Chris Cabin

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Collider, Slant Magazine
For 148 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 69% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 10.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Chris Cabin's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 55
Highest review score: 100 Citizen Kane
Lowest review score: 12 What Maisie Knew
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 70 out of 148
  2. Mixed: 22 out of 148
  3. Negative: 56 out of 148
148 movie reviews
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    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Ender's Game
    Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Enough Said
    Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Jupiter Ascending
    The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    After Earth
    The art of storytelling is both of distinct narrative interest and personal issue in the latest payload of calcified nonsense from one of modern cinema's oddest would-be auteurs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    The Double
    Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Bad Words
    The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    What We Did on Our Holiday
    The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    A Walk Among the Tombstones
    All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Focus
    The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    The Interview
    It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Mr. Holmes
    Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Ride Along
    The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Despicable Me 2
    The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Man of Steel
    All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Haute Cuisine
    Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Peeples
    Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Sabotage
    There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    The Company You Keep
    A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Chef
    Jon Favreau's film comes off as flippant in its view of independent labor as a universally liberating experience for an artist and businessman.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    The Gunman
    The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Rush
    Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Ted 2
    The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane's racy, dick-centric sense of humor.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Les Coquillettes
    It's hard to ignore the fact that a substantial percentage of Letourneur's would-be character study is dedicated to concentrated Schadenfreude that's unbalanced and without any real narrative weight.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    The Way, Way Back
    Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Chris Cabin
    Metallica: Through the Never
    The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Escape Plan
    A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    The Expendables 3
    For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    The Smurfs 2
    Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Josh Heald's script takes the easy way out, ending the film with a torrent of slapdash sentimentality.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Chappie
    The film's exasperating atonality washes out any legitimate idea about identity, education, nature versus nurture, or artificial intelligence that Neill Blomkamp hoped to evince.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    The Nut Job
    There's no personality in the design or the script, which only renders the cynical aftertaste of this convoluted one-squirrel-against the-world story all the more potent.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Kick-Ass 2
    The film doubles down on the love-hate relationship with ultra-violence that typified its predecessor, but A History of Violence this is not.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Delivery Man
    The breadth of Vince Vaughn's gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn't the game-changer.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Insidious: Chapter 2
    A full realization of the very worst fears one could imagine when its director, James Wan, unexpectedly emerged from the torture-porn murk with its original, spiritedly directed predecessor.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    RED 2
    An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Need For Speed
    Even when compared to other films posing as Ford Mustang commercials, Need for Speed isn't particularly memorable for anything other than the startling incompetence and dull sheen of the end result.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Walking with Dinosaurs
    The strain to make the film both an educational tool and a child-minded entertainment is noticeable throughout.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Dom Hemingway
    That Dom is so clearly an up-to-11 caricature, embodied with reliable pizzazz by Jude Law, makes the sentimental moments feel especially false.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Fast & Furious 6
    Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    World War Z
    The zombies twitch, leap, gnash, and destroy, but the film has all the thrill and surprise of a model U.N. summit.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Kingsman: The Secret Service
    It's tructured in familiar, safe terms, plays for very low stakes, and appeals to no one so much as white, male teenagers with chips on their shoulders.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Wish I Was Here
    It's hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff's second feature as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Project Almanac
    The film delivers the same misogynistic, faux-modernistic jolts of trashy humor and labored plotting that typify the work of co-producer Michael Bay.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Chris Cabin
    Free Birds
    The film is absent of humor and thrills, and accented with designs and color schemes that are equally notable for their lack of risk.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    Men, Women & Children
    Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    Winter's Tale
    Fantasy is heavily dependent on vision, which Mark Helprin had in spades, but the look of Akiva Goldsman's fantasy is limp, timid, and occasionally outright awkward.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    The Best Man Holiday
    The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    What Maisie Knew
    David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    Grown Ups 2
    The obvious amount of hard work that went into this out-of-touch sequel is partly what makes it so irritating.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    Some Girl(s)
    Like most of Neil LaBute's work in the field of "emotional terrorism," the film protests that bad behavior isn't only good, but also essential to art.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    Sex Tape
    By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz's backsides.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 12 Chris Cabin
    The Judge
    One long trial of moral duty, and one that excuses repugnant behavior and psychological warfare in lieu of a repetitive, condescending sermon on honoring thy father.

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