For 6,914 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
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,535 out of 6914
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Mixed: 3,062 out of 6914
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Negative: 1,317 out of 6914
6,914
movie reviews
- By critic score
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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 100
To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami. -
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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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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
Michael Atkinson 100
Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Safe Conduct -- a rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation -- is one of the very best movies ever made about the life of moviemaking. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 100
It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted. -
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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 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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Critic Score 100
The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" -- I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986. (Review of 20th Anniversary Re-Release) -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised. -
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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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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
Another unforetold career acme: Christopher Guest's seductive and brilliantly modulatory A Mighty Wind, which trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
It remains a stunning achievement, if nearly as exhausting and frustrating as the Tex Avery bureaucracy it roasts, but Gilliam's stylistic dysfunctionalities, art-directed out of junkyards, are what still percolate in the forebrain. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument. -
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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
J. Hoberman 100
The year's most ingenious and original animated feature. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 100
In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging. -
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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
J. Hoberman 100
What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one. -
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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
Dennis Lim 100
Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 100
Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
The Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in this exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, titled for the "central region" of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain's two hemispheres. -
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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
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
An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 100
The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth. -
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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
Dennis Lim 100
The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough--her (Claire Denis) most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling. -
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Critic Score 100
This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom. -
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Critic Score 100
To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains. -
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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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Critic Score 100
Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire." -
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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
This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
Ultimately, what makes Knocked Up a terrific film--one of the year's best, easily--is its relaxed, shaggy vibe; if it feels improvised in places, that's because Apatow trusts his actors enough to let them make it up as they go, like the people they're playing. -
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Critic Score 100
To watch this movie (shot in breathtaking widescreen by cinematographer Ian Jones) is to enter into a whole new language of symbols and meaning, the likes of which I have rarely encountered in cinema outside of the African tribal films of Ousmane Sembene. -
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Critic Score 100
In narrative terms, not that much happens, but as for Harry's emotional journey--well, that's nearly epic. -
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Critic Score 100
Bravura doesn't begin to describe Greengrass's skill in mounting these complex sequences...This is, simply put, some of the most accomplished filmmaking being done anywhere for any purpose. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
It's all true--every magical, exhilarating, infuriating, dumbfounding, jaw-dropping second of Gordon's miniature masterpiece. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer. -
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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
J. Hoberman 100
This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution. -
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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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Critic Score 100
The performances, culled from seven shows on the “Vertigo” tour from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, burn with the old unforgettable fire. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
A film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate. -
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Critic Score 100
The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.) -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but "Brian's Song," J"erry Maguire," and "The Longest Yard" notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment. -
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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 100
For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Police, Adjective is a deadly serious as well as dryly humorous analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly, the tyranny of language. Images may record reality, but words define it. -
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Critic Score 100
Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 100
When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 100
Not only does this Star Trek proffer smart thrills and slick kicks, but it builds upon the original's history–from its very first pilot episode to Robert Wise's 1979 "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and beyond–while creating an entirely new future. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010. -
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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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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
- Read full review
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- Posted Dec 23, 2010
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 100
A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.- Posted Feb 8, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.- Posted Mar 29, 2011
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Critic Score 100
An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.- Posted Mar 29, 2011
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Reviewed by
Nick Pinkerton 100
Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.- Posted May 24, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.- Posted Aug 2, 2011
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 100
Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.- Posted Nov 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
Michael Atkinson 100
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.- Posted Jul 17, 2012
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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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- Posted Oct 16, 2012
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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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Critic Score 100
That makes this the most rare of films: one that indisputably matters. And one that stuns.- Posted Dec 18, 2012
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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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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 100
Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.- Posted Feb 5, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 100
The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.- Posted Feb 12, 2013
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 100
Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.- Posted Feb 26, 2013
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Reviewed by
Scott Foundas 100
Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.- Posted Mar 12, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 100
Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.- Posted Apr 2, 2013
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Reviewed by
Ernest Hardy 100
This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.- Posted Apr 9, 2013
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Reviewed by
Alan Scherstuhl 100
The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.- Posted Apr 9, 2013
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Critic Score 100
This is one of the most fully rounded, unsentimental portraits of an artist you'll ever see on film.- Posted Apr 16, 2013
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