
2.4/4
Song Sung Blue (2025) Ty Burr There are some wild melodramatic curve balls along the way, and the actors are committed.
Posted Mar 02, 2026  Edit critic review
3/4
KPop Demon Hunters (2025) Ty Burr A cheeky fusion of anime and American animation with a fascinating, Myazaki-esque overlay of Korean folklore.
Posted Mar 02, 2026  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (2026) Ty Burr Anyway, the parts that are good are quite good – agreeably silly while freighted with emotional weight – and I’ll watch Kikuchi in anything, as should you.
Posted Feb 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Josephine (2026) Ty Burr I say stick with it, for writer-director Beth de Araújo’s subtle, pointillistic filmmaking, for Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan’s performances as the parents , and especially for Mason Reeves as Josephine.
Posted Feb 09, 2026  Edit critic review
4/4
The Secret Agent (2025) Ty Burr The Secret Agent is about loss – specifically, the loss of connection, of community, that accompanies the coming of tyranny, and about the communities that form in secret as a result.
Posted Feb 09, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025) Ty Burr The guiding intelligence and pervading mournfulness is all Pasha’s as he watches the light in his students' eyes slowly dim to darkness.
Posted Jan 30, 2026  Edit critic review
2.5/4
The Rip (2026) Ty Burr I was entertained, even if for the longest stretches I couldn’t have told you who was doing what to whom. Chalk it up as yet another twist in the tale of Matt ‘n’ Ben – two Yin/Yang talents who will be yoked together for eternity.
Posted Jan 27, 2026  Edit critic review
4/4
Zelig (1983) Ty Burr Zelig is a movie that will remain timeless as long as people are willing to sell their souls to be part of something. It’s very funny until the laughs stick in your throat.
Posted Jan 27, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Marty Supreme (2025) Ty Burr When all is said and done, the movie’s an expansion of "Uncut Gems" without quite being an improvement, and it showcases a director whose talent keeps increasing even as he may be running out of things to say.
Posted Jan 05, 2026  Edit critic review
3/4
Köln 75 (2025) Ty Burr A pleasant little pick-me-up.
Posted Jan 05, 2026  Edit critic review
4/4
Resurrection (2025) Ty Burr Resurrection is a full-sensory experience; indeed, each chapter is framed around the theme of the six Buddhist senses: Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind.
Posted Dec 22, 2025  Edit critic review
1.5/4
Ella McCay (2025) Ty Burr It is not a coherent movie, let alone a very good one, and, most depressing of all, it is a diminishment from one of the most skilled observers of the human comedy we've had.
Posted Dec 15, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Bugonia (2025) Ty Burr This is not everyone’s cup of tea, obviously, but it’s pitched expertly on a fulcrum of absurdity and caustic honesty about the fix we’re in while poking the sore spots of various modern social ills.
Posted Dec 15, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine (2025) Ty Burr It’s a good, heartening send-off to a songwriter who was one of the very best this country has produced and to a sensibility that only this country could have produced – Mark Twain meets Man Ray with a side of heartbreak.
Posted Dec 09, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Jay Kelly (2025) Ty Burr Thoroughly enjoyable without meaning terribly much beyond the standard (if welcome) message that you shoulda stopped to smell the roses, and maybe it's not too late.
Posted Dec 08, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Left-Handed Girl (2025) Ty Burr Pungently filmed, with a haunting central performance by Tsai as the mother.
Posted Dec 08, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo (2025) Ty Burr The Stringer comes to a more convincing judgement and in doing so illustrates the mutability of memory, the whims of chance, and the dodginess yet ultimate stubbornness of truth.
Posted Dec 08, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
The Return (2024) Ty Burr t’s a haunting, primal first feature about two young brothers and the reappearance of their long-absent father.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
The Christophers (2025) Ty Burr The Christophers is a charming and challenging tennis match between two opposing acting styles, one of them confident with the certainty of youth and the other with the mastery of old age.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Good Fortune (2025) Ty Burr Good Fortune rests on the universal fondness with which we hold its leading angel, who has the rare knack of being in on the joke while somehow remaining too pure for it.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Frankenstein (2025) Ty Burr I haven’t been truly sold on Elordi until now, but underneath the heavy prosthetics beams a battered nobility that’s unique in the many film iterations of this property.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/4
Hamnet (2025) Ty Burr The overarching force of “Hamnet” is not feminist but humanist, and it embraces Will, his wife and their children while radiating out to the Globe.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/4
The Last Viking (2025) Ty Burr As always, Jensen and company are making a screwball comedy, with dark and violent undertones, about finding a community of exceedingly strange strangers with whom you can be as broken and deluded as you need to be.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Bad Apples (2025) Ty Burr An entertaining but awfully heavy-handed black comedy– or maybe it’s heavy-handed but awfully entertaining – about an idealistic grammar school teacher who takes extreme measures when dealing with a disruptive class bully.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) Ty Burr The older I get and the more movies I see, the more I welcome a commitment to crazy, and The Testament of Ann Lee absolutely qualifies.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/4
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Ty Burr Sometimes a movie is more fun for the people making it than the audience watching it, but this is not one of those times. Even so, “Wake Up Dead Man” balances its comedy with a pointed contrast between a faith that divides and a faith that unites.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/4
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Ty Burr Easily one of Panahi’s best, a savage comedy, the blackest of black.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Sentimental Value (2025) Ty Burr A family drama, one that at first seems as if it’s about a daughter, then a father, then another daughter, until you realize it’s about all of them and more, and about how damage – both personal and historical – rolls downhill through the generations.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020) Ty Burr Is “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” exploitative or enabling? On the contrary, it is friendly, clear-eyed, and wise — tender about our follies and unsentimental about where they lead us.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
2/4
Wicked: For Good (2025) Ty Burr Overloaded with action and extras and garish CGI sets and songs that float by mellifluously without ever lodging in your head that the movie all but short-circuits itself.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Rental Family (2025) Ty Burr A sweet, sentimental and fairly soggy drama with a novel dramatic conceit.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Remember the Night (1940) Ty Burr Stanwyck has never been more appealing, a tough cookie thawing under the mistletoe, MacMurray reminds you that he was a terrific romantic comedy lead.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3/4
Freaked (1993) Ty Burr Honestly, the plot makes even less sense than that précis, but who cares when you have Mr. T cast as a Bearded Lady, Bobcat Goldthwait as a human sock puppet, an uncredited Keanu Reeves as Ortiz The Dog Boy.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/4
Roofman (2025) Ty Burr It’s best for the quiet scenes between the leads, in which Dunst knows exactly what to do and shows her co-star the way.
Posted Dec 06, 2025  Edit critic review
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