Ben Kenigsberg

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For 1,125 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 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ben Kenigsberg's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 The Girl and the Spider
Lowest review score: 0 Date Movie
Score distribution:
1125 movie reviews
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    You might devour less after watching Food, Inc. 2, and what you eat will probably be healthier.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Truth vs. Alex Jones offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    "You Can Call Me Bill" is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    Gets points for originality but quickly succumbs to terminal self-amusement.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Space: The Longest Goodbye leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Ben Kenigsberg
    In essence, Marmalade pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    The jarring switch to documentary gives Bushman its added charge.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist . . . But Society of the Snow is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Ben Kenigsberg
    The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    “The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Ben Kenigsberg
    While the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Ben Kenigsberg
    The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Ben Kenigsberg
    Die-hard Elvis fans will no doubt call some of the characterization in Priscilla slander, but part of the achievement here is that Elvis is not simply a monster. Fame has merely given him the superpower of not having to pay attention to anyone else.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    The most barbed aspect of the movie, a National Geographic release, is its acknowledgment of the role that National Geographic itself has played in exoticizing groups like the North Sentinelese.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Ben Kenigsberg
    Foe
    To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Ben Kenigsberg
    Story Ave is marred by late revelations that appear designed, in a studio-notes sort of way, to clarify motivations. What’s unspoken — and what’s seen — does enough.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Ben Kenigsberg
    Dancing in the Dust shows Farhadi’s early confidence with using framing and cutting to create tension and parallels — skills that would serve him later.

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