Chris Barsanti

Select another critic »
Film Journal International, Slant Magazine, The Playlist
For 194 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Chris Barsanti's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Wojnarowicz
Lowest review score: 20 Silencio
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 137 out of 194
  2. Mixed: 39 out of 194
  3. Negative: 18 out of 194
194 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Two Pianos
    Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Power Ballad
    Like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, the film never finds the right groove.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Fantasy Life
    Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    Nova 78'
    Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Ballad of a Small Player
    The film’s ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of its protagonist’s world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Is This Thing On?
    This is a finely observed and good-natured piece of work that carries some of the creative angst of Bradley Cooper’s other films but without the need to convince us of its main character’s genius.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Play Dirty
    Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    Devo
    Smith brings a tone of melancholy to the closing stretches of “Devo,” acknowledging in some way that all revolutions fade and mass cultural subversion will only ever work up to a point. But there is also a lack of sentimentality or resume-burning here, which feels of a piece with the band’s spiky posture and protest mentality.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    My Mother's Wedding
    Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
    The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Meeting with Pol Pot
    Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Echo Valley
    A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Mountainhead
    If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Gazer
    The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    Sly Lives! pays appropriate credit to its subject’s greatness by not devolving into pity even after depicting Stone at his lowest points.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Last Days
    Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Peter Hujar's Day
    The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Kiss of the Spider Woman
    For a musical so dedicated to celebrating and critiquing the transformative potential of cinematic fantasy, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman brings relatively little of the kind of overwhelming star power that can truly transport audiences.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Bubble & Squeak
    Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Chris Barsanti
    Elton John: Never Too Late
    Elton John: Never Too Late comes across as a safe and well-tooled piece of a carefully managed relationship with Disney.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Chris Barsanti
    Apocalypse in the Tropics
    At one point, she connects the beliefs of these conservative evangelicals with the post-colonial idealism of Brasilia’s builders, whose faith was “not in God but in the equally abstract ideas of progress and democracy.” That sense of inquiry and curiosity stops Apocalypse in the Tropics from veering into hyperbole without ever losing its harrowing urgency.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    War Game
    By setting up such a potentially cataclysmic scenario and not convincingly illustrating how it could be resolved or stopped from occurring in the first place, War Game undercuts the very reason it was made.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Wildcat
    By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Coup de Chance
    The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    Against All Enemies
    Though Sadoff’s chilling documentary sometimes resembles less a film than a briefing (albeit one narrated by Peter Coyote), the warning here is dire; simplicity may be the best tactic to get the message across.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Chris Barsanti
    Io Capitano
    The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Veni Vidi Vici
    The film’s humor is a clenched-fist assault on runaway greed and systemic corruption.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Love Me
    The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Chris Barsanti
    A Real Pain
    The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Crime Is Mine
    It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Taste of Things
    The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Pain Hustlers
    The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Burial
    This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Chris Barsanti
    Radical Wolfe
    Unlike its subject, Radical Wolfe would rather be liked than start something.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Lesson
    It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The League
    At its most engrossing, the film vibrantly sketches out the historical roots of the Negro baseball leagues.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Chris Barsanti
    American Pain
    Foster tackles this material in the high-velocity fashion common to many stranger-than-fiction documentaries about people gleefully living outside the law. There is a lot for him to work with, one vivid and outlandish anecdote spilling into another.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Asteroid City
    A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Lynch/Oz
    Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Somewhere in Queens
    Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Revoir Paris
    The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Teachers' Lounge
    While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Inside
    Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Manodrome
    While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    BlackBerry
    By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Shortcomings
    Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    You Hurt My Feelings
    The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Cat Person
    Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    AUM: The Cult at the End of the World
    An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    There There
    The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Good Night Oppy
    Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    My Imaginary Country
    By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    See How They Run
    The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Return to Seoul
    Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    A Compassionate Spy
    The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Story of Film: A New Generation
    The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Nope
    The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    The Gray Man
    The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Hold Your Fire
    The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Donbass
    While Donbass is far from perfect, hiding too much of its story and message in at-times dull and layered absurdity, it nevertheless presents a harrowing picture of how war and nationalism corrupt and degrade places nowhere near the battlefield.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Windfall
    Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Outfit
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Call Jane
    The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    When You Finish Saving the World
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Breaking
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Italian Studies
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The First Wave
    Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Finch
    The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Last Duel
    Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Power of the Dog
    The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Encounter
    In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Becoming Cousteau
    Where “Becoming Cousteau” frustrates at times is its thin treatment of Cousteau’s work. The films and shows are represented with plentiful footage but not truly discussed or differentiated. It’s an odd choice, given Cousteau’s cinematic obsession.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Duke
    The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Enemies of the State
    The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    False Positive
    False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    An Unknown Compelling Force
    Disappointingly, despite the rich subject matter, Le Guillou lets “An Unknown Compelling Force” become more his story than that of the dead.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    The Lost Leonardo
    The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Final Account
    Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Dry
    The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Things Heard & Seen
    Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Barsanti
    Stowaway
    By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Funny Face
    Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Chris Barsanti
    Wojnarowicz
    Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Cherry
    Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Passing
    A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Judas and the Black Messiah
    Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    A Glitch in the Matrix
    Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    How It Ends
    The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The World to Come
    The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The White Tiger
    Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    Herself
    Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Chris Barsanti
    Wonder Woman 1984
    The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    The Father
    The film approximates the dislocation of its main character’s mind with a frighteningly slippery ease.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Chris Barsanti
    The Midnight Sky
    Shrouded in an elegiac reverie, The Midnight Sky is a frequently beautiful movie, from the mechanical ballet of the bird-like Aether to the brief glimpses of K-23, where Jupiter looms in a purplish night sky. But its inability to make a strong connection between the separated stories, and a tone that slips sometimes from poetic quietude to sentimentality, keep the movie from taking a long and honest look at the devastation its reticent mood only suggests.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »