Bilge Ebiri

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L.A. Weekly, New York Magazine (Vulture), The New York Times, Village Voice
For 1,180 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 39% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Bilge Ebiri's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Cyrano
Lowest review score: 0 Dolittle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 711 out of 1180
  2. Mixed: 366 out of 1180
  3. Negative: 103 out of 1180
1180 movie reviews
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Air
    Air might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    Sorry Angel
    Honoré’s scenes feel at once composed and curiously mundane, as if he’s trying to take the precision of his earlier work and mix it with a more realist impulse — or, if we’re being less charitable, as if he’s trying to will his aesthetic into something more “mature.”
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Beyond the Lights
    Beyond the Lights is a deft, gorgeous movie. For all its honesty, it’s never slow, and for all its criticism of the music industry, it’s never finger-wagging.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Hoppers
    Hoppers is a fun, modest little movie with enough zip and charm to keep kids engaged, and as such, one doesn’t want to criticize it too much. But the memory of what Pixar once was, the behemoth that redefined animation for multiple generations, may still make us wonder where all that energy and originality and artistry went.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    The Best Offer
    Part of the pleasure in watching The Best Offer is the elegant, unassumingly suspenseful way it unfolds. You never quite know where it’s all headed, in part because it never quite tells you what kind of movie it is. I called it a “romantic thriller,” but there’s a lot more movie here than that.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Bilge Ebiri
    Live From New York!
    It’s too cursory, too frivolous to make a case for the show’s importance as an American institution, even though it insists on it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Jay Kelly
    The movie has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    The Killer
    Filled with expertly composed sequences undone by the protagonist’s relentless observations about the meaninglessness of existence, the movie feels like an attempt to highlight its own emptiness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Results
    With this cast, and such a vivid sense of play, Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom-com. It’s enchanting.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Julieta
    While Almodóvar may move his characters around like a god (or at least a moralist), his attention to detail and his fondness for unexpected bits of tenderness give these people shape and dimension and keep the narrative from becoming schematic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Bilge Ebiri
    Ferrari
    Ferrari is elegant and restless, with a sense throughout that something horrific might be lurking around each corner. And when the director straps his cameras on those cars and sends them on their way, the picture transforms into something more visceral and chaotic, a fever dream (or maybe a nightmare) of speed and smoke.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    News of the World
    It feels odd to see a Western in 2020 that actually dares to be a Western, especially coming from a director who for so long specialized in urgent, high-tech, ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers. But maybe that’s not so odd a combination. News of the World has the trappings of an old-fashioned epic, but it also has a restless, modern soul.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    The Square
    Östlund is specific and exacting as a writer and director, and within The Square’s empty spaces, we’re forced to confront our own values, and our own visions of ourselves.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Bilge Ebiri
    Rage
    The movie is imprisoned by its Cage’s stiffness. All he gives us is strained, robotic seriousness. I’m not sure he even gives us any rage.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    The Club
    It’s occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a dull combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that’s the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    Legend
    Hardy, it seems, is an ecosystem of love and hate and betrayal and madness unto himself. The rest of Legend just can’t keep up.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Megadoc
    Like the man who made it, Megalopolis is a movie that bears both the qualities and the scars of these conflicts. We probably didn’t need Megadoc to tell us this, but it remains a thoroughly fascinating look at one of the most unlikely films ever made.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    The Devil's Bath
    The Devil’s Bath is a deeply fucked-up picture. I say that with admiration.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    The Dig
    Death is intercut with passion, as tragedy and glory tangle onscreen. It’s as if the dig itself radiates out a new understanding of existence, revealing both the broad arc of history and the curlicues of love, loyalty, and loss that abound within it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Bilge Ebiri
    Athena
    Its subject is timely but its presentation is timeless — it’s a war movie, a family drama, a Greek tragedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Where Is Kyra?
    The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Zodiac Killer Project
    A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Juror #2
    Eastwood’s unhurried gaze allows the characters’ humanity to shine through. His style might be simpler, but his generosity as a filmmaker, his willingness to embrace the complex and the open-ended, has never been more evident. Juror No. 2 is a fine entry in a great director’s career.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Mandy
    The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    All the Money in the World
    It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Union County
    We talk of fictional movies with documentary touches, but Union County sometimes feels like a documentary with some fictional touches.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Bilge Ebiri
    No Good Deed
    It’s certainly not good. But it’s not entirely dire.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    In Bloom
    In Bloom feels, more than anything else, like a war movie.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Bilge Ebiri
    Happy End
    Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    His House
    Horror is often cathartic, purifying — it puts you through the wringer but you emerge on the other side, somehow cleansed. You’ll find no such succor here. His House is beautifully made, and its scares are monstrously effective, but its images of real-world dread remain unresolved, its specters unvanquished. The film leaves you with wounds that won’t heal.
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