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Smash Cut Reviews

Smash Cut Reviews is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Karl Delossantos, Matthew Huff, Ryan Oquiza.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
4.5/5
Marty Supreme (2025) Karl Delossantos He talks a mile a minute, lies like his life depends on it (because sometimes it does) and makes decisions like consequences don’t exist. And for 149 glorious meteoric minutes, we want nothing more than for Marty to keep going.
Posted Dec 02, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Wicked: For Good (2025) Karl Delossantos Ariana Grande’s magnificent performance as an emotionally torn Glinda gives "Wicked: For Good" the complexity and depth to play greater than the sum of its parts.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Black Phone 2 (2025) Karl Delossantos Fans of the first movie will find the expansion of the boundaries of its world and the exploration of its characters’ wounds in “Black Phone 2” engaging. Is that enough nightmare fuel to hypnotize anyone else? Perhaps not.
Posted Oct 16, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
HIM (2025) Karl Delossantos Tyriq Withers is a movie-star-in-the-making and very often when the movie works, it's because of his performance. But it's all wasted potential. It's all greatness gone to waste.
Posted Sep 18, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
Hamnet (2025) Karl Delossantos “Hamnet” may be about a death, but what makes it so powerful is that it is about the living—and what keeps us living.
Posted Sep 10, 2025  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Obsession (2025) Karl Delossantos Obsession feels like a classic we’ve been watching for years—less derivative than timeless. It’s unquestionably a horror classic in the making.
Posted Sep 08, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Carolina Caroline (2025) Karl Delossantos “Carolina Caroline” constantly feels exciting. It's like being behind the wheel of a vintage sports car. The rumble and purr of the engine gets your adrenaline going because you know the second you hit the gas there's no slowing down.
Posted Sep 07, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Hamlet (2025) Karl Delossantos Shakespeare's rich, lyrical language delivered by a majority South Asian cast already breathes fresh energy into this modern retelling of “Hamlet”, giving it a mesmerizing, electric charge.
Posted Sep 06, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Oh, Hi! (2025) Karl Delossantos A tragicomedy about the worst evil of all: situationships.
Posted Jul 25, 2025  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Sinners (2025) Karl Delossantos Sinners manages to be a folk horror, western drama, southern gothic, Blaxploitation thriller, quasi-musical and, oh yeah, a vampire movie exploring deeply rooted themes about our society while being the most devilishly entertaining movies of the year.
Posted Apr 10, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
The Gorge (2025) Karl Delossantos It dips into high-concept sci-fi, survival thriller, creature horror and, yes, romance. Somehow, it never feels like it’s shortchanging any of those genres. It is the most romantic movie of the. year… just with tree-like zombies that crawl out of a gorge.
Posted Feb 13, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Love Hurts (2025) Karl Delossantos Despite its impressive and entertaining action sequences and a charming Ke Huy Quan, Love Hurts its less love and a whole lot of hurt.
Posted Feb 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Presence (2024) Karl Delossantos By the end of its breezy 85-minute runtime, you might just find yourself missing being someone’s ghost in a dark corner of their closet.
Posted Feb 06, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Queer (2024) Karl Delossantos At its heart, Queer is about queer loneliness, queer desire, and the queer desire to know we're not alone.
Posted Nov 27, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
Wicked (2024) Karl Delossantos With expansive, dynamic musical numbers that fill the screen, a fast-paced rhythm, and larger-than-life characters, Wicked is proudly and unapologetically a musical.
Posted Nov 20, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
The Life of Chuck (2024) Karl Delossantos A philosophical pondering of the moments that add up to a life set against the temporariness of it all. Airy, abstract but entertaining, it may be polarizing but will deeply move many.
Posted Sep 16, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
We Live in Time (2024) Karl Delossantos We Live In Time presupposes that life's big struggles are best defeated with life's little joys.
Posted Sep 09, 2024  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Strange Darling (2023) Karl Delossantos With its saturated cinematography bringing a mad technicolor world to life and crisp near-deafening sound underlined by Craig DeLeon‘s discordant bass guitar score rattling, it feels like you're on the fury road—and you might as well be.
Posted Aug 23, 2024  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Dìdi (2024) Karl Delossantos As a second generation Asian-American, watching Dìdi was an entertaining, affirming, slightly cringy, but healing experience.
Posted Jul 25, 2024  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Crossing (2024) Karl Delossantos Filled with joy (particularly queer joy) amongst the realities of the world, Crossing is a beautiful and moving testament to change and one of the best movies of the year.
Posted Jul 18, 2024  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Longlegs (2024) Karl Delossantos Longlegs is an amalgamation of better told stories that came before it. Perkins has a mastery for horror and suspense that is worth of his namesake but his stories lack the same gravity to live up to the classics he evokes.
Posted Jul 11, 2024  Edit critic review
5/5
Anora (2024) Karl Delossantos Where there's melancholy laced into the fabric of all of Baker's films, he hides it in Anora before revealing that it was there all along. That magic trick makes it one of the year's best—and an unforgettable star turn that will have you saying her name.
Posted May 24, 2024  Edit critic review
4.5/5
The Substance (2024) Karl Delossantos All the mismatching debauched pieces of The Substance come together to form a Frankenstein's monster of a diabolically delightful B-movie that brings laughs, thrills and blood... lots and lots of blood.
Posted May 20, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
The Girl With the Needle (2024) Karl Delossantos There’s a reveal in The Girl with the Needle so heinous and disturbing you’d think you were watching a horror—and at times it feels like it is.
Posted May 19, 2024  Edit critic review
5/5
Challengers (2024) Karl Delossantos Challengers is a winner. Game, sex, match. It feels like a movie we haven’t seen before, or at least in recent memory. One that doesn’t feel bogged down by its self-importance nor trying so hard to be shocking or camp (I’m looking at you, Saltburn).
Posted Apr 24, 2024  Edit critic review
3/5
Civil War (2024) Karl Delossantos Civil War feels at war with itself. When it focuses on the sheer terror and brutality of war it is nothing short of engrossing. But when it deigns to say anything specific about the current state of society in the United States it feels misguided.
Posted Apr 11, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
The First Omen (2024) Karl Delossantos With devilishly delectable imagery as beautiful as it is horrifying, it trades cheap jumpscares for dread-filled slow burn that gets under your skin and delivers a diabolical thrill that lasts after the credits roll.
Posted Apr 05, 2024  Edit critic review
3/5
Monkey Man (2024) Karl Delossantos Though its ambitious plot can feel overstuffed at times, Patel’s magnetic screen presence (and abs) and assured vision keep you hooked from beginning to end.
Posted Apr 04, 2024  Edit critic review
4/5
Femme (2023) Karl Delossantos Femme is as messy and beautiful and complicated as we are. It’s the kind of queer thriller we deserve.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
5/5
Dune: Part Two (2024) Karl Delossantos Dune: Part Two is a The Empire Strikes Back or The Return of the King-level event. A science fiction classic in the making that’ll inspire the next generation of science fiction and fantasy films.
Posted Feb 21, 2024  Edit critic review
5/5
How to Have Sex (2023) Karl Delossantos How to Have Sex subverts the 2000s-era raunchy sex comedy to deliver a sobering holiday drama with a melancholic realistic edge. With Mia McKenna-Bruce‘s heartbreaking performance as its strong beating heart it is much more than another teen movie.
Posted Feb 02, 2024  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Mean Girls (2024) Karl Delossantos In an effort to update a classic, Mean Girls feels dated
Posted Jan 19, 2024  Edit critic review
4.5/5
RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ (2023) Karl Delossantos Beyoncé is so often revered as larger-than-life, and in many ways she is. With this film, she tells us that while she’s able to communicate these concepts epically, they all originate from completely human experiences.
Posted Dec 04, 2023  Edit critic review
3.5/5
The Holdovers (2023) Ryan Oquiza While The Holdovers conjures warm and nostalgic storytelling with its ’70s found family spirit and trio of outstanding performances — especially Da’Vine Joy Randolph — its emotional impact is stunted by its fractured focus.
Posted Nov 21, 2023  Edit critic review
3/5
Rustin (2023) Karl Delossantos Colman Domingo is nothing short of sensational. A theatrical rendering of a man that in many ways was larger than life living in a world that sought to dull his shine — both from those against him and on his side.
Posted Oct 20, 2023  Edit critic review
4.5/5
May December (2023) Karl Delossantos As the camera closes in on Julianne Moore's face and a dissonant chord strums, she dramatically delivers the line, "I don’t think we’re going to have enough hot dogs." From then on, it's impossible not to be transfixed by the high camp of this melodrama.
Posted Oct 02, 2023  Edit critic review
4.5/5
American Fiction (2023) Karl Delossantos American Fiction is an uplifting family drama, swoony romantic comedy, and uproarious absurd comedy all wrapped up in a hilarious crowd-pleasing satire that'll have you crying from laughter and then asking, “Am I the problem?”
Posted Sep 17, 2023  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Dream Scenario (2023) Karl Delossantos Dream Scenario is exactly how Nicolas Cage should be spending his career: on bonkers wild swings like a comedic version of A Nightmare on Elm Street where Freddie is a normal average guy and his weapon is doing nothing.
Posted Sep 16, 2023  Edit critic review
4/5
Origin (2023) Karl Delossantos As a whole, Origin is a dazzling epic of large ideas and the smallness of those affected by them.
Posted Sep 12, 2023  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Unicorns (2023) Karl Delossantos Unicorns is a gorgeous glittering hidden gem. Full of queer life and spirit.
Posted Sep 09, 2023  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Perfect Days (2023) Karl Delossantos As Nina Simone croons out “Feeling Good” over an unbroken long shot of Hirayama’s face illuminated by the sun a sense of satisfaction creeps over us — like when you reach the final perfect line of a simple poem.
Posted Sep 08, 2023  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Bottoms (2023) Karl Delossantos Emma Seligman’s vision of high school in Bottoms is equal parts satiric and surreal. Like if Luis Buñel directed The Breakfast Club or Andrei Tarkovsky directed Clueless. The pure absurdity is something to marvel at.
Posted Aug 25, 2023  Edit critic review
3/5
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) Karl Delossantos Red, White & Royal Blue is a fairytale. A gay fairytale. Like “first 50 rows at a Lady Gaga concert” gay fairytale. One where a line like “first 50 rows at a Lady Gaga concert kind of gay” is eye-roll-inducing but oddly charming at the same time.
Posted Aug 11, 2023  Edit critic review
A
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) Matthew Huff It’s one of the most artfully rendered and least “oorah”-shouting war films in recent history.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
A-
Empire of Light (2022) Matthew Huff Some have called out the screenplay as the singular weak spot in this barrage of masterclass craftsmanship, but I’d argue that the loose threads contribute to the melancholy vignette quality of the film.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
B
Moving On (2022) Matthew Huff Moving On is not groundbreaking cinema, but it doesn’t need to be. Honestly, it’s the better for it.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
4/5
Barbie (2023) Karl Delossantos Barbie looks camp right in the eye and turns it into a hot pink-splashed post-modern meta exploration of existentialism, feminism, the patriarchy and masculinity packaged in a satirical surreal musical comedy homage to classic cinema.
Posted Jul 19, 2023  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Past Lives (2023) Karl Delossantos Though Past Lives is an epic in scope spanning decades at its core it’s a sweet intimate drama about how your past colors your present and often clouds your future.
Posted Jun 29, 2023  Edit critic review
3/5
The Little Mermaid (2023) Karl Delossantos Halle Bailey's version of “Part of Your World” has bore itself into my psyche — and likely the rest of the audience if judging by the applause break after her final ethereal riff.
Posted May 22, 2023  Edit critic review
2/5
Mafia Mamma (2023) Karl Delossantos Mafia Mamma tries to be Under the Tuscan Sun, Goodfellas and a raunchy 2000s comedy yet fails at all three.
Posted Apr 12, 2023  Edit critic review
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