Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice
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For 310 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 67% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stephanie Zacharek's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 68
Highest review score:
Stories We Tell
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Take Me Home Tonight
Critic Score 15
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 210 out of 310
  2. Mixed: 85 out of 310
  3. Negative: 15 out of 310
310 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 47
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Restless
    The picture is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can't believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can.
    • Metascore: 68
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Applause
    A small movie with modest ambitions, and accordingly, it packs only a modest emotional punch.
    • Metascore: 50
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    No Strings Attached
    It's all just too cute for words, and more's the pity. Because in the end, No Strings Attached is more meaningful for what it does rather than for what it says along the way.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Soul Surfer
    Thus ends one of the most understated shark-attack sequences, ever; it's almost Bressonian, except it's not boring.
    • Metascore: 64
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Cold Weather
    Cold Weather is partly a movie with an actual plot, not just a portrait of young twentysomethings adrift in unfulfilling circumstances.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    X-Men: First Class
    So while X-Men: First Class at first takes its source material with just the right amount of self-deprecating seriousness, it founders in the second half, when it becomes overburdened with squirrelly plot mechanics and an excess of self-evident dialogue.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    The Beaver
    Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.
    • Metascore: 66
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    The Amazing Spider-Man
    Probably not as good as you hoped or as bad as you feared.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Mr. Popper's Penguins
    The whole enterprise is surprisingly painless, albeit in an icy-cool, numbed-out way.
    • Metascore: 42
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money - but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.
    • Metascore: 56
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Real Steel
    It goes through all the motions, properly and efficiently, and yet it's missing some core warmth. Watching Real Steel, I kept thinking of Brad Bird's retro-modern cartoon "The Iron Giant," and of how that picture humanized a metal alien so effortlessly.
    • Metascore: 57
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Horrible Bosses
    Aside from having murder on their minds, these three are a lot more well-behaved than the "Hangover" guys.
    • Metascore: 59
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Tower Heist
    Tower Heist is overstuffed with actors, and yet Ratner manages to give each of them one or two good moments.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    21 Jump Street
    For now, 21 Jump Street is a small puff of fresh air simply because it's not, like umpteen other releases coming down the pike, based on a comic-book series.
    • Metascore: 47
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Rock of Ages
    Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Our Idiot Brother
    It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Tabloid
    It's an amusing enough story, all right, and it adequately fills up Tabloid's 88 minutes - but a minute longer would have been too much.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    American Reunion
    The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it's laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original so distinctive.
    • Metascore: 54
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    The Great Gatsby
    It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    Sing Your Song
    It's valuable for both the vintage footage Rostock has collected and for the observations provided by Belafonte, who is as charming, handsome and persuasive in his mid-80s as he ever was.
    • Metascore: 38
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    The Moth Diaries
    It offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.
    • Metascore: 58
    • Stephanie Zacharek 70
    To the Wonder
    For all the absurdity, there's also something strangely touching about it, maybe because for once Malick has allowed himself to be unsure. To the Wonder is an irresolute piece of work, a sketchbook of a movie, one made by a human being rather than an august master.
    • Metascore: 46
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Knight and Day
    Nothing Cruise does seems to come from the inside -- every eye crinkle, every grimace, every brow furrow seems plucked from the air, collected from the universe around him and bent to do his bidding. Maybe that’s one kind of acting. But it’s not cool. Never will be.
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    • Metascore: 56
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Dinner for Schmucks
    The problem isn't just that the gags feel airless and pointless; it's that the performers - many of whom have done wonderful work in other settings - seem more bent on pleasing each other than on entertaining us.
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    • Metascore: 62
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Micmacs
    Nearly everyone, and everything, in Micmacs is at one point or another guilty of trying too hard.
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    • Metascore: 43
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    MacGruber
    MacGruber never gathers any momentum. Once in a while a funny line or absurd sight gag will amble into the foreground, only to recede immediately in the rear-view mirror of memory.
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    • Metascore: 57
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Iron Man 2
    The big problem with Iron Man 2, maybe, is that it so dutifully gives the people what they want, instead of giving them what they didn’t know they wanted.
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    • Metascore: 63
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Babies
    The point of Babies, to the extent that it has one beyond allowing us to revel in unstoppable baby cuteness, is to underscore that infants everywhere are more similar than they are different, regardless of what country they’re born and raised in.
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    • Metascore: 66
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    Looking for Eric
    What’s remarkable about Looking for Eric is the number of ways in which it ALMOST works.
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    • Metascore: 46
    • Stephanie Zacharek 65
    The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?
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