For 626 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 68% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 12.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Benjamin Lee's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 53
Highest review score: 100 You Won't Be Alone
Lowest review score: 20 Fifty Shades Freed
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 45 out of 626
626 movie reviews
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    In trying to scratch our itch for the old while also recognising the new, McKendrick settles for something stale.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    For a slow – and often ponderously uneventful – film, the ending also feels strangely rushed, decisions and reveals not explored enough for them to really land in the way that’s clearly intended (there’s a potentially more satisfying psychological thriller using the same ingredients). There’s really impressive craft here though.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    The romcom is a genre I will forever root for, despite it being stuck in a cruelly long flop era, and while Office Romance does have a tad more gloss than Netflix’s many junkier alternatives, the magic is still missing. Like the office at its centre, it’s too sleek and corporate to melt us – all work and no play
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    You can feel the struggle of trying to cram everything in and even at an unforgivably bloated 143 minutes, it’s both busy and hollow.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Benjamin Lee
    Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Benjamin Lee
    For a film so unashamedly silly, it’s also incredibly, tiresomely un-fun and, by the end, laughably earnest, as if we should all be learning a very important lesson.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    The only mildly jolting sequence is the cold open, setting up a previous haunting with two friends, something the marketing team was clearly aware of, having essentially shown it in full in the first teaser trailer. It’s downhill from there, as we’re stuck with an anonymously written couple we struggle to root for as they face off with an antagonist we struggle to understand.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Benjamin Lee
    Ritchie is more deeply invested in the thought-through craft of making a B-movie than many of his peers and there’s a smooth sensuousness to how he moves, each of them looking, feeling and sounding like films he genuinely cares about.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    The off-brand, bought down the market quality of Skydance animation is initially less of a problem here without the poorly realised humans of Luck and Spellbound to distract but there’s still no immersion or sweep to the world being created, just bright colours which might be enough for some toddlers.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Roommates might not rival the fizzy, formative teen films it both references (Clueless) and often directly cribs from (Mean Girls) but it still belongs in a different league to what we’re mostly served right now. Could someone possibly tell that to Netflix?
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    It’s an unsatisfying and head-scratchingly empty drama that in its final meaningless moments, as shreds of drab voiceover are matched with a dramatically overstylised rainstorm, starts to feel as creatively pointless as the sort of vapid, brand-commissioned film Jolie’s director was hired to make. It makes the fashion world seem deathly dull, as if Winocour dislikes it as much as her protagonist allegedly does.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Benjamin Lee
    We should be on the edge of our seat but every should-be set piece falls flat, the choreography always feeling a little off and the editing never works as tightly as it should.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Like the film around him, [Ritchson] does what he needs to do, everything here just about serviceable for the moment yet never memorable enough for the moment after.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    There’s just about enough here to show signs of life...but Williamson often feels like he’s treading water when he should be drawing blood.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    There might be just about enough competence to Polone’s film-making to ensure this won’t be the worst horror film of the year, but it’ll probably be the least necessary.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    There’s also no real satire here either (moneyed folk are apparently bad, did you realise?) and at this stage of the rich-eating cycle, I just want it to be over. Forget a killing, Ford has made a real mess instead.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    [Colman] knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and heart-wrenching drama but the film around her isn’t as adept. Like the dream husband at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    It’s an earnest tribute to a lot of things – a city, a time, a genre, a mentality, an actor in Turturro – and while we’ve definitely been here before, it’s nice to come back.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Benjamin Lee
    In many increasingly overcrowded fields – trauma horror, curse horror, gay horror, Sundance horror – Leviticus stands tall.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Benjamin Lee
    What should be wickedly cutting in-the-know dialogue is soft and uninventive, what should be a seat-edge string of escalating circumstances becomes increasingly tiring and hard-to-buy and while the cast is game, they mostly struggle to find the right level for Yan’s admittedly difficult-to-match zany energy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Benjamin Lee
    It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be.

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