For 774 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Barry Hertz's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 American Honey
Lowest review score: 0 Unplanned
Score distribution:
774 movie reviews
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    The dialogue is to the point without being eye-rolling, the action is meaty and mostly CGI-free (the highlight is a night-vision firefight) and the performances are committed, even touching.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Barry Hertz
    Nearly every performance here is excellent, a beautiful balance of nerves and neuroses.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 36 Barry Hertz
    A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Barry Hertz
    In Schrader’s strong, meditative hands, everything gels together to create an entrancing work that is serious and, very nearly, profound.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 84 Barry Hertz
    If family is everything to the Fast & Furious films – as lead lunkhead Vin Diesel would surely posit – then Fast X is a nuclear family reunion that goes atomic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    In keeping with Lucas’s general life philosophy, Mills’s film doesn’t attempt to paint a portrait of one woman, but rather a capturing of the land that woman calls home.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    At around the hundred-minute mark, everything in Gunn’s perfect little cinematic galaxy falls apart in a magnificently depressing fashion. It is as if the MCU higher-ups got wind of what was going down and quickly engineered a black hole of studio notes to suck the Guardians into a tesseract of meaningless set-pieces and prolonged B-plot detours.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    Carmen is a wild and unrestrained attempt to empty its director’s entire brain onto the screen, and for that it deserves recognition. But the ultimate result slips too easily between heroic effort and hot mess.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 89 Barry Hertz
    If watching mass-murdering maniacs get absolutely destroyed on-screen is your thing – and it very much is mine – then Sisu is a perfectly depraved night out.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Barry Hertz
    The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 95 Barry Hertz
    Its visual imagination is wonderfully unrestrained, compelling in its extremes even when it is so clearly indebted to every movie that Aster hoovered up to get here. Its tone is impressively steadfast in its desire to repel one moment, entrance the next. And its performances are across-the-board astounding in their commitment.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision – all of it only ever-so-slightly goosed by a political softening that perhaps says more about contemporary American filmmaking than the storytellers working within it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Air
    The movie is so across-the-board charming that even the most hardcore of socialists will find themselves rooting for Nike – that bastion of global corporate responsibility – to make gobs and gobs of money off the hard work of a young Black athlete.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Barry Hertz
    Unfortunately, despite Egerton’s most dedicated efforts to pump some life into his hero, Rogers is the blandest kind of capitalist hero. Meanwhile, the various Soviets and Brits caught up in the Tetris antics are just one graphics card away from being Super Mario Bros.-ready boss-level villains.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 65 Barry Hertz
    Clocking in at a severely bloated 165 minutes, Chapter 4 is both a thrill and a slog, an all-you-can-eat buffet that insists on stuffing your guts before it spills them.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    The experience of watching this new Shazam! is akin to watching an exceptionally wealthy but ultimately sweet and innocent child smash their toys together for 130 minutes. There’s little point in it all, but hey, at least the kid is happy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 76 Barry Hertz
    While the film’s ending expects audiences to untie some impossible fan-theory knots, the climax is also packed to the rafters with murder and mayhem and even a little on-the-nose movie-theatre nostalgia, resulting in moments that demand fits of laughter, gasps and, of course, screams.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 85 Barry Hertz
    The actor is as engaging and captivating as ever on-screen as Adonis, yet he’s just as present and committed behind the camera, delivering a stirring string of heartwarming and jaw-breaking moments that add up to something if not exactly unique, than certainly rousing, effective and entertaining.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 97 Barry Hertz
    The film is simply operating at a speed constantly one click ahead of expectations, never satisfied that any one viewer could know where it might all be heading.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 95 Barry Hertz
    Return to Seoul is not a dour, sombre thing – it is intense, electric and confrontational.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 56 Barry Hertz
    We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 97 Barry Hertz
    BlackBerry is funny, fast and nerve-rattling. And it is always – always – intensely entertaining.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 66 Barry Hertz
    When the narrative knife is as dull as it is here, there is just no fun in bleeding out. If Caron and his collaborators don’t learn their lesson, though, at least we will. Work smarter, not Sharper.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 23 Barry Hertz
    Coloured wall-to-fake-wall with cheap-looking CGI, the film looks like it was shot from inside the guts of a first-generation iPhone – there is an aesthetic emptiness to it all that is soul-crushing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 65 Barry Hertz
    Alice, Darling does so much right that it is acutely painful when it goes wrong.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Finally, by tethering his story’s uneasiness to the rock that is Bautista, Shyamalan delivers a star vehicle built for two. It isn’t quite right to say that the director and his star deserve each other – more like they need one another. Just as we do. To the end of the world, fellas.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 86 Barry Hertz
    There are so many elements that seduce and beguile – including the rusted-out Brutalism of the Li Tolqan prison where the cloning procedure takes place, and Goth’s supremely unhinged work as James’s seductress, a performance more Looney Tunes than human – that the entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.

Top Trailers