Ben Kenigsberg

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The A.V. Club, The New York Times, Time Out, Time Out London, Variety, Village Voice
For 1,131 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 7% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ben Kenigsberg's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
Lowest review score: 0 Date Movie
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 395 out of 1131
  2. Mixed: 600 out of 1131
  3. Negative: 136 out of 1131
1131 movie reviews
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    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    Parkland: Inside Building 12
    The movie, directed by Charlie Minn, is unbearable to watch, yet its centering of first-person testimony — supplemented with floor plans of the building and phone footage from that day — makes the massacre immediate in a way that sometimes gets lost in news coverage or political debates.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Unicorn
    Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Isn't It Romantic
    The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    What Men Want
    While What Men Want starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    Under the Eiffel Tower
    The film is yet another ode to the restorative magic of wine country sunshine, which apparently also has the power to expose the story’s egregious midlife-crisis clichés.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot
    There is something admirably perverse about a movie that treats the killings of Hitler and Bigfoot as secondary to a character study of a crusty old man and his regrets, but that doesn’t make the film less dull or deflating to watch.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    They Shall Not Grow Old
    Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    Arctic
    Arctic has the courage to avoid obvious payoffs.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Gandhi Murder
    The conspiracy thriller The Gandhi Murder begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Ben Kenigsberg
    Jihadists
    The erasure of the difference between propaganda and reality cuts to the heart of what is appalling about Jihadists, a terrorist mixtape that appears remarkably uninterested in presenting these men in a more critical way than they would want.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    Tito and the Birds
    The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature Tito and the Birds, directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
    The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    What Is Democracy?
    Like democracy itself, the movie assumes such a broad mandate and has such noble intentions that indicating its shortcomings seems almost beside the point.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Lionheart
    It is globally minded filmmaking that is also comfortingly familiar.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    Ashes in the Snow
    There are a few powerful images.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Genesis 2.0
    While the sights and sounds here are unique, the movie seems frustratingly torn about whether to buy the futurism and mysticism it’s selling.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    Holmes & Watson
    There is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Avicii: True Stories
    The director, Levan Tsikurishvili, never reconciles the movie’s competing impulses. It’s part promotional video, part backstage doc and — in retrospect — part tragedy.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Ben Kenigsberg
    American Renegades
    Part of the thrill of heist movies is in watching a caper take shape before its execution. But the director, Steven Quale, rushes through the planning stages; there’s no obstacle that can’t be overcome with a quick line of exposition.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Mortal Engines
    As these things go, Mortal Engines offers a fair amount of fun.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Bitter Melon
    Although the first hour of Bitter Melon is a spiky and absorbing story of repressed feelings, the movie grinds to a halt in its final third as the characters talk things out, which might be helpful in life but in drama tends to belabor the obvious, as well as offer an easy exit.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Ben Kenigsberg
    Song of Back and Neck
    What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Ben Kenigsberg
    Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer
    New evidence for the case that computer animation is homogenizing children’s movies, robbing them of visual interest, this harmless, charmless movie plods along well-trodden turf.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    DriverX
    This is not a perfect film, and features maybe one wild night too many. But its outlook — optimistic about human nature yet cynical about the times — lingers.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Las Sandinistas!
    For a movie trying to push back at popular perceptions of history, ¡Las Sandinistas! could stand to be more lucid.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    The World Before Your Feet
    Short of walking with Green, a film is an ideal way to share in his knowledge. And after watching The World Before Your Feet, it’s difficult to look at the city the same way.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Jonathan
    The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Of Fathers and Sons
    Of Fathers and Sons is ultimately more impressive for its access than it is revealing of drives or beliefs. If Derki’s goal was to capture what causes ideology to spread, he and his camera look without seeing.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Ben Kenigsberg
    Shoah: Four Sisters
    Their stories are as harrowing, complicated and rife with imponderables as any Lanzmann filmed. And together, collected in a form that is much less labyrinthine than “Shoah,” they represent an ideal introduction (and capstone) to Lanzmann’s project.
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