Barry Hertz

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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 1,050 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 Passengers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 712 out of 1050
  2. Mixed: 200 out of 1050
  3. Negative: 138 out of 1050
1050 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Barry Hertz
    No Time to Die
    It is both eager to distinguish itself from the series’ shaggiest shenanigans but also happy to embrace them whenever it feels things threaten to get too heavy. The result is an overlong and conceptually loopy thing – but when it works, which let’s say is, oh, I dunno, 83 per cent of the time, it offers one helluva view … to kill!
    • 75 Metascore
    • 82 Barry Hertz
    Titane
    Like her first film, 2016′s fine-young cannibals tale Raw, Ducournau is tracing taboos to sketch a messy but compelling treatise on life’s endless growing pains. Ride or die.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Barry Hertz
    Prisoners of the Ghostland
    It is an overstuffed, manic, exhausting piece of instant movie-meme catnip – likely impenetrable to all but the hardest of hardcore genre devotees.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Barry Hertz
    Ste. Anne
    A highly abstract look at family, memory and regret, all filtered through the reality of daily life in the Métis Nation, Ste. Anne makes a big impression.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Barry Hertz
    Night Raiders
    With Night Raiders, Goulet can confidently claim to be today’s most effective practitioner of Indigenous sci-fi, a subgenre in which time-tested cinematic thrills – speculative fiction, violence, a heightened sense of style – act as Trojan Horses for themes that audiences might otherwise ignore. Everyone wins.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Barry Hertz
    Petite Maman
    Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Barry Hertz
    I'm Your Man
    Director Maria Schrader’s new sci-fi-tinged rom-com might be conventionally structured, but it is also smoothly crowd-pleasing work, tackling all the anxieties and neuroses of midlife romance with the fears and promises of next-generation technology.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 86 Barry Hertz
    Misha and the Wolves
    Misha and the Wolves is as much a documentary as it is a wrestling match: filmmaker versus subject, truth versus fiction. Ultimately, the viewer comes out the winner.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 59 Barry Hertz
    Cryptozoo
    There is a certain charm to Shaw’s deadpan comedy – and I genuinely appreciated what I can only assume was an intentional callback to Michael Cera’s fate in 2013′s This Is the End – but one visit to the Cryptozoo was enough for me.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 78 Barry Hertz
    The Truffle Hunters
    By focusing on the old men and their dogs who spend their time in the woods of Northern Italy searching for the prized fungus, Dweck and Kershaw operate on a level of gentle, removed observation.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 62 Barry Hertz
    PAW Patrol: The Movie
    We’re still a long, long way from the heights of animation titan Pixar. But you (parents, that is, not whichever five-year-old might have a Globe subscription) might also put your phone down for a stretch to see just what’s happening on-screen. At the very least, you’ll see which toys you’ll soon have to buy. Yelp!
    • 72 Metascore
    • 68 Barry Hertz
    CODA
    There isn’t enough raw drama, deep-felt emotion, or genuine artistry on display here to keep CODA from staring down its own obligatory end: a half-smile and a shrug.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 64 Barry Hertz
    Annette
    Annette’s failure to ignite is especially frustrating because, not infrequently, Carax delivers images and moments that verge on the indelible.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 73 Barry Hertz
    Free Guy
    Free Guy is here, it repeatedly reminds us, to have a good time, not a long-franchise time. But there is something so overwhelmingly corporate and safe about the thing that you can see the glimmer of a brand-new cinematic universe in every twinkle of Reynolds’ dreamy hazel eyes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 89 Barry Hertz
    The Suicide Squad
    The most derivative but finely tuned of superhero movies to come out in ages.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Barry Hertz
    The Green Knight
    The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 61 Barry Hertz
    Stillwater
    It is at once highly watchable and baffling.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Barry Hertz
    Jolt
    Jolt is a perplexing mix-up of genre and intentions. From one scene to the next, I had no real understanding of where the film might go next – but instead of anticipating the unpredictable, I came to quickly dread the arbitrariness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 66 Barry Hertz
    Old
    The movie, and I don’t think I’m over- or under-selling this, is pure chaos. From its rib-poking opening to its magnificently messy conclusion, Old is a feverishly earnest look at mortality, responsibility and, um, well … I wish that I could explain just what I think Shyamalan is getting at in his final 15 minutes
    • 43 Metascore
    • 17 Barry Hertz
    Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 86 Barry Hertz
    Pig
    Director Michael Sarnoski’s feature debut is more like a Nicolas Cage supercut: alternately ridiculous, bare-bones, heartfelt, puzzling and what-in-god’s-name-y. And more often than not, it works.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 57 Barry Hertz
    Fear Street Part Three: 1666
    Ultimately, Fear Street is a shiny and expensive super-cut of callbacks and needle-drops. It is cool but empty horror worship.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 46 Barry Hertz
    Space Jam: A New Legacy
    The corporate-synergy-ness of it all is both deeply distressing and unintentionally fascinating.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 32 Barry Hertz
    Gunpowder Milkshake
    This is regurgitated shoot-’em-up nothingness fetishistically dressed in the cosplay of equality. The women are not characters to care about, but props to kill and be killed.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 82 Barry Hertz
    Bone Cage
    If Olson and his game cast weren’t so determined to shade their characters with delicate, sometimes tremendous layers of humanity, Bone Cage’s fatalism might be impossible to digest.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 45 Barry Hertz
    Fear Street Part Two: 1978
    If you’re going to make a movie in which a psycho slices away at both campers and counsellors in direct homage to the age of Jason Voorhees, you need to go scuzzy or go home. A proper slasher movie should make you want to take a shower. Here, I felt sparkling clean.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 58 Barry Hertz
    Black Widow
    Once we’re in the story proper . . . Black Widow quickly turns into another rote exercise in Marvel house style.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 54 Barry Hertz
    The Tomorrow War
    It is a fool’s errand to imagine what someone like Verhoeven would have done with The Tomorrow War’s material – this is a movie made for the express purposes of delivering some lazy woo-hoo summer fun, not any kind of sneaky subversiveness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Barry Hertz
    The Forever Purge
    Sound the alarm, hide the children and lock the doors: another Purge movie is here. And it’s deadlier, and dumber, than ever.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 69 Barry Hertz
    Fear Street Part One: 1994
    While Janiak is able to easily tick off the hallmarks of the genre, and perhaps convince those actually alive in the nineties that the entire decade must have been backlit in aggressive neon, her film doesn’t quite scream (or Scream) out for two more films’ worth of context.
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