Bilge Ebiri

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L.A. Weekly, New York Magazine (Vulture), The New York Times, Village Voice
For 1,187 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 0.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Bilge Ebiri's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 The LEGO Movie
Lowest review score: 0 Dolittle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 715 out of 1187
  2. Mixed: 369 out of 1187
  3. Negative: 103 out of 1187
1187 movie reviews
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    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Halloween Ends
    Green, despite having co-written and directed all of the entries in this most recent crop of Halloween sequels, isn’t really a horror guy. He doesn’t seem to have the precision and rhythm required to truly shock us. Luckily, with Halloween Ends, he’s found a way to make one of these movies his own, sans scares but with tons of atmosphere and a sense of queasy, gathering dread.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    Amsterdam
    Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Bilge Ebiri
    Smile
    Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Bilge Ebiri
    The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    It’s hard to tell if The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a comedy that wants to be a drama or a drama that wants to be a comedy. Of course, a film can be both. This one, alas, is neither.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Bilge Ebiri
    Dead for A Dollar
    The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Traveling Light
    The movie gathers force as it proceeds and delivers one final shock toward the end. It’s not a twist, exactly, but rather a development that makes you reconsider what you’ve just seen — suggesting that those who sometimes seem to care the least about the world are, secretly, the ones most overwhelmed by it.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Blonde
    Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    The Whale
    Once everything finally collides in The Whale, something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Bilge Ebiri
    Don't Worry Darling
    The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Bilge Ebiri
    Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    Iñárritu has a flair for the cinematic, for bold and striking images, but he is not an experimental filmmaker. He doesn’t have that kind of deft touch, that willingness to throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and — most importantly — move on.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    TÁR
    We know where Tár is headed from pretty much its opening scenes, but that doesn’t mean that the film shouldn’t still surprise and shock us. Luckily, this is where Blanchett comes in, turning the movie from a moderately interesting and topical one into something quite beautiful. She brings the energy and the sensation that much of the rest of the film lacks.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    White Noise
    White Noise is certainly uneven — wildly so, probably by design — but it’s also never boring, always eager to throw something new at the viewer, and it’s eager to entertain. I never imagined I’d laugh so hard while watching a movie adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    The Good Boss
    It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Three Thousand Years of Longing
    Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Bilge Ebiri
    Beast
    Yes, it’s all illogical and silly: Lions don’t behave this way, and humans tend to be better at self-preservation than such movies would have us believe. But if everybody always acted correctly, we wouldn’t have movies like Beast, and that’d be no fun at all.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Bullet Train
    Bullet Train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound — elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous feel … well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    A Love Song
    It’s all supremely touching and evocative without ever feeling too on-the-nose or heavy-handed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Resurrection
    About halfway through Resurrection, Rebecca Hall delivers a nearly eight-minute monologue about her character’s past that is so riveting, so mystifying and terrifying that you shouldn’t be surprised if it shows up in every acting class sometime in the near future.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Bilge Ebiri
    Where the Crawdads Sing
    As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    The Sea Beast
    Unlike many modern-day animated films, which find inspiration in fantasy and present us with unique, fanciful designs, the world of The Sea Beast is so realistically rendered, so detailed and physical, that much of the time it feels like a live-action adventure. It’s so thoroughly immersive it might make you believe in sea monsters.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Murina
    Kusijanović conveys all this through the way her actors move against and look at one another. That’s filmmaking of the highest order — intimate and gripping.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Bilge Ebiri
    Minions: The Rise of Gru
    For all its efforts at wild humor, The Rise of Gru never quite builds up a comic head of steam. It’s filled with laugh lines, but they feel like placeholders — a lot of middling bits about the time period plus a tired assortment of anachronisms.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is the most unassuming and delicate of movies, but don’t be shocked if it leaves you in ruins.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Bilge Ebiri
    Cha Cha Real Smooth
    What’s ultimately so disappointing about Cha Cha Real Smooth is its shallow vision of growing up, which might explain why the protagonist does so little of it.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Spiderhead
    Here is a place, then, where everyone does as they’re told, and beneath its placid surfaces, its lush setting and clean spaces, lies a deep moral decay. This is a common theme in science fiction, but on film it’s rarely been presented as entertainingly and thoughtfully as it is in Spiderhead.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Bilge Ebiri
    Lost Illusions
    Giannoli knows exactly which buttons to push and for how long. He takes what could have been a fussy adaptation of a dusty tome and turns it into something hugely entertaining.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Hustle
    Hustle works, and it works beautifully, thanks to Sandler’s commitment.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Bilge Ebiri
    Jurassic World Dominion
    It’s frantic yet lifeless, chaotic yet pro forma. A thorough lack of care emanates from the screen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Bilge Ebiri
    Benediction
    To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction.
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