For 996 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 67% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kyle Smith's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 48
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
996 movie reviews
    • Metascore: 84
    • Kyle Smith 100
    Dropping by on the same people every seven years like an old friend - or an unwelcome relative - Apted has constructed a peerless, suspenseful work that develops character to a depth that would make Tolstoy jealous. If you have any interest in documentaries, watch the DVD of the first film, "7 Up" (49 Up hits DVD Nov. 14). You won't be able to stop.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Kyle Smith 100
    A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Kyle Smith 100
    Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Kyle Smith 100
    What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.
    • Metascore: 56
    • Kyle Smith 100
    Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange."
    • Metascore: 80
    • Kyle Smith 100
    Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Kyle Smith 100
    Deep, disturbing and funny.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Kyle Smith 100
    It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Kyle Smith 100
    56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."
    • Metascore: 74
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.
    • Metascore: 68
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.
    • Metascore: 56
    • Kyle Smith 88
    If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Kyle Smith 88
    What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.
    • Metascore: 42
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Kyle Smith 88
    It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul.
    • Metascore: 51
    • Kyle Smith 88
    There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.
    • Metascore: 38
    • Kyle Smith 88
    The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.
    • Metascore: 64
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Lymelife, set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Kyle Smith 88
    Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.
    • Metascore: 47
    • Kyle Smith 88
    After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.