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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 69 Barry Hertz
    Dumb Money
    Like the stock market itself, there are peaks and valleys.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 55 Barry Hertz
    A Haunting in Venice
    By the time the deep dark truth about the mysterious case is revealed – in a series of twists that are more “agh” than “aha” – even the hardest core of Christie fans won’t be itching for a fourth Poirot go-round from Branagh. Which will not only benefit audiences but also the filmmaker himself.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    The Equalizer 3
    The film’s central problem is that it takes Fuqua forever to make the inevitable happen, and when he gets around to it, the entire set-piece arrives with all the refined taste of an overcooked noodle swimming in a bowl of ketchup.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 41 Barry Hertz
    Haunted Mansion
    Simien is no doubt a talented storyteller – his work on Dear White People, both the film and Netflix series, is evidence enough. But his vision here is clouded by corporate obligations and a woefully weak script by Katie Dippold, who herself is much funnier in every one of her other projects.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 85 Barry Hertz
    Talk to Me
    Although the movie’s energies dip slightly toward its end, when Mia’s plan to rid the world of the cursed hand requires superhuman acts of strength and derring-do, Talk to Me delivers a series of slash-and-burn shocks that last far longer than 90 seconds.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 96 Barry Hertz
    Oppenheimer
    Once it clicks – and it will – the film burns hard, fast and blindingly bright.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Afire
    The dramedy of manners is as rich and rewarding an experience as any of Petzold’s more ambitious films. Afire arrives like a calm wind, and leaves with everything and everyone perfectly scorched.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Barry Hertz
    Theater Camp
    Regrettably, Theater Camp doesn’t have a wide enough scope to zoom out from its extremely specific landscape to turn its inside jokes outward, nor an ironic enough detachment from the material that it’s riffing on.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 94 Barry Hertz
    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    At nearly every turn, Dead Reckoning aims for something more than the sum of its Evel Knievel parts. In an already strong year for breakneck, throat-kick, punch-out cinema, this adrenaline-pumped fever dream from Cruise and his regular enabler-slash-director Christopher McQuarrie represents a brutally thrilling action-film apotheosis.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 85 Barry Hertz
    Joy Ride
    Joy Ride is as fantastically filthy as they come, providing enough glorious gags about gagging to carry audiences through the cold, hard winter to come.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 65 Barry Hertz
    Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    There is only one Spielberg, so the result is an adventure that sands away the edges of its own taste for danger, with the destination – those gobs of cash – mattering far more than the journey.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Barry Hertz
    No Hard Feelings
    No Hard Feelings tries so very hard to shock – to score that collective audience gasp – that it ends up clutching its own pearls.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 93 Barry Hertz
    Asteroid City
    Asteroid City proves, once again, that there is so much more to the filmmaker than casual detractors assume.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 35 Barry Hertz
    The Flash
    This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 74 Barry Hertz
    Elemental
    Heartfelt in tone, imaginative in scope and rendered with a seemingly endless well of aesthetic wit, the romantic-comedy is a worthy addition to the Pixar canon … until the characters start speaking.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Past Lives
    This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Barry Hertz
    The Boogeyman
    There are jump-scares aplenty, and a great deal of barely visible shots of its monster, culminating in a full-on creature reveal that’s nicely gross. The characters are sketched out just enough to make you care whether they live or die, with solid performances from all involved, including a rare star turn from Messina.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Kandahar
    The dialogue is to the point without being eye-rolling, the action is meaty and mostly CGI-free (the highlight is a night-vision firefight) and the performances are committed, even touching.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Barry Hertz
    You Hurt My Feelings
    Nearly every performance here is excellent, a beautiful balance of nerves and neuroses.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 36 Barry Hertz
    The Little Mermaid
    A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Barry Hertz
    Master Gardener
    In Schrader’s strong, meditative hands, everything gels together to create an entrancing work that is serious and, very nearly, profound.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 84 Barry Hertz
    Fast X
    If family is everything to the Fast & Furious films – as lead lunkhead Vin Diesel would surely posit – then Fast X is a nuclear family reunion that goes atomic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Barry Hertz
    Geographies of Solitude
    In keeping with Lucas’s general life philosophy, Mills’s film doesn’t attempt to paint a portrait of one woman, but rather a capturing of the land that woman calls home.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    At around the hundred-minute mark, everything in Gunn’s perfect little cinematic galaxy falls apart in a magnificently depressing fashion. It is as if the MCU higher-ups got wind of what was going down and quickly engineered a black hole of studio notes to suck the Guardians into a tesseract of meaningless set-pieces and prolonged B-plot detours.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    Carmen
    Carmen is a wild and unrestrained attempt to empty its director’s entire brain onto the screen, and for that it deserves recognition. But the ultimate result slips too easily between heroic effort and hot mess.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 89 Barry Hertz
    Sisu
    If watching mass-murdering maniacs get absolutely destroyed on-screen is your thing – and it very much is mine – then Sisu is a perfectly depraved night out.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Barry Hertz
    Chevalier
    The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 95 Barry Hertz
    Beau Is Afraid
    Its visual imagination is wonderfully unrestrained, compelling in its extremes even when it is so clearly indebted to every movie that Aster hoovered up to get here. Its tone is impressively steadfast in its desire to repel one moment, entrance the next. And its performances are across-the-board astounding in their commitment.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    Renfield
    The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision – all of it only ever-so-slightly goosed by a political softening that perhaps says more about contemporary American filmmaking than the storytellers working within it.
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