For 6,913 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: 2,534 out of 6913
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Mixed: 3,062 out of 6913
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Negative: 1,317 out of 6913
6,913
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
If you doubt whether Honey can scrape together the dough, this is probably the movie for you. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time. -
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Critic Score 30
Cox's tacky melodrama is indeed sub-par, but no worse than numerous gay indies. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Sinagra 30
Cube is still adorable, but the potentially poppin' battle between the shop and big-box competitor Nappy Cuts gets obscured by sloppy chronology and flat, cartoonish politicos. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Sinagra 30
As a gloves-off Erin Brockovich, Ryan never makes it into the ring. -
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Critic Score 30
Eurotrip's constant anxiety that women might turn out to be men and vice versa makes this command especially fraught. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
"The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity. -
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Critic Score 30
Would be all but unbearable without the excited testimony of the young men and women of color who'd spent their happiest nights at the Loft or the Gallery or Paradise Garage. -
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Critic Score 30
If the Naqoyqatsi-lite score by Philip Glass doesn't exactly make sense of the film's sketchy identity politics, it does complement its utter ridiculousness. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity. -
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Critic Score 30
The just plain folks in Home Fries -- down home, slightly slow, and desperate for happiness -- would make great Jerry Springer Show guests if they weren't so damned pretty. -
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Critic Score 30
The plot is so absurdly perfunctory that preview audiences snickered at its TV-drama slapdashness; the producers should have pushed the straight-camp potential much further and retitled this weak bruiser Sporting Wood. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Director Vicente Amorim's dramatic instincts evoke after-school specials (most of the drama entails the clan's brooding teenager chomping at the parental bit), and his visual ideas are restricted to aping "City of God's" fish-eye ambience and hectic editing. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish. -
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Critic Score 30
All the stylistic flourishes can't hide the lack of an actual plot, character development, or point. Like Gerardo, we wait, hoping something will happen, knowing nothing will. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith. -
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Reviewed by
Joshua Land 30
As one five-year-old critic at the press screening astutely observed during a would-be sensitive moment: "Boooorrring!" -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive. -
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Critic Score 30
The threadbare plot gets considerable padding from alternately psychotic, lecherous, and greedy Caucasians. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior). -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
Fraught with sophomoric lost-innocence metaphors and schematic oedipal tensions. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
No one can accuse Garfield: The Movie of infidelity to its source: It faithfully conveys the banality of Jim Davis's cartoon. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject. -
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Reviewed by
Joshua Land 30
Repeatedly assuring us that its titular subject is really "a metaphor for life," Swing attempts unsuccessfully to liven up a tired scenario with a touch of Twilight Zone fantasy. -
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Critic Score 30
Nussbaum's attempt to capture the 'tween zeitgeist fails: The Spice Girls–infused soundtrack is dated, and the feel-good progressiveness forced. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
A stifling chamber piece laced with Repulsion-style foreboding and an undercurrent of kink. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
The acting is deliberately bad, directed to an ostensibly dreamlike flatness; and it's also just plain bad. -
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Critic Score 30
Devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 30
Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished. -
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Critic Score 30
In its attempt to diagnose a problem, it ends up serving more as a symptom of the left's current, and sadly warranted, anxieties. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
As the dapper Lady Penelope, Sophia Myles tries to infuse the enterprise with some "Charlie's Angels" verve, but she's only one life vest, and the movie is a downed plane. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
The screwiest yarn yet from Shyamalan's metaphysical-Limburger career project, a non-horror horror film. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
A mondo product placement in search of a screenplay, the conscious "Working Girl" homage Little Black Book makes the mistake of banking on Brittany Murphy, a Melanie Griffith look-alike with none of Griffith's gawky charms. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise? -
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Critic Score 30
Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog. -
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Critic Score 30
Slowly devolves to the inept "warm bodies shine together in the darkness." -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins. -
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Critic Score 30
Devoid of Sopranos stereotypes, the film charms with its p.c. portrayal of Italian Americans, yet the depiction of Mexicans veers toward the offensive. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 30
Kampmeier's muddled, miserable first feature about maculate conception will make you look back fondly on 1985, the year Godard's "Hail Mary" and Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God" came out. -
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Reviewed by
Akiva Gottlieb 30
Eventually, the pointlessness of The Cookout exudes a modicum of charm, but the simple-minded mess still lacks the wit and moral weight of an episode of "Family Matters." -
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Critic Score 30
A Letter to True could provide a corrective reminder that bad taste emerges in high-class forms as often as low. The film's failures cannot be faulted to inexperience. -
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Critic Score 30
Litvack offers a cameo by Vanessa Redgrave as proof that there's a prestige picture within all this frivolous melodrama. Non, merci. -
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Critic Score 30
Stilted lines alternate with ominous pauses and an annoying Pure Moods score tinkling around an oppressive sound design. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 30
True to Chekhov's dictum, a gun does fire near the end -- by which point eye-rolling audience members may be up in arms too. -
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Reviewed by
Leslie Camhi 30
Most of the redemptive notes ring false, as does the mythical Manhattan, where the snow is just too clean and everybody lives around the corner. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all. -
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Critic Score 30
Director Stolhand gets a high-quality look on a minimal budget, but the script and acting are so amateurish. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
The romantic woes of one attractive, privileged, intellectually overreaching acupuncture enthusiast don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
Takes a potential hot-button premise--the callous indifference of the Indian medical bureaucracy toward the lower classes--and dramatizes it in the most shameless way possible. -
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Critic Score 30
This Phantom's an overblown mess of ostentatious razzmatazz. Sure, all the ingredients of camp are there (oh, the hubris!), but this isn't a so-bad-it's-good classic. It's worse. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
At least Macht emerges relatively unscathed from the mess, content to brood and mutter self-loathing observations while Johansson and (most painfully) Travolta spoon their Southern accents out of a jar and spread it all over the humid scenery. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 30
Although there's no evidence of sexual chemistry on the screen, the stars share a certain physical defensiveness that occasionally makes them seem simpatico; most of the time, however, they just look bored to death. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer. -
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Reviewed by
Nick Rutigliano 30
If you're in prison, it's best to stay there. 'Cause if you don't, as Blink of an Eye makes clear, you're fucked -- Outside the safety of your cell, a vicious world of cliché lies in wait to claim you. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
The filmmakers at once coarsen and dilute a fascinating life into a lumpy puddle of punishing inspirational hokum. -
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Critic Score 30
A calculated teen gross-out flick that owes more to "American Pie" than its own progenitor. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Tries to show the oh-so-human side of Gospel-hawking, His Word, the Path, and so on. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Eisenstadt has nowhere to go with her catalogue of relaxed urban crazies, and at 79 minutes, the movie is padded out by four song interludes too many. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
Most of the action is tedious, and the less you pay attention to the dialogue, the less you'll feel your hand inadvertently twitching as if with joystick. -
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Critic Score 30
Odd beginning permits viewers to leave after five minutes and know what happens. Those remaining are left with the full tome, its 92-minute length hiding an experience as draining as "Heaven's Gate." -
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Reviewed by
Akiva Gottlieb 30
The elderly, violin-toting hero's successful attempt to infiltrate his miscreant nephew's mall-punk garage band is too creepy to fulfill the hipness quotient. -
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Critic Score 30
There are many dreadful elements in this chronicle of aging gay male porn star Colton Ford's quest for crossover success in the music industry: sub-amateurish camera work, a maddeningly repetitive score, and a listless narrative. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
10 on Ten is less illuminating than pedantic, as well as tediously self-absorbed. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day." -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut. -
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Reviewed by
Melissa Anderson 30
Greenspan and Harmon's paltry song of themselves concludes with five minutes of outtakes, capping the self-love. -
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Critic Score 30
The best straight-plays-gay, straight-goes-gay flick since "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." -
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Reviewed by
Laura Sinagra 30
When this flick is honest about its pimping, it has that Rat Pack charm. But attempts at real ruggish posturing--like that de rigueur sideways-gatted, full-body-exposure firing stance--are just plain laughable. -
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Critic Score 30
The collision of neorealist casting with in-your-face visual pyrotechnics is jarring to say the least, and 15 quickly wears down the viewer with its barrage of strobe effects and attention-deficit editing. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
Marred by a rambling voice-over at one end and a pat therapeutic resolution on the other, the film has a nice half-hour patch somewhere in the middle. -
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Critic Score 30
In spite of some genuinely charming performances, The Man Who Copied is about as engaging as a paper jam. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material. -
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Critic Score 30
Give 'em a handicap for making a 20-minute man go 90--still, it's not enough. -
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Critic Score 30
Chuckle-worthy jabs at American cultural imperialism aside, Le Grand Rôle has little to offer except a maudlin love story that ironically feels like a Tinseltown tearjerker facsimile. -
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Critic Score 30
The only thing more inexplicable than the loathsome score is the story's determination to impregnate all its major female characters. Fuggedaboudit. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 30
John Schultz's wan, unfunny The Honeymooners is unlikely to tickle devotees of Jackie Gleason's archetypal yuk-fest. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
Based on characters created by Rodriguez's then-seven-year-old son, Racer Max, the film doesn't belong in wide release. It belongs on a refrigerator door, alongside "100%" spelling tests, old lunch menus, and notices from the PTA. -
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Critic Score 30
First-timer Casper Andreas approaches his subject with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Tired jokes are repeated over and over. -
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Critic Score 30
The result is like a Nike commercial without a shot of the sneakers. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Watching it is a smidgen like listening to the same monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for the 105th time, but for the Spierig brothers, it is clearly a demonstration of fast-cheap capabilities and a one-way ticket straight out of Queensland. -
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Critic Score 30
The action sequences reek of drudgery rather than adventure, and with the exception of Chiklis's remarkably soulful performance beneath 60 pounds of orange Thing makeup, all of the characters are flatter than their two-dimensional counterparts. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun. -
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Reviewed by
Benjamin Strong 30
By rubbing your nose in this hillbilly mayhem, Zombie all but dares you to acknowledge your liberal elitism, simply because just now, in Dubya's America, you don't happen to find anything particularly funny or lovable about stupid, dangerous provincials. -
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Critic Score 30
Dukes insults not "family values," as the original Cooter claims, just general intelligence. Yee. Haw. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller. -
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Critic Score 30
A PG-13 dramedy set in L.A. about some attractive, way-too-earnest aspiring stars has the potential to be a delectable good-bad favorite, but Undiscovered is nowhere near the guilty pleasure it could have been. -
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Critic Score 30
Billed as a "satirical comedy about the American dream," La Visa Loca doesn't have anything to say about that eternal subject and is excruciatingly unfunny. -
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Critic Score 30
If you value plausibility in movies, skip Kamikaze Girls; this is the sort of picture where getting run over by a truck gives a character gorgeous hair instead of a broken hip. -
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Critic Score 30
Falk isn't given anything funny to say or do, but his performance is littered with beautiful touches, tiny oases of brilliance in an entertainment desert. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization. -
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Critic Score 30
On a spare stage set, Dresser's clever script is allowed breadth for contemplation; here it's sodden with animated sludge. Watch it with your eyes closed. -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing. -
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Critic Score 30
The real subversion is director Michael Meredith's insistence on not capturing interactions between human beings in a frame; with some forethought he could have filmed the actors individually and spliced. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album." -
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Reviewed by
Jessica Winter 30
The script, allegedly by "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, throws together tangentially related plots like cats in a sack. -
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Critic Score 30
Making concessions at every turn to the youth-horror market, the film slashes the ages of its protagonists by some 15 years, and its IQ follows suit. -
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Reviewed by
Benjamin Strong 30
What's worth noting is how much greater deliberation was given to the marketing than the screenplay of this cursory dud, rushed to theaters exactly a year after its amusing predecessor. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 30
Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
The dead-end social points Gonick is making are so blunt they're hardly points at all anymore, but the galleon anchor that's weighing down this well-intentioned homey is the amateur acting. -
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Critic Score 30
Our blood-smacking antiheroine, Rayne (Kristanna Loken), isn't a vampire; she's a dhampir, a half-human, half-vampire cross-fiend who's as anguished, strange, and sloppy as mercenaries, or movies, get. -
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Critic Score 30
Myles deserves better, but acquits herself as admirably as one can mired in medieval muck. -
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Reviewed by
Ben Kenigsberg 30
There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design. -
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Critic Score 30
This should be funny or sad, but it's neither, in this incoherent cross between "Riding the Bus With My Sister" and a Christina Ricci vehicle. -
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Reviewed by
Ed Park 30
Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well. -
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Critic Score 30
Seems this is yet another puddle of futuristic sludge for us to blame on John Cassavetes. -
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Critic Score 30
Writer-director Chris Kennedy delights in torturing his poor protagonist--what are the odds that a massive Aussie line dancers' convention would take place in the abandoned train yard right across the street from his jail?--but enduring this oddly humorless "comedy" is even harder on the audience. -
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Critic Score 30
Whatever her limitations, Argento the actor makes certain that Argento the director doesn't lack for "action"--and that the audience doesn't lack for pain. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist). -
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Critic Score 30
This flat-footed male weepie musters an insurance ad's worth of clichés about the importance of busting a move in middle age-and it strains so hard to do so that it's almost perversely compelling. -
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Critic Score 30
Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas. -
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Reviewed by
Mark Holcomb 30
A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about. -
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Critic Score 30
Faced with a long and miserable road on which they make each other sorry or crazy, both Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) dig in hard on the least appealing parts of their stock characters. -
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Critic Score 30
Like 2 Fast 2 Furious before it, Tokyo Drift is a subculture in search of a compelling story line, and Black's leaden performance makes you pine for the days of Paul Walker. -
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Critic Score 30
For its ever shifting attitudes toward men, women, and murder, Waist Deep is one of the sloppiest movies ever to reach the screen. -
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Critic Score 30
The movie goes from being another mildly depressing lump of unrealized comic potential to being an actively unpleasant experience. -
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Reviewed by
Dennis Lim 30
This monumentally ridiculous film doesn't stop at subverting stereotypes; it discombobulates narrative logic and the basic laws of human behavior. Still, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from watching the actors attempt to dig out from under the rubble that William Lipz's screenplay repeatedly dumps on their heads. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type. -
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Critic Score 30
Boasting a "Scary Movie" rate of scatalogical jokes-per-minute, it fails to match that franchise's low yield of guffaws. -
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Reviewed by
Michael Atkinson 30
The movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy. -
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Critic Score 30
Rather than creating believable characters engaged in nuanced conflict, Boy proffers a pair of obvious symbols and hopes that they'll make a statement about the personal and the political. -
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Critic Score 30
The doc these kids would make with flea market camcorders couldn't possibly be as ugly as this absurdly hypocritical critique of the far right's role in escalating the culture war. The classier indoctrination to which Gap-shopping urban Democrats subject their kids might look damn spooky, too, but it probably wouldn't sell. -
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Reviewed by
Joshua Land 30
It's tough to be sure of anything in this murky experimental feature, which sadly fails to live up to its title. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 30
Levinson loses his movie, his audience, and his purpose in a tangle of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions that sink the movie just when it begins to transcend expectations. In short, it would have been great if it had stopped, oh, 12 minutes in. -
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Critic Score 30
A case of provocative issues at the mercy of unskilled execution, Zerophilia is a psychological-horror comedy that pokes its toe into dangerous sexual waters but then scurries away. -
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Critic Score 30
This is laughably absurd, but unlike the first "Saw," the third installment gives no indication that its humor is intentional. -
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Critic Score 30
The musical numbers are dreadful and the jokes barely register, but more disappointing is how rote the exploration of the transgender dilemma is. -
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Critic Score 30
When the story takes a jarring turn into horror flick territory, Invisible loses whatever rhythm it might have had. Jane and Joe's rejuvenated love can conquer many things, including mentally impaired country folk, but it just can't save this unfortunate film. -
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Critic Score 30
Automatons is what happens when "Eraserhead" and "Tetsuo the Iron Man" bong themselves into oblivion and collaborate on a minimalist avant-garde sci-fi cheapie shot in a toolshed. -
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Critic Score 30
Poor little girl, chewed up in the Factory machinery. It was inevitable, perhaps, that a biopic of the Pop princess would stick to pop psychology, but did it have to feel as flat as a silkscreen? With its hackneyed party scenes and jet-set montages, Factory Girl fails even at frivolity. -
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Critic Score 30
Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma. -
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Critic Score 30
There's no beguilement to this toothless caprice by writer- director Barry Strugatz, who may intend a spoof of '50s melodramas and alien abductions but delivers instead an inert doodle. -
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Critic Score 30
Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket's rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film's innuendo might have seemed daring; today it's close to ridiculous. -
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Critic Score 30
Maggenti suffocates her story with dated references to every buzzword from Laura Mulvey's feminist catalog except for "the male gaze." In short, a nightmare worse than "Trust the Man." -
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Critic Score 30
The TV show excels with its short squad-car bursts of random inanity; here, the plot -- stretched out to 84 minutes -- feels like a dime bag tossed aside by a fleeing perp. -
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Critic Score 30
As it is, Witherspoon's sweet-as-peach-pie Southern accent only grates and writer-director Bright's incessant winking at the audience bespeaks a project that was running on empty before shooting started. [22 Oct 1996, p.88] -
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Critic Score 30
A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies. -
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Critic Score 30
Rock capably directs a screenplay graced with one or two chuckles ("You stare at a soccer mom too long and they'll post your name on the Internet") and soured by a whole lot of misogyny. -
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Critic Score 30
Writer-director Anthony Lover takes such a kid-gloves approach to his handicapped co-star that he achieves the opposite of the intended effect: Every time Scott enters a scene, it's as if someone just told the entire cast "Whatever you do, don't say 'retard.' " -
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Critic Score 30
American Cannibal, something like the (mock-)doc equivalent of "The Producers," really, really should've been funnier. -
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Critic Score 30
I find it hard to believe that Conway bamboozled half of London simply by announcing his name, and it's regrettable that the filmmakers premise their picture on such improbable gullibility. The real Conway was assuredly slier than his bio-pic incarnation; he ought to have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen. -
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Critic Score 30
Those two age-old foes--science and blind faith--tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues being visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater. -
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Critic Score 30
Half-new at most, this "Running With Scissors"–type tale of a precocious, effeminate teen who gets hot for teacher while prepping for a life in the arts isn't evidently autobiographical. Neither is it funny--or poignant or insightful or remotely worth one's time. -
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Critic Score 30
Neel is a compelling subject, but she's more alive in one of her paintings than in all of the voluminous video footage her grandson thrusts upon us. -
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Critic Score 30
Though Momo is dedicated to "the missing children and the children who are coming to save the world," the most provocative question it asks is whether, with its conspicuous product placement, the film was secretly backed by Coca-Cola. -
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Critic Score 30
The result packs all the hilarity of a museum installation on The Semiotics of Silent Comedy. -
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Critic Score 30
Unmotivated jitters and flash-zooms abound, needlessly complicating a flagrantly elaborate premise. -
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Critic Score 30
As a longtime writer on "The Sopranos," Terence Winter has steered clear of most of the hoary organized-crime clichés. Instead, he's poured them all into director Michael Corrente's anemic urban drama. -
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Critic Score 30
Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his. -
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Critic Score 30
Beyond his technical clumsiness, Caleo seems convinced that real men exert power by being A-type jerks and all women are sluts. If nothing else, this film serves as a troubling psychological profile of a filmmaker who feels scornfully cynical toward nothing in particular. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 30
Hal Hartley fans, Flirt may be too slight and schematic. [13 Aug 1996] -
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Critic Score 30
Furiously intent on celebrating male love, Gibson and company try to refuse the erotics of friendship and miserably, wonderously fail. [[31 Aug 1993] -
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Critic Score 30
Andrei Zagdansky's tedious time capsule of the event makes peculiar assumptions about audience familiarity with Ukrainian politics beyond what trickled into the headlines, blowing past potentially fascinating footnotes and story threads for 72 minutes of pure B-roll. -
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Critic Score 30
Short of pulling a Zach Braff, there's one sure way to get known as a screenwriter: Put your actual name in the title of the script. -
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Reviewed by
Amy Taubin 30
The movie lacks any sense of subcultural specificity, though it has a superabundant country music score. [22 Apr 1997] -
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Critic Score 30
Eli Roth punks capitalism all the way to the bank with cheap tricks and bankrupt imagination. -
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Reviewed by
J. Hoberman 30
The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996] -
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Critic Score 30
You can't see the forest for the twee in writer-director Taika Waititi's thicket of cutesy conceits, from the stunted supporting characters to the precious animated interludes. -
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Critic Score 30
Gaglia's torture re-creations become rote quickly, and his cross-processed, color-tinted, randomly inserted, over-zoomed Film School 101 indulgences need their meds adjusted. -
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Critic Score 30
With its broad, toothless humor and ham-fisted fits of melodrama, this sitcom-grade embarrassment aims to dethrone "Muriel's Wedding" as the quirky Aussie feel-gooder of all time, except it hurts too much to watch. -
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Critic Score 30
Director Chalerm Wongpim's skull-buster makes up in wild-eyed insanity (and excessive, arbitrary slow motion) what it lacks in acting, pacing, and coherence. -
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Critic Score 30
In the end, the most offensive part of Bratz isn't its stereotypes or brand expansion; it's the sorry state of Jon Voight's career. -
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Reviewed by
Robert Wilonsky 30
Focusing almost solely on Lavoe's addictions (drugs and women, ho and hum), El Cantante is a garish, dispiriting bit of work--a mountain of biopic clichés snorted through the lens of a fidgety camera that never pauses long enough for us to get to like (or even know) the man responsible for making the Nuyorican sound a mainstream American commodity in the 1970s and early '80s. -
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Critic Score 30
Stylish, low-budget indies thrive on redeeming the clichés of everyday life. But that takes smart writing and sharp humor, of which Laura Smiles has none. -
