Andrew O'Hehir

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Salon
For 1,494 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 65% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Andrew O'Hehir's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Mother
Lowest review score: 0 The Water Diviner
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,045 out of 1494
  2. Mixed: 346 out of 1494
  3. Negative: 103 out of 1494
1494 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    The To Do List
    This is definitely a formula movie, lovingly and even obsessively so, made by someone who obviously enjoyed “American Pie” and numerous other raunchy-sweet teen sex comedies of the ’90s, and wished they existed for girls.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew O'Hehir
    Blue Jasmine
    The whole experience of watching casts of talented and over-eager actors try to make sense of his (Allen) nonsensical scripts becomes increasingly strained and bizarre. I’ve felt that way about recent Allen movies I mostly enjoyed, like “Midnight in Paris” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and it goes double or triple for Blue Jasmine.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew O'Hehir
    Blackfish
    Cowperthwaite builds a portrait of an intelligent but profoundly traumatized animal who was taken from his family in the North Atlantic as an infant, and has been driven to anger, resentment and perhaps psychosis after spending his life in a series of concrete swimming pools.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew O'Hehir
    Computer Chess
    There’s even a shadowy hanger-on (played by novelist and journalist Jim Lewis) who may be a drug dealer or a CIA-NSA-type spook or both. That’s just one of the many ways that this profound, peculiar work of genius, this half-comic portrait of the present in embryo within the past, reverberates with hidden meanings and a questing intelligence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Conjuring
    As a ninth-generation descendant of Abigail Faulkner, a convicted Salem witch who only escaped execution because she was pregnant at the time, I call down a terrible malediction upon the people who made this entertaining but indefensible movie.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew O'Hehir
    Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station is a document of irreparable grief and paradoxical hopefulness; it launches the careers of two immensely talented young African-American artists and offers the possibility that Oscar Grant’s life, while it was much too short and ended so dreadfully, served a higher purpose in the long arc of history.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    It leaves you with provocative questions and memorable images rather than neatly wrapped answers, and with that feeling of imprecise mystery I remember so well from my own youthful experiences: Something beautiful and evanescent just happened, or almost happened. But you can’t describe it, and if you try to seize it, it vanishes into sand and salt and sun.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew O'Hehir
    Pacific Rim
    This is a noisy, chaotic, technology-crazed 21st-century action film, but also one made with tremendous excitement, vigor and heart, along with a myriad of wonderful details.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Andrew O'Hehir
    Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass memorably captures a dying way of American life, a marvelously untrammeled American landscape and at least two animals — men and sheep — that despite their millennia-long domestic relationship still have a spark of wildness in them.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    20 Feet from Stardom
    This is one of those moving, tragic and triumphant secret histories of American culture where the biggest surprise is that no one’s told it before.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Way, Way Back
    Beautifully executed, loaded with sharp observational moments, and never cheats either its characters or its audience by descending into raunchy teen-movie cliché. This is a delicately balanced and often very funny holiday alternative suitable for pretty much the entire family.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Lone Ranger
    If anything, it’s overstuffed with imagination and ideas, and when it comes to Hollywood movies I very much prefer that to the default setting. See it with an open mind, and you may well be surprised.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Heat
    What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Andrew O'Hehir
    White House Down
    This piece of midsummer madness is undeniably silly and delusional, a dire political fable told as tongue-in-cheek pastiche.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Andrew O'Hehir
    A Band Called Death
    And then would come this generous, spirited documentary, to capture one of the strangest and most inspiring of all family stories of tragedy and triumph that this crazy country has produced.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    I'm So Excited
    Almodóvar isn’t just flashing back, retro-style, to the era of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” He’s also returning to a core principle of that era and of his work, which is that human sexuality, as much as it drives us crazy and makes us do stupid things, is also a force for the liberation of the human soul.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    Despite its slick packaging and overtly facetious premise, director Matthew Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier’s faux-educational documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs packs a wallop.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    World War Z
    A genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew O'Hehir
    Man of Steel
    Despite looking, feeling and (especially) sounding expensive – this is one of the loudest summer spectacles of recent years – Man of Steel is second-tier and third-generation Chris Nolan-flavored neo-superhero material.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Andrew O'Hehir
    This Is the End
    I enjoyed the hell out of it for a while, but it got irritating and self-congratulatory long before it was over and I desperately do not want to see it again.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    What Maisie Knew
    It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama What Maisie Knew by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Internship
    What makes The Internship especially unfortunate is that there are pieces of a better, funnier movie lying around here, pretty much unnoticed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    Much Ado About Nothing
    Homemade as it clearly is, and first-drafty as it often feels, Whedon’s Much Ado will reward repeat viewings, for the adroitly paced dialogue, the debauched humor of the extended party scenes and the offbeat visual jokes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    Watching a movie about the late trash-TV pioneer turns out to be fascinating, even when his story is told as messily as it is here.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    The East
    It’s more that the filmmakers close out this oddly inspiring yarn of apocalypse and paranoia with a note of false reassurance. Yes, the world is fundamentally screwed and most people are apathetic or paralyzed. So start ringing doorbells!
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Andrew O'Hehir
    Hannah Arendt
    Talky but fascinating period drama.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    Star Trek Into Darkness
    There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Star Trek Into Darkness – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing. (Here’s something to appreciate about Abrams: This is a classic PG-13 picture, with little or no sex or swearing, but one that never condescends.)
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Andrew O'Hehir
    The Great Gatsby
    Whether or not Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” will go down in history as a legendary flop is not for me to judge (though all signs currently point toward yes), but it surely belongs to the category of baroque, overblown, megalomaniacal spectacles dubbed “film follies” by longtime Nation film critic Stuart Klawans.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    Iron Man 3
    As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, Iron Man 3 is a pretty good one!
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Andrew O'Hehir
    Love Is All You Need
    It’s an enormous relief to have a lightweight but non-insulting date movie to recommend in this arid season. This isn’t a movie that requires your full attention at every second – although when Dyrholm and Brosnan are on-screen, you won’t be able to look away – but it’s a nifty entertainment that’s always easy on the eyes and gains just a bit of dramatic weight as it moves forward.
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