A.A. Dowd

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IGN, The A.V. Club
For 852 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

A.A. Dowd 's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 The Long Day Closes
Lowest review score: 16 Replicas
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 528 out of 852
  2. Mixed: 278 out of 852
  3. Negative: 46 out of 852
852 movie reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    The Babadook
    Believe it or not, though, the real horror of this superb Aussie monster movie has almost nothing to do with the title fiend and everything to do with the unspoken, unspeakable impulses he represents. Remove the Babadook from The Babadook, in other words, and something plenty terrifying remains.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    Manakamana
    Really, though, the film’s focus is on neither the destination nor the journey, but on the individuals planting themselves in front of the lens.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    The Big Sick
    There was more than the usual dating-scene obstacles threatening their future together. Collaborating on the screenplay for The Big Sick, Nanjiani and Gordon have made a perceptive, winning romantic comedy from those obstacles, including the unforeseen emergency that provides the film its title.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    Baby Driver
    Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 67 A.A. Dowd
    Atlantics
    Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    The Green Knight
    Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Get Out
    Wildly entertaining.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    West Side Story
    Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Eighth Grade
    What makes this coming-of-age film special is that it’s at once harsh and humanist: a perceptive, realistic comedy about tweenage life that’s also rich in compassion, that scarcest of junior-high commodities.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Mudbound
    If the endgame is tough to bear, the getting there is rarely less than involving, thanks to the sensitivity of Rees’ staging. She’s made an economical epic with an intimate modern soul.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Everybody Wants Some!!
    In its funky, aimless, winningly juvenile way, Everybody Wants Some is about as inclusively celebratory as any college comedy in memory: Per its title, it really does want everybody to get some.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Sunless Shadows
    This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Beanpole
    Beanpole is grim, but it’s too superbly crafted, and too alive with human spirit, to be a truly grueling experience.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 A.A. Dowd
    The Long Day Closes
    What’s uniquely remarkable about The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies’ 1992 return to his own childhood, is how gloriously disorganized its story feels.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 67 A.A. Dowd
    Fruitvale Station
    Putting a human face on a public tragedy that already had a human face, Fruitvale Station plays like an uncomplicated eulogy, with little more to say on its subject than “what a shame this bad thing happened.”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    The Handmaiden
    A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    76 Days
    At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    The Truffle Hunters
    The Truffle Hunters is more eccentric and lyrical than its logline might suggest.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Red, White And Blue is stark and straightforward, further proof that McQueen has distinguished each entry in his bold foray into small-screen storytelling.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    It’s a gripping portrait of boots-on-the-ground activism, at least so long as it keeps the focus squarely trained on the actual activism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Harmonium
    The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Fireworks Wednesday carefully, organically introduces its characters, then lets the audience try to discern what they’re withholding.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    Toy Story 4
    The basic pleasures of this fourth installment may be at once more hectic and more shopworn, but the film preserves, at least, the pathology of its series: that anxiety about finding meaning and your own place on the shelf.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 A.A. Dowd
    The Witch
    The result is a horror movie that comes dangerously close to showing sympathy for the real devils, the kind that burned witches instead of instructing them. Good thing it’s scary.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 A.A. Dowd
    Graduation
    In the end, it’s the hard questions that linger, disquietingly unanswered.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    You Were Never Really Here
    For all the influences glowing dimly under its skin, You Were Never Really Here remains its own bewildering animal, unmistakably Ramsay’s.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    A Ghost Story
    Get on the wavelength of this mesmerizing, singularly unusual genre experiment and the undead being at its center stops looking so silly.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 A.A. Dowd
    Widows
    If Widows is pulp, it’s pulp made with intelligence and craft and an urgent social conscience. One might even call it a throwback to a richer era of American studio movies, except that the story also feels attuned to a very contemporary anger, aimed at powerful men and the corrupt systems that sanction their abuses.
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