Stephen Hunter, Washington Post
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For 907 reviews, this critic has graded:
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47% higher than the average critic
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1% same as the average critic
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52% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Stephen Hunter's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 57 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 444 out of 907
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Mixed: 233 out of 907
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Negative: 230 out of 907
907
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Stephen Hunter 100
A brilliant film--vivid, haunting, intelligent and in good taste, wonderfully acted, wonderfully written and directed. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
A wonderful, piercing and hilarious examination of high school politics and how bitter and ruinous it can become. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
The story is told so passionately that it demands as much of you as it does of its performers, all of whom are up there, giving everything. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Misanthropic, cruel, hostile, corrupt, blasphemous and basically pretty evil. I loved it. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
The sheer joy of letting go as a tale overwhelms your senses and drives the known world away -- that's the story. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
In some ways Soderbergh does a much better job than Tarantino. He handles the time shifts more adroitly, always keeping us on track; he goes easy on the violence, and when he does unleash it, it's short, fast and ugly. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work." -
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Stephen Hunter 100
The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
It's a strange enough film, yet weirdly great. No movie has quite gotten the clammy weight of fear, the sense of hopelessness that would necessarily haunt underground workers. To see it is to sweat through your underclothes. It'll melt the pep out of your weekend. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year. -
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Stephen Hunter 100
This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.- Posted Feb 15, 2011
- Read full review
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Stephen Hunter 90
Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun! -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The best kind of genre filmmaking: It plays by the rules, obeys the traditions and is both familiar and fresh at once. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
I don't think "Queimada" is as great a movie as "Battle of Algiers," but it retains its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice. -
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Stephen Hunter 90
In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan." -
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Stephen Hunter 90
The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance. -