Chris Barsanti

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For 154 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.2 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. Negative: 11 out of 154
154 movie reviews
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    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
    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 has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.

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