Barry Hertz

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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 1,058 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Barry Hertz's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 American Honey
Lowest review score: 0 Unplanned
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 719 out of 1058
  2. Mixed: 201 out of 1058
  3. Negative: 138 out of 1058
1058 movie reviews
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    The President's Cake
    Shot entirely in the director’s home country with a largely amateur, untrained cast, the film blends a striking sense of street-level realism, political commentary and poetic nostalgia for the naive innocence of youth.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 45 Barry Hertz
    How to Make a Killing
    While Ed Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell who do the most unintentional damage.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Feb 18, 2026
    • 66 Metascore
    • 55 Barry Hertz
    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Crime 101
    Whereas Michael Mann gave Heat the perfect narrative offramp, Crime 101 tends to circle the block toward the end.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Feb 11, 2026
    • 55 Metascore
    • 39 Barry Hertz
    Wuthering Heights
    It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Pillion
    The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.
    • 5 Metascore
    • 0 Barry Hertz
    Melania
    Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    Shelter
    Statham is as enjoyably stern and semi-serious as ever, but his sturdy presence cannot enliven a weirdly buttoned-up exercise in mercenary mayhem.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 79 Barry Hertz
    The Wrecking Crew
    Momoa and Bautista are having an unhinged blast in The Wrecking Crew, as eager to rip each other a new one as they are to compare themselves (unfavourably and intentionally) to such contemporaries as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Barry Hertz
    Honey Bunch
    Glowicki and Petrie are immensely committed and often fearless performers – so much so that you can see them frequently bouncing against the constraints of the story surrounding them, the actors seemingly confident that if they pushed themselves just past the brink, the movie’s half-untapped potential might burst wide open.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Sound of Falling
    In just her second feature, Schilinski creates a true art-house epic, haunting and lyrical.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 74 Barry Hertz
    A Private Life
    Foster is, as always, exceptionally compelling to watch as she tries to puzzle out Lilian’s motivations. And the actress is surrounded by France’s finest men of a certain age. Auteuil, Amalric and Vincent Lacoste do their due diligence as performers, even when Zlotowski’s screenplay asks them to abandon all pretenses of rationality.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 76 Barry Hertz
    The Rip
    A corrupt-cop drama that is mostly aware about its B-minus-movie aspirations, Carnahan’s film is a thoroughly enjoyable if not particularly original mashup of Training Day, Cop Land, Triple 9 and a dozen-plus other films in which it is up to One Good Cop™ to solve a mystery involving a dead police captain, dirty officials and millions of dollars in drug-cartel money.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 94 Barry Hertz
    The Testament of Ann Lee
    Seyfried, who has already cemented her status as one of today’s most beguiling and unpredictable performers – any other actress would get whiplash going from playing tech-schemer Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout to a betrayed opera virtuoso in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils to the sudsy theatrics of last week’s The Housemaid to this – is simply phenomenal.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 77 Barry Hertz
    The Mother and the Bear
    Ma’s film isn’t solely set on establishing The Peg’s winter bona fides, but rather exposing the city’s throbbing romantic heart, which might be able to melt the coldest of days.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 47 Barry Hertz
    The Choral
    While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 95 Barry Hertz
    No Other Choice
    From beat to beat, it is impossible to predict where Park is going with this film. Best to just turn up the volume, and trust in the rhythm that Park has set for himself. Let him lead the dance.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 53 Barry Hertz
    Anaconda
    Similar to getting caught in the grip of a giant Amazonian snake, in which you have the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode, the experience of watching Tom Gormican’s new action-comedy Anaconda is a painful one.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 78 Barry Hertz
    Song Sung Blue
    Jackman is such a finessed force of nature that he’s as good as you might expect, but Hudson – who never quite landed as juicy a part as in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which is now more than a quarter-century old – matches her co-star beat for beat, bar for bar. Good times, they never seemed so good.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 99 Barry Hertz
    Marty Supreme
    Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 87 Barry Hertz
    Is This Thing On?
    Arnett delivers something warm and genuine here, especially every time he’s paired against Dern, who perhaps knows this territory better.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 69 Barry Hertz
    The Housemaid
    Only Seyfried truly understood the assignment that Feig handed her, the actress oscillating between two modes – intense and freakishly intense – with finesse.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Dec 16, 2025
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Barry Hertz
    Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The bulk of Fire and Ash feels distressingly derivative of what came before, down to ultra-specific plot beats
    • 53 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    Silent Night, Deadly Night
    Nelson seems content to just swing one giant axe after another, hoping that he busts as many guts as he does brains. His intentions are naughty, and the result isn’t so nice. Even for those who prefer a little blood on their snow boots this time of year.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Peter Hujar's Day
    It can be slow going, certainly, but it’s always rewarding. Pull up a chair, stay a while.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 85 Barry Hertz
    Resurrection
    The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    The Secret Agent
    The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Barry Hertz
    Still Single
    Burger and Tateisi don’t quite deliver a film as energetic and unpredictable as their subject.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 97 Barry Hertz
    Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
    In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Barry Hertz
    Jay Kelly
    The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.
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