For 4,782 reviews, this publication has graded:
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48% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
| 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: 2,324 out of 4782
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Mixed: 1,769 out of 4782
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Negative: 689 out of 4782
4,782
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Critic Score 100
As the story unfolds, carefully and elaborately, what develops is not just a remarkably intricate crime tale but a brilliant and compassionate story of people who struggle to rise above their flawed nature. This may be the best movie of the year; it's definitely one of the greatest crime films of all time. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Conceptually bold and rapturously beautiful Gerry, a minimalist landscape film that's unlike anything on the American independent scene. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
Unchecked goodness has its price, after all, and childhood wonder wouldn't be nearly as sweet if it didn't fade. That may explain the film's appeal. It trapped that feeling, and its sense of possibility, in amber -- then, now, and for any time. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
While it's very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the '70s and '80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It's a deeply satisfying movie. -
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Critic Score 100
Writer/director Neil LaBute has taken the gender-issues film into uncharted, almost inhuman territory with this malevolently perfect exploration of male cruelty. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
Part of Spielberg's skill as a filmmaker comes in choosing the right collaborators. Janusz Kaminski's gorgeous cinematography, Michael Kahn's graceful editing, Jeff Nathanson's clever script, and John Williams' score all work well in unison, but the film's masterstroke is the casting of Walken as DiCaprio's utterly decent father. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
Above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways. -
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Critic Score 100
Heartbreakingly beautiful film, a brilliant adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's equally beautiful novel, is a sort of Casablanca for our time. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
The film finds a surprising amount of tenderness and humor beneath the brutality. The laughs may catch in the throat, but that's only a byproduct of City Of God's power to leave viewers breathless. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
An excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Kaufman strikes just the right balance between playfulness and sincerity, leaping freely from one absurd situation to another before pulling back on the reins. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
At once a devastating condemnation of war and an exciting action film...The additional running time only adds to Petersen's masterfully bleak, claustrophobic atmosphere. Das Boot is by no means a pleasant experience, but it's an intelligent and emotionally gripping one that you won't forget. [Director's Cut] -
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Critic Score 100
The numerous, extended revival scenes are amazing, with Duvall a dynamo of divine energy and devout dedication. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
The film succeeds by expertly melding the two stages of Tarantino's career. The rambling Tarantino of "Jackie Brown" and "Pulp Fiction" is evident in every lovingly crafted and delivered monologue, each leisurely paced scene and long take. The more action-oriented, fight-intensive Tarantino reappears in the viscerally exciting bursts of ultra-violence that punctuate the stretches of dialogue. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
The filmmakers smartly counter heavy drama with goofy comedy, mining a rich vein of humor in the juxtaposition of the mundane and the superheroic. Maguire and Molina excel at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, but the film is stolen once again by J.K. Simmons. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Virtually every Super Technirama frame of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard could be described as "painterly" in its ornate details and exquisitely balanced color compositions. (Review of DVD Release) -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
A rousing, reverent, often brilliant re-creation of a seminal comics character, Batman Begins proves Batman is at home in the 21st century as he was in the 20th. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
For Kaige, The Promise can't exactly be called a return to form--it's more a return to "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers" director Zhang Yimou's form. Either way, it's still glorious. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
It's hard to film icons like Young as anything BUT icons, but Demme's film gets past the legend, zooming in on Young's aged, heroic face and finding an artist as human as the rest of us. -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 100
L'Enfant is intended as a pointed critique of pop culture's celebration of arrested adolescence. The title could refer to Renier's baby, Renier himself, or even the gang of schoolboy robbers that he's gathered around himself. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
The King's perception of religion is hardly friendly, but it's only one aspect of a terrific drama, one that ultimately admits that people can be as much of a terrifying mystery as their creator. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
When a director of Scorsese's caliber is working at the top of his game, it's a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
It's a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Zodiac is the rare serial-killer movie in which the psychosis stems as much from the pursuers (and the filmmaker) as the pursued. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
No one writes for ensembles better than Apatow, and his players are all skilled at giving his work a loose, improvisational feel. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
Corey Haim plus Corey Feldman plus Joel Schumacher doesn't seem like a foolproof formula for a good movie, but when the three oft-maligned figures united for 1987's horror-comedy The Lost Boys, the result was briskly entertaining. -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 100
The affection audiences feel for A Christmas Story is related to the holiday spirit, yes, but specifically to Clark and Shepherd's awareness of how the true meaning of Christmas manifests in the real world, where a warm meal on a cold, dark day—and a surprising moment of parental grace—can ease a troubled mind. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
A peculiar and destabilizing tone that's far from the standard Hollywood oater, but entirely fitting for two larger-than-life characters fulfilling their roles in history. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
If nothing else, the film puts the lie to the notion that an abortion could ever be frivolous or lightly considered. On that point, everyone in Lake Of Fire agrees, whether they acknowledge the other side or not. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
Anderson's uncompromising masterpiece will continue to resonate as a harrowing cautionary warning to a country with oil pumping through its veins, clouding its judgment and coarsening its soul. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
Burton brings his signature visual style, and a pair of stock players for his stars, into this film adaptation, but he wisely follows Sondheim's lead, letting the music and spirit of the original piece show the way. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant). -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
With Standard Operating Procedure, the Iraq War finally has its Hearts And Minds. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting Married sure is one heck of a party. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
At bottom, Silent Light is less about faith than matters of the heart, and in Reygadas' hands, the ache is bone-deep. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
It’s essentially a stroll through a fantastically detailed pastel world, in which the plot is little more than an excuse for Miyazaki to dive into a world teeming with colorful (and sometimes prehistoric) life. -
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Critic Score 100
The movie seems like a perfect found object, as if it had always existed and was just waiting to be uncovered. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
The film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
The film never lets banter, visual gags, or the usual manic kid-flick running about interfere with its more delicately handled thoughts on loyalty, longing, broken relationships, and generational continuity. It honestly earns its emotion, moment by painstakingly executed moment. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
There are many layers to the man and the movie, and it’s hard not to leave the theater shaken. -
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Critic Score 100
The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
Haneke’s latest is essentially an inquiry into the roots of a certain kind of evil. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
Granik has no taste for noir archness, opting for a chilly, shot-on-decaying-locations naturalism that feels as lived-in as Lawrence's performance. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
It's an exhilaratingly unpredictable experience, and not an easy one to shake. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
It's an emotionally claustrophobic drama, played with frayed nerves and raw emotions, and it serves as an unrelenting glimpse into relationship hell. It could easily have devolved into sweaty, pretentious melodrama or ersatz John Cassavetes if Cianfrance and his actors didn't maintain perfect control over the material.- Posted Dec 28, 2010
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.- Posted Mar 3, 2011
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).- Posted Mar 10, 2011
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Meticulous and immersive, Meek's Cutoff feels like history in three dimensions.- Posted Apr 7, 2011
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
In terms of scale, The Tree Of Life recalls the mammoth ambition of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's also more intimate and personal than Malick's previous films, rooted in vivid memories of growing up in '50s Texas.- Posted May 26, 2011
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 100
Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy, the film ends with rehearsals for yet another money-grubbing comeback tour.- Posted Jul 13, 2011
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
The film is little more than an exercise in style, but it's dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.- Posted Sep 14, 2011
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- Posted Sep 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.- Posted Dec 22, 2011
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.- Posted Dec 29, 2011
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice.- Posted Feb 8, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
There's a suffocating air to The Deep Blue Sea that makes it harder to access than other period romances of its kind, but Davies aligns himself wholly with Hester.- Posted Mar 21, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.- Posted May 23, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
It's a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it's over doesn't mean it's settled.- Posted Sep 12, 2012
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- Posted Oct 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.- Posted Oct 24, 2012
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
It's a wildly exciting ride, the fastest-moving, most enthusiastically kinetic kids' action film since "The Incredibles."- Posted Oct 31, 2012
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 100
While the scenes don't always fit together thematically or tonally, each one is its own polished gem.- Posted Dec 6, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
Sam Adams 100
Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.- Posted Dec 19, 2012
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 100
It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]- Posted Mar 12, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.- Posted Mar 19, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
The audience is indicted for its bloodlust. There's perversity in paying admission to get harshly scolded, and Funny Games is not for the squeamish, but this may be one time to step up and take the licking you deserve.- Posted Mar 20, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 100
It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.- Posted Apr 3, 2013
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 91
Fateless is a strangely beautiful film, enhanced by a typically lyrical Ennio Morricone score and by Koltai's hazy, grayed-out images. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 91
Like "The Aristocrats," Looking succeeds smashingly both as a comedy and as a savvy deconstruction of comedy. -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 91
For the most part, Willmott succeeds thrillingly. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet." -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 91
By the time Feuerzeig gets to his final shot--an artful portrait of Johnston's parents, with their son looming over them like a curse--he's emerged with the most harrowing and aesthetically keen portrait of madness and artistic inspiration since "Crumb." -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 91
Holofcener possesses a genius for creating exquisitely realized characters who seem to have led full, rich, complicated lives before the film's first scene takes place, and will go on living complex, idiosyncratic existences long after they disappear from the screen. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she has four of the best actresses in Hollywood as the leads, especially Keener. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 91
Filmed in long, quiet takes across gorgeous, all-but-empty landscapes, Mountain Patrol feels more like Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" than like the cops-and-robbers thriller its plotline suggests. -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 91
An intoxicating performance piece in which skilled actors pinball off each other with such energy and nuance that the audience almost forgets about the dying man on the edge of the frame. The style alone makes the movie's point. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
It's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 91
Over The Hedge stands out as genuinely witty and even a little barbed. Its chipper, sneering outsider's look at suburban sprawl and conformity isn't going to change the world, but it's still self-aware enough to be reasonably smart. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
In Chéreau's hands, Gabrielle has an operatic quality that throws the repressive environment into sharp relief; the film works like a pressure cooker, seething with bottled passions that intermittently burst through with startling cruelty and violence. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
Gosling excels at playing contradictory characters like this one, having kick-started his career as a Jewish neo-Nazi in "The Believer," but here, his inner turmoil rarely gets vocalized. It's a remarkably subtle performance. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
Bujalski's brand of stylized dialogue sounds genuinely fly-on-the-wall. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 91
There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk -- of being misunderestimated. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Rabin 91
Hartnett and co-star Scarlett Johansson--that most fatale of current filmic femmes--are naturals for this kind of noir-hued material, but the pairing of Ellroy and De Palma proves a marriage made in hardboiled heaven. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Tobias 91
Old Joy doesn't try for too much, but its subtle victories leave plenty to savor. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 91
An indie version of Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," albeit with none of the star power, a quarter of the budget, half the angst, and twice the charm. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 91
Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes. -
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Reviewed by
Keith Phipps 91
Almodóvar is still one of the few directors worth watching just for how he uses color on the screen. But the pleasures have always run much deeper, and now they run deeper still. -
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Reviewed by
Noel Murray 91
The first third of Iraq In Fragments is so intense--a masterpiece in miniature, really--that audiences may not have much emotion left for the rest. -
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Reviewed by
Tasha Robinson 91
It's a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers, but in spite of its crowd-pleasing ploys, it holds onto its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story. -
