Movieline's Scores

  • Movies
For 692 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 70% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 28% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 5
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 41 out of 692
692 movie reviews
    • Metascore: 33
    • Critic Score 50
    Virginia is like a box full of someone's long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp.
  1. It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.
    • Metascore: 33
    • Critic Score 30
    Punch manages to cram more slow motion into its first few minutes than a season of NFL highlights, all of "Inception" and every one of those NBC promos where the casts of whatever failing police procedural walk menacingly towards the camera.
  2. Because his character is never clear, Manolo's choices lack emotional interest and narrative urgency.
  3. Just Go With It attempts to merge farce and romantic comedy with the Sandler sensibility, and the result is a story that evades where it should engage and a whiplash tone that dispirits when it should delight.
  4. Defiantly unwatchable if occasionally transfixing, the film is essentially the home movies of three marauding burnouts.
    • Metascore: 32
    • Critic Score 50
    The smugness of the film grows wearying long before the end. Just because the people on and behind the camera are willing to acknowledge what we're watching is ridiculous crap doesn't really change the fact that, well, it is.
    • Metascore: 32
    • Critic Score 40
    The problem with Chernobyl Diaries isn't that it's offensive, it's that it's dumb.
  5. Chastain, an incandescent redhead with a heart-shaped face and round, shining eyes, does more justice to the part than it deserves.
  6. The puffy high tones of medieval fantasy punctured by the flatly vulgar and colloquial - is the film's central comic vein, one McBride taps it like it's never been tapped before.
    • Metascore: 31
    • Critic Score 40
    Bromance or romance, This Means War feels like something scrawled by enterprising teenagers who developed their concepts of love and espionage from films and TV shows they caught over a few weekends of basic cable surfing.
    • Metascore: 31
    • Critic Score 50
    No matter how much good-hearted licentiousness follows in the rest of the movie, the opening sequence brings a unshakable sourness to the whole affair.
    • Metascore: 31
    • Critic Score 40
    High School rushes through the parts it should savor and then pads out its runtime with filler elsewhere - and, less forgivably, it doesn't make getting high look like fun.
    • Metascore: 31
    • Critic Score 35
    Crazy Eyes is the third directorial effort from Adam Sherman, and is, like his 2010 "Happiness Runs," based on his own personal experiences, suggesting he either has a staggering sense of self-laceration or a just as noteworthy lack of awareness about audience empathy.
    • Metascore: 30
    • Critic Score 50
    Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it's a mess in any traditional movie sense, it's has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain.
  7. The film’s most impressive feat may be bringing a cartoon character to life while turning actual humans into 2-D cutouts.
  8. Isn't just unfunny; it's so dull.
  9. This is a film that transcends "good" or "bad," "like" or "don't like."
  10. The talking animals, though less tough to look at than those in "Marmaduke," are murder on the ears: Maya Rudolph as a neurotic giraffe and Sandler voicing a monkey could take the paint off of a Buick.
    • Metascore: 29
    • Critic Score 35
    13
    This is a lumpy, dumb, suspenseless thing that sometimes scarcely feels finished.
  11. Unfortunately, outside of the proxy satisfaction it will give those who are dying to see the grim reaper let loose on the set of a very special episode of "Glee," the pleasures of Don't Go in the Woods can't quite compensate for its straggly bits.
    • Metascore: 29
    • Critic Score 40
    "A Short Cuts" full of self-pitying sociopaths, Answers to Nothing follows its characters toward a succession of increasingly queasy conclusions it tries to pass off as heartfelt and human.
  12. Aside from a few arresting visuals, Red Riding Hood is just a slog through the woods.
  13. Infinitely worse than you dared to hope it wouldn't be, You Again dumbfounded and then defeated me.
  14. Walks the jittery line between being exploitative and too sensitive, and while it's probably a relief that it tips more toward the latter, the movie also seems a bit unclear in its motives.
    • Metascore: 28
    • Critic Score 50
    These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them.
  15. Season of the Witch is barely even a Nicolas Cage movie. He wanders through the picture, zombified.
  16. Though based on the Hemingway novel published 25 years after his death, Hemingway's Garden of Eden feels more like the result of an ungodly alliance between Harlequin house writers and the cut-and-paste masterminds at A&E Biography.
  17. Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV.
  18. Hits a new low of idiocy and crassness.
  19. This latest is grim stuff: Little Fockers hardly bothers with finding a reason to exist, although one might assume a focus on the abiding hilarity of life with small children. That assumption would be wrong.
    • Metascore: 26
    • Critic Score 35
    The film has the feel of something conceived and whipped together in very little time, perhaps to make its own built-in deadline.
    • Metascore: 26
    • Critic Score 40
    It doesn't help that even the pratfalls in A Thousand Words look tired and recycled.
  20. It takes too long for the story to come around to the fact that Will is just plain nuts - and even then, he gets over it in a heartbeat.
  21. The goof on New York's awful elite only gets grimmer and less viable as the film goes on.
  22. In another light the group's - and the film's - portentous resolution looks a lot like quitting, in true slacker style.
  23. Skyline is a piece of junk, even in a movie climate littered with expensive - though sometimes fun - junkiness.
  24. There is enough lurid, ludicrous subtext in the material to keep fans of such things happy. As trash, this is top of the line.
  25. The picture is directed with such a loose, slack hand that you'd think Craven had never directed a slasher-thriller before: I didn't jump once; I never even felt vaguely scared or creeped out.
    • Metascore: 25
    • Critic Score 55
    As Nathan, the teenage hero of Abduction, Lautner shows he's handy with stunts, many of which he clearly and impressively performs himself, and good with a fight scene. But when it comes to exchanges of dialogue, displays of emotion or just standing around, he's stiff and manifestly uncomfortable.
    • Metascore: 24
    • Critic Score 30
    To describe what unfolds as a slow burn is to be awfully generous.
  26. "Piranha 3D" was ridiculous, gory and fun, everything Piranha 3DD is not.
    • Metascore: 24
    • Critic Score 20
    The original "Saw" was smart enough to tease its audience, to literally restrain its characters and gradually dial up the dread, setting the table for a truly shocking twist. The latest just wants bigger and bigger bangs.
  27. Number of chipmunks who speak fluent chola when necessary: three. Number of Spider-Man/Pepe Le Pew mash-ups I can't really get into: one.
    • Metascore: 23
    • Critic Score 40
    It's as if, after years of playing characters with temper issues, Sandler has finally let some of that repressed rage leak out toward the audience.
    • Metascore: 23
    • Critic Score 5
    The Roommate has notched an unbelievable achievement; it makes the second rate "One Tree Hill" seems like it was about something.
  28. It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.
  29. Over-narrated by Kiefer Sutherland in full "this is extremely important and also very, very cool" mode, from its first self-important minutes Twelve seems as if it can't possibly be serious. Would that it were not.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Critic Score 40
    Less a film than a product, New Year's Eve is so carefully calculated as to be, in its own way, admirable.
  30. Fox and Rourke embody Lily and Nate's lost souls with vulnerability that's at once strikingly sincere and strange, particularly for two actors renowned for their impunity both on and off screen.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Critic Score 65
    Shark Night isn't fantastic, but it's a good enough time, and it'll never be better than when it's watched with a rowdy crowd in a theater.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Critic Score 30
    As played by Heigl, Stephanie is mind-blowingly charmless.
  31. It’s so ineffectual and unfocused that after it’s over, you’re not even sure you watched a movie.
  32. Completely harmless and inoffensive, and at the very least, Shyamalan appears to be having a little fun here.
    • Metascore: 18
    • Critic Score 40
    The reality of The Devil Inside is that it's a half-hearted patchwork of ideas blatantly lifted from better films, with characters who have to act increasingly foolish in order to allow the action to go forward and an ending so anticlimactic and abrupt that the audience at the screening I attended erupted in enraged boos as the credits rolled.
  33. Somewhere in there is a little blonde girl and her dreamy princeling, but damned if I could see them through the dreck.
    • Metascore: 18
    • Critic Score 30
    An incomprehensibly garbled, derivative attempt at a horror flick from first-time writer-director Todd Lincoln.
    • Metascore: 17
    • Critic Score 40
    You want to tell Six that yes, we get it already. But then subtlety isn't exactly his thing.
  34. The tiniest bit of Hudson's wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She's like an adorbs Camille.
    • Metascore: 9
    • Critic Score 30
    That Bucky Larson's humor is stuck at a toilet-centric grade school level is less damning than how little of that or any humor it contains - the film, directed by Tom Brady (The Hot Chick), sets up scene after scene that wanders around in the general vicinity of a joke idea without ever approaching anything like a punchline.
  35. The writing and directing debut of Italian actress Marta Mondelli, is a classic example of a director who wanted to make a film but lacked a story that demanded telling.