Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
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For 195 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 9% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Robert Abele's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 50
Highest review score:
Neighboring Sounds
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
I Melt with You
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 59 out of 195
  2. Mixed: 85 out of 195
  3. Negative: 51 out of 195
195 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 62
    • Robert Abele 70
    Red Hill
    Commendably entertaining.
    • Metascore: 41
    • Robert Abele 70
    You Won't Miss Me
    The movie achieves its own nervy sensitivity about youthful urban despair.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Robert Abele 70
    The Music Never Stopped
    In key spots, thanks to Simmons' brilliantly wounded gruffness and Pucci's nimble toggling act between vacancy and awakened spirit, The Music Never Stopped achieves an admirable poignancy about our emotional, healing relationship to the songs we love.
    • Metascore: 51
    • Robert Abele 70
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    Director David Bowers keeps things peppy and brightly lighted, but the movie's swiftest pleasures come from moment-seizing cast members.
    • Metascore: 66
    • Robert Abele 70
    Stake Land
    Resourceful writer-director Jim Mickle covers both in his realism-tinged indie Stake Land and shows that a savvy mixture of characterization, atmosphere and gore-eographed suspense can make even the most familiar fright tropes feel vaguely organic again.
    • Metascore: 57
    • Robert Abele 70
    How to Live Forever
    The cheeky title How to Live Forever belongs to a wry, hopeful yet enigma-appreciating documentary about the perils and possibilities that come with growing old.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Robert Abele 70
    Mozart's Sister
    The object isn't to stir you into what-if feminist outrage so much as to let a culturally magnificent era's societal inequalities act as a dissonant countermelody to a famous artist's biography.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Robert Abele 70
    Griff the Invisible
    The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.
    • Metascore: 54
    • Robert Abele 70
    Puncture
    The picture benefits from its performances, notably Evans' roguish appeal as a guy simultaneously driven and destructive.
    • Metascore: 52
    • Robert Abele 70
    Detachment
    A movie you keep expecting to fizzle because of its punching-the-air gracelessness, but there's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.
    • Metascore: 45
    • Robert Abele 70
    Intruders
    The effect is both visceral and thoughtful, demonstrating a knack for cinematic dread rarely shown by today's manipulative horror meisters.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Robert Abele 70
    Fightville
    By the end, Fightville feels authentic about this world, where success may be measured in wins, but the balance of unrelenting brutality and self-discipline needed for those wins is a trickier equation.
    • Metascore: 55
    • Robert Abele 70
    Safe
    There's nothing terribly original about Safe, but it's a suitably grimy playground for action cinema's reigning pit bull.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Robert Abele 70
    Sound of My Voice
    With storytelling economy and dramatic precision often missing from today's independent films, Batmanglij augments the building blocks for a nifty paranoid thriller with sharp commentary on our faction-centered society and the pitfalls of reinvention.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Robert Abele 70
    The Road
    The film's three-pronged narrative does a fair job of laying a spooky groundwork for the revelatory emotional sadism that lies behind most acts of evil; it just takes a bit of clunky exposition to get there.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Robert Abele 70
    Turn Me On, Dammit!
    The movie treats a girl's burgeoning sexuality as neither epic nor problematic, or mutually exclusive of feelings of love, but rather simply, refreshingly, as one part of maturing.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Robert Abele 70
    Kite
    Bhargava's naturalistic approach to capturing the sights and sounds of a city in full revelry on rooftops and in the streets is colorfully vivid - reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai's silky urban baths - but it threatens to keep the human drama at arm's length.
    • Metascore: 57
    • Robert Abele 70
    The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    A chunky spectacle, to be sure – overstuffed with plot and characters - but at times, it's an insanely entertaining one.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Robert Abele 70
    The Waiting Room
    Wherever you stand on healthcare and the fact that uninsured people nationwide use emergency rooms for basic services, the documentary The Waiting Room is a revealing portrait of the often tough transactions between patients and hospital staff at the urgency level.
    • Metascore: 54
    • Robert Abele 70
    The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    Although the sentiment threatens to flatten out an intriguingly nervy vibe, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has plenty of rhythmic charm about its responsibility-challenged strivers.
    • Metascore: 54
    • Robert Abele 70
    Now, Forager
    Despite an awkwardly jokey title, Now, Forager has charm, intelligence and a cool passion for its principled characters - an appealing off-menu slice for hungry indie admirers.
    • Metascore: 66
    • Robert Abele 70
    We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    As a tale of digital power-tripping both exhilarating and terrifying, We Are Legion stands as a useful 21st century narrative.
    • Metascore: 63
    • Robert Abele 70
    North Sea Texas
    Though not without its mini-heartbreaks and melancholic turns, North Sea Texas explores emergent sexuality and first love with a refreshing optimism.
    • Metascore: 62
    • Robert Abele 70
    Lunch
    An agreeable visit with comedy titans who clearly cherish the opportunity to regale their peers with war stories and opinions about the state of comedy today.
    • Metascore: 62
    • Robert Abele 70
    Dragon
    Dragon has enough interesting left turns in style, mood and psychodrama to make it stand out.
    • Metascore: 48
    • Robert Abele 70
    Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.
    • Metascore: 63
    • Robert Abele 70
    Spring Breakers
    The movie is an arty lark of ambiguous entertainment value, pulsing with melancholy. It's rarely less than interesting visually or tonally, thanks in large part to Korine's prurient sense of humor and the rich location textures and Crayola sweep provided by gifted cinematographer Benoit Debie ("Enter the Void").
    • Metascore: 57
    • Robert Abele 60
    The Infidel
    An admirably cagey effort to mine humor from the thorny cultural and racial divide that is Muslim-Jewish relations.
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    • Metascore: 55
    • Robert Abele 60
    Gun Hill Road
    The quietly commanding turn by newcomer Santana - whose outward embrace of an already well-internalized transformation leaps off the screen with equal parts joy, melancholia and bravery - is a standout.
    • Metascore: 46
    • Robert Abele 60
    Johnny English Reborn
    All that matters with efforts like this is whether the cookie-cutter plotting serves up enough situations for Atkinson to contort himself into and out of jams. After all, are the narratives what you remember from the "Pink Panther" movies? Or the silly things, like that Clouseau could so easily get his finger caught in a spinning globe?
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