April Wolfe

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L.A. Weekly, The A.V. Club, TheWrap, Village Voice
For 186 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

April Wolfe's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Manchester by the Sea
Lowest review score: 0 Life Itself
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 111 out of 186
  2. Mixed: 60 out of 186
  3. Negative: 15 out of 186
186 movie reviews
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    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Manchester by the Sea
    A poignant, surprisingly hilarious depiction of death, grieving, and small-town life.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Call Me by Your Name
    Guadagnino adeptly captures not just the physicality of a burning love but also the emotional and intellectual components, and the film is all the more salient for that careful, realistic interpretation.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    The Florida Project
    Though Moonee’s story may not have a Hollywood happy ending when she’s grown and the world has been cruel, Baker has created an indomitable character who’s at least got a fighting chance.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Night of the Living Dead
    Up until 1968, horror had been escapist. But Night of the Living Dead made horror serious business.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 April Wolfe
    Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    McDormand could have carried this film all the way through a minefield of touchy topics, singed but with all parts in the right place, primed for a painful laugh. But goddamnit if the cops in this story didn’t ruin all the fun.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    A Star Is Born
    To fall in love with Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is to embrace its paradoxes and, to quote a song Lady Gaga sings in the film, go “off the deep end” and submerge oneself “far from the shallow.” My advice? Submit. Suspend yourself in the charms and romance of this melodrama.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Sweet Country
    Thornton delicately peels back all the layers of Aussie injustice in this film, but what’s most unnerving is that the story proves to be so universal.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 94 April Wolfe
    Shirkers
    Like another breakout independent film this year, “The Tale,” Tan’s documentary attempts to portray her own narrative with objectivity and distance, but she discovers along the way that such a thing may not be possible, that memories will wait years or decades to snag you in their truths.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Jane
    There are no loose ends or wasted time; everything builds to a rising crescendo that makes you feel like your heart is going to burst. The immense strength of this remarkable woman is on such powerful display that, twenty minutes into the film, tears welled from my eyes and did not stop, even after I left the theater.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Hereditary
    In Aster’s story, as in life, the devil is in the details. As the film goes on, these details accumulate, coalesce, and then hang heavy over the characters.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Mudbound
    With Mudbound, Rees proves the truest rule of all: That talent and vision make all lesser rules negotiable. This absorbing, incredibly accomplished film should win awards and be taught in history classes all over America.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    Campillo’s focus on these charismatic characters, who bicker constantly but pick one another up the second they fall (sometimes literally), makes their present so thrilling that we don’t focus on what bleak future may await them.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 April Wolfe
    Bodied
    Simultaneously entertaining, overwhelming, compelling, and grating, Bodied raises its hand and talks until words mean nothing and everything.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Certain Women
    Certain Women is a kind, loving, and deeply moving portrait of bighearted small-town people.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Jackie
    Every scene is visceral. Every note played tells a story.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Raw
    Raw isn’t derivative — it’s fresh, funny, and grounded in reality. Underneath all the blood and guts, this is the story of a woman whose body demands love in extremity and the only person who’ll ever understand her fully: her sister.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Revenge
    In other hands, this film could go kitsch, could all be a big joke, but Fargeat directs Lutz like no other Rambo-style action hero before her.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    A Fantastic Woman
    A Fantastic Woman shows that the obvious insults a trans person may endure will, of course, weigh on the psyche, but the death by a thousand well-meaning cuts hurts as well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    One of the most sincere and funny portraits of family life to come along in a while.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 April Wolfe
    The Wife
    It is the depth Close lends to Joan that kept me riveted — and angry.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Not a Pretty Picture
    What’s most unnerving about this four-decade-old film is how little has changed in the time since. We are still learning the same lessons Coolidge was trying to impart so long ago — nothing is different.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 April Wolfe
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The best I can say about Buster Scruggs is that it seems as though the Coens picked their favorite actors and wrote them a part specifically tailored to their abilities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 89 April Wolfe
    Let the Sunshine In
    When films are made about straight men in this predicament, they’re often considered explorations of a “midlife crisis,” but Denis’ film poses the questions: What if crises aren’t limited to a certain age, and what if love itself is the crisis?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Fences
    This screen adaptation...is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie houses really should screen it with an intermission.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 April Wolfe
    Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 April Wolfe
    Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 April Wolfe
    The Innocents
    Where "Ida" takes a drearier, more realistic approach to the story, The Innocents, despite its dark focus on a group of women living in fear of getting repeatedly raped by their allies, actually has a mightier finish, something of a crescendo to cut through the quiet grief.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 April Wolfe
    It Comes at Night
    A soul-crushingly dark examination of human nature amid an invisible and unnatural threat.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Beach Rats
    Hittman’s depictions of sexuality, emotional crisis, and parent-teen relationships are rendered here without sentimentality — and with the burning urgency of a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 April Wolfe
    Sorry to Bother You
    I will be very clear with you, dear readers, that this surrealist comic moral tale, about a poor man selling his soul to ascend in a golden elevator to the heights of a dubious corporation, is a balls-to-the-wall, tits-to-the-glass, spectacular orgy of fist-pumping, anti-capitalist, pro-labor ideas rolled into 105 minutes of gloriously unpredictable plot.
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