For 6,905 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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63% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 54
| 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: 2,529 out of 6905
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Mixed: 3,060 out of 6905
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Negative: 1,316 out of 6905
6,905
movie reviews
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.- Posted Apr 30, 2013
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
The Leopard is the greatest film of its kind made since World War II—its only rivals are Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Visconti's own "Senso." -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Bertolucci's masterpiece--made when he was all of 29--will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars. -
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Critic Score 100
It has come to serve as a solemn metaphor for remembrance, as well as for butt-numbing endurance.- Posted Dec 10, 2010
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 90
It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.- Posted Mar 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A vivid exercise in hokum that more or less invented the idea of French film noir...and not just for Americans. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine. -
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Critic Score 100
Robin Hood is movie pageantry at its best, done in the grand manner of silent spectacles, brimming over with the sort of primitive energy that drew people to the movies in the first place. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
The hard-charging originality of the screenplay—the equivalent of turning "The Hot Zone" into a Farrelly comedy—suggests a deficient legacy of credit to Terry Southern's corner. -
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Critic Score 90
Ratatouille is as much a feast for the senses as it is food for thought. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Remains Chaplin's most sustained burlesque of authority. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 70
Corny as that is, the film's nadir comes when Zuckerberg's pretty young lawyer comforts him (or us) with the mealy-mouthed observation, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 70
No previous rocksploitation film had ever done so splendid a job of selling its performers. -
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Critic Score 100
It's a sensational performance by Chastain...She's a most unlikely leading lady, pale and slight of stature, with a raging mane of strawberry blond hair, but she holds the screen with a feral intensity, an obsessive's self-possession.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.- Posted Dec 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
A very nutty fruitcake, Spirited Away is characterized by wonderfully detailed animation, packed with incident and populated by all manner of comic creatures. -
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Critic Score 60
E.T. is a dog movie. Genre-wise, I mean. It's about a boy meeting a dog, naming it, taming it, learning from it, and growing up. Of course, the genre is superficially disguised as science fiction, as was the fashion at the time. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Killer of Sheep is an urban pastoral--an episodic series of scenes that are sweet, sardonic, deeply sad, and very funny. -
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Critic Score 100
A full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. -
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Critic Score 90
Paley's beguiling, consistently inventive visuals and sly yet melancholy tone are about as warm and winning as heartbreak-fueled empowerment gets. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
A film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Contemporary audiences may not see why, even in its toned-down simplification of the novel, From Here to Eternity was the most daring movie of 1953, but it remains an acting bonanza. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.- Posted Sep 6, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore. -
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Critic Score 100
Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of this power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography (oft-mistaken for DV), the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 50
Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
One of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 80
Crouching Tiger's dramatic line is so blurry that the central character is only a bystander to the climactic fight between forces of good and evil. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from "Sweet Smell of Success") gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
You either love it or you love it; in any case, Martin Scorsese's history-making scald is truly a phenomenon from another day and age. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds. -
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Reviewed by
Stephanie Zacharek 100
This wondrous, absorbing little picture covers a great deal of winding meta-territory, reflecting on the ways in which a single family's story can be told—or maybe, more accurately, examining the idea that there's no such thing as a "single story."- Posted May 7, 2013
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 80
It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999] -
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Critic Score 90
Petri's visually flamboyant film turns into a heady mix of Marx, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Brecht, with a bit of Dashiell Hammett thrown into the blender. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Although dense with incident and motif, the movie has an effortless flow. -
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Critic Score 50
Far too often, though, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby--who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end--would have despised. -
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor 90
For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 90
What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 90
35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 50
It's too bad that the film is sporadically crude (a moment of suicidal angst is illustrated with a shove-zoom to the pavement), prone to mega-Italian extroversion, and far too in love with stupid pet tricks. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Directed by anyone else, Masculine Feminine--one of three movies that Godard made in his peak year, 1966--would be a masterpiece. For the young JLG it's business as usual. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.- Posted Aug 7, 2012
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution. -
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Critic Score 40
Viewers must get in touch with their inner child to fall for Belle's eventual love for Beast. The film seems somewhat aware of this, casting an ambiguous hue on its happily-ever-after conclusion. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
The year's most ingenious and original animated feature. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 70
The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid. -
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Critic Score 90
Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Schager 80
The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
A movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. -
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Critic Score 100
The most measured, classical film of their (Coen Brothers) 23-year career, and maybe the best. -
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Reviewed by
Michelle Orange 90
The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.- Posted Jan 29, 2013
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 100
The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.- Posted Jan 29, 2013
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Critic Score 70
Sold to the global arthouse market as the "French Scorsese," Audiard does know his genre. A Prophet, the director has said, is the "anti-Scarface." -
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Critic Score 80
In the end, the most interesting aspect of this quiet, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling film is the way it teases out the intricate power structures that flourish even in as godforsaken (and lovely) a place as the Ozarks. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 70
All told, and in giant widescreen, it's only blood-red adolescent fun, but it blooms like Douglas Sirk with a Gatling gun compared to the teenage demographic's current fare. Matrix, schmatrix: This is the season's supreme party movie. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 70
The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 80
The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.- Posted Mar 22, 2011
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Critic Score 100
It's a political statement, an act of defiance, a master class in one auteur's body of work and process, and a document of a life unseen. But above all, it's a gripping entertainment.- Posted Feb 28, 2012
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 70
Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 80
Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 90
I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 80
The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 90
Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation--though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-'toon juggernauts--but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, "adult" comic story into moving pictures. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 90
As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise." -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 80
The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 70
A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 70
If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora. -
