Andrew Barker

Select another critic »
Variety
For 201 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 8% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 8.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Andrew Barker's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 55
Highest review score: 100 Newtown
Lowest review score: 0 Mother's Day
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 70 out of 201
  2. Mixed: 99 out of 201
  3. Negative: 32 out of 201
201 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew Barker
    Kill the Messenger
    The film taps into far deeper, richer veins of material than it has the time to properly mine. It’s nonetheless a flinty, brainy, continually engrossing work that straddles the lines between biopic, political thriller and journalistic cautionary tale, driven by Jeremy Renner’s most complete performance since The Hurt Locker.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew Barker
    Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Unsatisfying on a musical level, it’s nonetheless a well-acted, sporadically impressive piece of filmmaking.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Andrew Barker
    A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Too formally well crafted to be dismissed, but too straightforward and uncurious to be particularly exciting or insightful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew Barker
    Love & Mercy
    A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew Barker
    Eden
    Hansen-Love, who co-wrote the script along with her former-DJ brother Sven, zeroes in on the signature experiences of ’90s club life with expert precision.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Andrew Barker
    The Cobbler
    The result is a slow-motion zeppelin crash that starts as a dull-edged fable, and then spirals further and further out of control without ever growing more exciting or interesting.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    My Old Lady
    Its translation from stage to screen looks to have been a bit rocky, and the film never manages to transcend its actors-workshop aura and develop into something deeper.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 10 Andrew Barker
    Behaving Badly
    [A] ruthlessly unfunny misfire.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 30 Andrew Barker
    The Prince
    The action sequences are competently directed, but exhibit virtually no flair or invention.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Andrew Barker
    The November Man
    Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    A Five Star Life
    Maria Sole Tognazzi’s ultra-sedate romantic comedy A Five Star Life is full of aesthetic sophistication and luxurious ambiance, but its pleasures are all secondhand, and the whole endeavor is too starved of incident to really stick in the memory.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Andrew Barker
    Affluenza
    A splashy-looking yet depressingly empty exercise that is never more shallow than the times when it tries to go deep.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew Barker
    Deliver Us From Evil
    Deliver Us From Evil is a professionally assembled genre mashup that’s too silly to be scary, and a bit too dull to be a midnight-movie guilty pleasure.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    Jersey Boys
    As handsome as his compositions are, Eastwood’s filmmaking simply doesn’t have the snap or the feel for rhythm that the script’s rapid-fire theatrical patter requires, and the relative dearth of prominent musical performances turns what could have been a dancing-in-the-aisles romp into a bit of a slog.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    This Is Not a Ball
    Muniz uncovers a raft of intriguing people and stories, with subjects ranging from sports to astrophysics, gender politics, history and developmental psychology, but he never sits still with them long enough to ask any probing questions, and the film never arrives at any real point.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Andrew Barker
    Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records
    The footage on display here is voluminous and intimate, briskly edited together in a sort of studiously haphazard way that syncs up perfectly with Madlib’s far-reaching soundtrack mix.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew Barker
    The Fault in Our Stars
    Director Josh Boone is hardly the most distinctive cinematic stylist, but he’s smart enough to let his scenes linger for a few beats longer than most mainstream directors would, and seems to trust his actors to carry their own dramatic weight.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    Maleficent
    Uncertain of tone, and bearing visible scarring from what one imagines were multiple rewrites, the film fails to probe the psychology of its subject or set up a satisfying alternate history, but it sure is nice to look at for 97 minutes.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew Barker
    Blended
    Blended suffers from a fundamental lack of trust in its audience, following every unexpectedly smart exchange with a numbskull pratfall or one-liner, and every instance of genuine sincerity with an avalanche of schmaltz.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew Barker
    Stage Fright
    Most frustratingly, the film rarely manages to meld its two parent genres at all, with musical-theater pastiche dominating the early going, and straight slasher pastiche taking over around the halfway point, and rarely the twain do meet.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Andrew Barker
    Bad Johnson
    The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew Barker
    For No Good Reason
    While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew Barker
    Bears
    Surely some of the film’s various incidents have been creatively stitched together from stray bits and pieces of footage, but its central conflict is an entirely organic one, and rarely is any offscreen string pulling distractingly evident.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew Barker
    Brothers Hypnotic
    Lively, funny and at times philosophical, Brothers Hypnotic tackles the challenges of maintaining an independent music career, as well as some knotted generational conflicts, and handles it all with great sensitivity.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew Barker
    Divergent
    By trying to cram in as many explanatory info dumps as possible, Burger neglects to tend to the elements of the film that could easily make up for any narrative deficiencies: namely, a sense of place and a feeling of urgency.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Andrew Barker
    Fort Tilden
    Its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew Barker
    Neighbors
    Lewder, weirder, louder, leaner, meaner and more winningly stupid than anything its director Nicholas Stoller and star Seth Rogen have ever been involved with before, frat comedy Neighbors boasts an almost oppressive volume of outrageous gags.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Andrew Barker
    I, Frankenstein
    Utterly witless, listless, sparkless and senseless, this supernatural actioner makes one long for the comparative sophistication of the conceptually identical “Underworld” franchise (with which it shares producers and a writer).
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew Barker
    McCanick
    If the drably derivative, infuriatingly improbable police drama McCanick is remembered for anything, it will be for its uniformly overqualified cast.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Andrew Barker
    Devil's Due
    The film expends plenty of effort crafting a few memorable freakout setpieces and nailing down the logistics of its found-footage camera placement, yet it offers precious little in the way of real scares or engaging characters, and even less in original ideas.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »