Chris Barsanti

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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
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 45 Chris Barsanti
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    There is only so much a director can do to bring surprise to certain stock elements—it would be refreshing to just once see a convoy survive a movie without being ambushed—but Sollima knits together big, sweeping aerial shots and tight-in, juddering angles that work each nerve not already done to pieces by all the automatic weapons fire and exploding vehicles.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 42 Chris Barsanti
    Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    By refusing to illuminate the detainees’ stories or the humanitarian crisis—not widely reported enough for Brady to take the audience’s familiarity as a given—they are trapped inside, The Island of Hungry Ghosts relegates itself to being little more than a pretty but wispy curiosity that fails its beleaguered subjects.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Chris Barsanti
    Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    For Driver’s movie, Basquiat is a ghostly presence, popping up in snapshots or scraps of footage.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Chris Barsanti
    The Insult
    Doueiri wrestles with the complexities of history and morality without ignoring the humanity of the individuals caught in this frightening maelstrom of a story.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 91 Chris Barsanti
    No Stone Unturned
    Gibney’s movie points fingers not just at the people it argues carried out the killing, but the highly-placed figures who covered up for them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Chris Barsanti
    Strong Island
    This is cinematic intimacy in the best manner for the worst of all reasons.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 58 Chris Barsanti
    Whose Streets?
    This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Chris Barsanti
    The Reagan Show
    Satirically tart throughout, The Reagan Show is still a schizoid experience. It mostly wants to dissect the Reaganites’ bread and circuses tactics, but also to present a thumbnail history of his presidency. Both are credibly delivered, but they don’t always necessarily mesh.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    A Gray State
    Excepting a strangely off-key final scene, A Gray State is a compelling, highly dramatic piece of documentary filmmaking.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Chris Barsanti
    LA 92
    The broad-spectrum approach of LA 92 resists easy answers while still holding a strong editorial viewpoint about the overlapping institutional defects that led to the riots.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Chris Barsanti
    By the Time It Gets Dark
    By the Time It Gets Dark jumps at first into an examination of Thailand’s repressed history of political violence and dictatorial control. But that initial pencil sketch of a thesis is soon shuffled away in favor of several other less-interesting story threads which add up to much less than the sum of their parts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Chris Barsanti
    The Public Enemy
    There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence, from the first moment he’s on screen, he radiates such a brash Fenian cockiness you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him. It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Chris Barsanti
    Coup 53
    Once Taghi Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Walter Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Barsanti
    The Night of the 12th
    The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.
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