Bob Mondello

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NPR
For 276 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 68% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 29% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Bob Mondello's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 12 Years a Slave
Lowest review score: 10 I Am Number Four
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 214 out of 276
  2. Mixed: 55 out of 276
  3. Negative: 7 out of 276
276 movie reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story is ferocious filmmaking, but it wouldn't have half the force it does if the director didn't also get at the complicated man Pat Tillman was.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 95 Bob Mondello
    Nebraska
    The filmmaker has crammed Nebraska with orneriness, humor, greed, Americana and performances so natural they seem like found objects — especially Dern's, which caps a career of character parts with a delicately nuanced character.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 55 Bob Mondello
    Sex and the City
    If this fabulously decked-out foursome is self-absorbed enough to be inadvertently cruel on occasion, they also suffer lots of guilt -- though their angst is rendered somewhat less angsty for viewers by the zingers, the designers, and the cheerfully objectified men on display.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Argo
    By its final fade, Argo feels like more than just a thriller - even a thriller with real thrills and serious Oscar buzz. It feels like a window on events that led to the world we live in now.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Bob Mondello
    Get Out
    As a writer and a remarkably accomplished first-time director, Peele layers other notions on top as he's inverting those — about servitude, about social privilege, about law enforcement and "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" - style liberals.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 95 Bob Mondello
    The Dark Knight
    The real relationship here is between a Batman in existential crisis and a Joker who'd love to leap with him into the abyss -- tight-a--ed yin and anarchist yang in a fantasy franchise that Nolan has made as riveting for its psychological heft as for the adrenaline rushes it inspires at regular intervals.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Bob Mondello
    The Past
    The last 30 seconds of the film — wrenching, startling, utterly transformative of everything that precedes them — has haunted me for months. The Past will, I'm guessing, haunt me for years.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Bob Mondello
    The Tree of Life
    The film is gorgeous and abstract, leaping around in time and space, structured in movements and more like a symphony than a conventional narrative.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station isn't really a surprising film, except insofar as it's rare to see such a warmly emotional big-screen portrait of black family life.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 96 Bob Mondello
    Slumdog Millionaire
    Romantic, action-packed and always held together by an intriguing social conscience, Slumdog Millionaire is a rapturous crowd pleaser.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Bob Mondello
    Séraphine
    Writer-director Martin Provost tells much of Seraphine's true-life story without words, lingering here on the process by which she makes paints, there on the obsessive single-mindedness she brings to her art.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Bob Mondello
    Happy-Go-Lucky
    So relentlessly upbeat that it won't take long before you're wondering just how the director plans to wipe the smile off her face.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 85 Bob Mondello
    The Cove
    Psihoyos describes his troops as a kind of "Ocean's 11" team, and that's apt enough: He's making a real-life action caper, a heist with potential consequences in the real world. The buildup to getting the shots they want has a good deal of natural tension. And the payoff -- well, let's just say it's devastating.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    In the Loop
    The performances are explosively funny, from Hollander's increasingly bewildered and way-out-of-his-depth Simon to Chris Addison's hapless PR fledgling. But the star is Peter Capaldi.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    The Salt of the Earth
    Healing the land helped heal Salgado. It also provides an eloquent closure to The Salt of the Earth, as landscapes of human misery give way to ... landscapes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Animal Kingdom
    First-time writer/director David Michod reportedly worked for eight years on his screenplay, deepening its tale of a violently dysfunctional family until its gangster conventions feel as if they're in the service of a modern-day Greek tragedy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Milk
    What sets this film entertainingly apart from most civil-rights sagas, though, are a slew of relaxed, offhandedly persuasive performances, along with the flamboyance of hippie-era San Francisco.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    BlacKkKlansman
    If hate groups were insidious four decades ago, argues Lee in his most ferociously entertaining (and just plain ferocious) film in years, how much more dangerous are they today?
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Bob Mondello
    The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The faux-naive point of view probably worked better in the novel; the literalness of film renders certain of the story's conceits overly precious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    James White
    James White is never more moving than when the filmmaker shows his callow hero doing the best he can: when James helps his mom weather a particularly rough patch, for instance, with what amount to real-life bedtime stories. Imagining happy scenes he's pretty sure she'll never see — of James all grown up.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 85 Bob Mondello
    It Follows
    From the opening moments, the one thing clear about It Follows is that it will not follow in everyone else's footsteps.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Monsieur Lazhar
    Fellag, a comedian and himself an exile from Algeria, makes Lazhar both a sensitive and an amusing figure. And the kids are just terrific, especially Emilien Neron as a boy who carries the guilt of the whole school on his shoulders.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Short Term 12
    What might seem on paper a cloyingly sentimental heartwarmer becomes, in Cretton's hands, a briskly believable, often funny, always invigorating and ultimately wrenching story of emotional fortitude.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Bob Mondello
    Sugar
    The filmmakers have mostly cast from Dominican playing fields rather than from acting studios -- Algenis Perez Soto, the accomplished first-time performer who plays Miguel Sugar Santos, was himself a teen ballplayer -- so game and practice sequences have an easy authenticity from the start.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    The Lobster
    If weird is what you're looking for, The Lobster is, claws down, the rom-com of the year (though possibly not one you'd want to choose for a first date).
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Star Trek
    It's hard to imagine anyone caring much why we're plunging ahead at warp speed, when the ride is so insanely satisfying.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 85 Bob Mondello
    The Trip
    These guys are a hoot, and The Trip is a trip and a half.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Steve Jobs
    The film's tension comes partly from a raft of terrific performances — everyone's good, and Fassbender's stellar — and partly from juxtaposing Jobs' public and private personas. He could make cheering audiences believe he was changing the world, but backstage ... not so much.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Bob Mondello
    Captain Phillips
    Hanks and Abdi are so compellingly matched that unlike with most thrillers, it won't be the action climax in Captain Phillips that'll stick with you. It'll be that aftermath, which gets at the emotional toll of terrorism in a way few movies have.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 85 Bob Mondello
    Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger by the Lake has become a psychosexually intriguing blend of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and William Friedkin's "Cruising" — one in which sex gets intertwined with murder, fear battles desire, and the police discover that voyeurs don't necessarily make good witnesses if no one ever exchanges names or phone numbers.
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