Chris Barsanti

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Film Journal International, Slant Magazine, The Playlist
For 133 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Chris Barsanti's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Wojnarowicz
Lowest review score: 20 Silencio
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 92 out of 133
  2. Mixed: 31 out of 133
  3. Negative: 10 out of 133
133 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Hold Your Fire
    The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Donbass
    While Donbass is far from perfect, hiding too much of its story and message in at-times dull and layered absurdity, it nevertheless presents a harrowing picture of how war and nationalism corrupt and degrade places nowhere near the battlefield.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Windfall
    Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Outfit
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Call Jane
    The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    When You Finish Saving the World
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    892
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Italian Studies
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The First Wave
    Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Finch
    The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Last Duel
    Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Power of the Dog
    The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Encounter
    In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Becoming Cousteau
    Where “Becoming Cousteau” frustrates at times is its thin treatment of Cousteau’s work. The films and shows are represented with plentiful footage but not truly discussed or differentiated. It’s an odd choice, given Cousteau’s cinematic obsession.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Duke
    The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Enemies of the State
    The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    False Positive
    False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    An Unknown Compelling Force
    Disappointingly, despite the rich subject matter, Le Guillou lets “An Unknown Compelling Force” become more his story than that of the dead.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Lost Leonardo
    The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Final Account
    Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Dry
    The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Things Heard & Seen
    Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Stowaway
    By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Funny Face
    Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Chris Barsanti
    Wojnarowicz
    Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Cherry
    Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.
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