Ben Croll

Select another critic »
IndieWire, TheWrap
For 172 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ben Croll's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 The Shape of Water
Lowest review score: 10 Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 139 out of 172
  2. Mixed: 29 out of 172
  3. Negative: 4 out of 172
172 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Croll
    Splitsville
    As filmmakers, Covino and Marvin are singularly committed to each bit, pushing all premises to the comic extreme. Their characters, however, are less than steadfast and true.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Croll
    Small Things Like These
    Small Things Like Things is a modest gem.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Croll
    The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    Given the film’s abridged runtime and its genuine playfulness, even Wes-skeptics might find themselves cracking a wry grin from time to time.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Croll
    Fjord
    In Fjord, as in his best work, he builds entire systems that grind his characters down.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Croll
    Gentle Monster
    Though Kreutzer never lets any adult character off the moral hook . . . she also refuses to shade these relationships with outright antagonism. Instead, they are all appraising one another, weighing others’ actions to balance their own ethical scales, and in doing so, trying to better understand themselves. That’s the same reason we turn to art.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 79 Ben Croll
    Birds of Passage
    This is a story about power, but it’s also a story about place. More than that, you’ve really got to see it to believe it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    The Dreamed Adventure
    This is a film of details and detours, digressive above all, cast with non-professionals native to the region. It plays as an ethnographic travelogue, using a potboiler hook for lightly applied narrative structure.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    Loving
    The film traces a strong, steady line to a foregone conclusion, and that steadiness is exactly the point.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    Petrov's Flu
    Make no mistake, Petrov’s Flu is a formidable piece of filmmaking; it is also an exercise in style that uses its own virtuoso technique as a blunt-force tool against the audience.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    Cover-Up
    The result is an always engaging, sometimes enraging, and occasionally revelatory doc, stretching from Civil Rights to Substack, that every so often reveals something more jarringly (and appealingly) adversarial.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    Yes
    Yes is a tortured film, from a tortured artist, about a tortured man, meant to torture us with a kaleidoscope of anguish and a coterie of grotesques. Formally, the film nearly bursts at the seams, as Lapid’s camera spins fast and frantic and out-of-control, with the color contrast and soundtrack turned all-the-way up, keeping the film forever on assault mode.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 78 Ben Croll
    Moulin
    As that battle settles into stalemate, “Moulin” maintains a somber keel, never curdling into bleakness or hagiography. With escape and release dim prospects, the film plays as a controlled study in self-control — unpacking a form of resistance divorced from action and a kind of fatalism born of genuine hope.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Ben Croll
    Father Mother Sister Brother
    Playing like variations on a theme, Jarmusch’s shaggy-dog triptych affably loops through moments of awkwardness and family strain, finding fresh notes in the repetition.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Ben Croll
    Mickey 17
    The film, in short, exhilarates and exhausts in equal measure, abundant in ambition and arduous, at points, in execution. And after six long years of waiting, one can hardly fault a bit of excess generosity – even if the feast leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    The Workshop
    Though the film occasionally assumes the airs of a slow-burning thriller, the overall product remains a firmly intellectual exercise.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    You Were Never Really Here
    For all of its meticulous construction and often masterful craft, the film remains something to coldly admire rather than easily embrace, often playing more as a collection of accomplished filmmaking moments than as a fully enthralling whole.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Disco Boy
    At a taut and elliptical ninety minutes, a couple of awkward final steps hardly feel like fatal flaws. Getting in, getting down, and getting out as style hopping sizzle reel, Disco Boy heralds a promising new talent who totally has the moves.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Eddington
    Aster has always had a knack for confrontation, while Phoenix works best as an open-nerve. That the duo should prove so adept tapping into a vein of neurotic action is one of the many brutal surprises in a social satire as blunt and broad as America itself.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Coward
    It plays as an oral, musical history, rich in period research and detail, laying out its narrative and thematic concerns early and never really moving beyond them.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    The Midwife
    Offering plum roles to Catherines Frot and Catherine Deneuve, The Midwife is a minor-key crowd pleaser about friendship, forgiveness and rolling with the punches.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Another World
    Another World succeeds in captivating on the sheer strength of its caustic tone, which offers a sustained performance of ice-cold contempt quite unlike anything Brizé has tried before.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Babygirl
    Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, Halina Reijn’s surprisingly genteel Babygirl might bare the occasional fang, but it doesn’t have much bite.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice goes all-in on the legacy front, offering everything you want and less, playing as a Burton buffet that leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied, and in no real hurry to go back for thirds.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Incredible But True
    Like nearly all of Dupieux’s previous work, Incredible but True stretches a high-concept, low-execution premise about as far as it can go, wrapping things up the nanosecond before they outstay their welcome. But unlike his previous work, this film leaves the viewer with a pleasant, and almost bittersweet aftertaste; it almost leaves you wanting more.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Elemental
    With story beats and character turns that strain well beyond familiarity, Elemental matches formal adventure with storytelling timidity. Here is a new spin on the old formula, livened up by advances in technology and delivered with real artistry. The film is full of complex and volatile parts, all held together in the most elemental of containers.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Dossier 137
    A procedural is never just about the case, even as the inquiry barrels along. To his credit, Moll ably recognizes as much, making his procedural a fine example of the form.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Peter von Kant
    The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Stillwater
    Bracketed by genre on both ends, the middle third of this 140-minute film becomes a gentle tale about a misfit finding in a platonic relationship a kind of second chance in life. In other words, it becomes a certain kind of Tom McCarthy film — and then gets back to the overarching story.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Mom and Dad
    More than the fervid cartoon violence and Cage’s rococo line readings, the film’s greatest asset lies in its simple, cold-blooded premise.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 75 Ben Croll
    Leave One Day
    Taking a sturdy, mainstream premise — a big-city careerist reflecting on her life path during a trip back to the holler, in a setup that faintly echoes “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a hundred other rom-coms — and shading it with moral grays, natural light, and a more unvarnished turn from a well-known star, Leave One Day plays uncannily like a Gallic cover of a Sundance movie, gussied up and vaunted onto the international stage.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »