Chris Willman

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For 46 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 15% same as the average critic
  • 42% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Chris Willman's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 71
Highest review score: 91 Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Lowest review score: 40 Liam Gallagher: As It Was
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 35 out of 46
  2. Negative: 0 out of 46
46 movie reviews
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Neville’s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney’s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    If you’re a big Ozzy fan, you probably already love him for being brave enough to go out and meet his public one last time, against what we can now see from this film were nearly all odds. But the greater bravery might have been going on camera repeatedly for this doc, and allowing himself to convey that old age is not for the faint-hearted, even as it renders you fainter of heart.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    “Because I Believe” is as lovely to listen to as it is to look at.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    Bombach’s movie finds its real flavor in exploring the differences in the duo’s two very distinct personalities, which up till now might have seemed like a fuzzy, singular unit by all but the most hardcore fans.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Chris Willman
    In the Court of the Crimson King is really about as good as rock documentaries get, in capturing the essence of a group of musicians and how they relate to each other, the world and a muse whose demands result in literal and figurative calluses.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Chris Willman
    For most fans, this show isn’t so much about watching her career flash before their eyes — although there’s that — but their own roller-coaster lives. It’s sort of Broadway, kind of psychotherapy/church, and all too well-executed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    Jazz and animation make for strong bedfellows in They Shot the Piano Player, a film from Spanish directors Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all sorts of ways.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Watching this film satisfying tie up Case’s loose ends, you can still lament the lost promise of the Plimsouls, or wonder what might’ve happened with a more copacetic label/artist relationship.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Chris Willman
    Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    In a sense, Kiss the Future is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    When the movie — co-directed and produced by Emmy winner Sophie Robinson (“My Beautiful Broken Brain”) — relaxes into a more traditional doc approach, it’s on surer, if less dramatic, footing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    It’s far from the first music doc to reveal that it can be lonely at the top, but it is among the few to convey that there are no easy answers for that when mental illness is at the root. Of all the portrayals of pop superstars that have been produced in-house in recent years, “My Mind & Me” is probably the one with the least celebratory third act … which is something to celebrate.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    There are remarkably few serious hiccups along the way in achieving the career reclamation Carlile envisions for Tucker at the start. But any heightened sense of drama isn’t really necessary when it comes to the pleasures of spending time with two such strong musical personalities in what amounts to a documentary two-hander, fully justifying tagging the younger artist’s name onto the film’s title as an awkward but fitting addendum.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    [Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    The clichéd word that’s most bandied about by vinyl enthusiasts really does apply to the movie that’s been made about it: “warmth.”
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Don Argott and Demian Fenton’s film belongs more to the realm of fan service than crossover pic, but it’ll attract curious souls from other corners of the rock world who don’t mind the devil being in two hours’ worth of details.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    It’s a documentary that merits a place in classrooms as well as theaters, as a preventative against the virus of cynicism.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Chris Willman
    Coming away from “Just a Girl,” it’s impossible not to be convinced that Moreno is the rare screen legend who found a way to stick the Hollywood landing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    If the film falls short as a possible tale of heroic enlightenment, it’s still pretty absorbing, in the in-between moments, as a study of a dude still working out the intersections between wild public success and neurotic torments. To the extent that its middle and best section is really a story of politics driving someone already prone to depression deeper into it, that’s when The Boy From Medellín feels most timely.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Fortunately, “I Got a Story to Tell” bears a life force that looms even larger than Wallace’s — that of his Jamaican-born “moms,” Voletta, who has so much star presence that even Angela Bassett couldn’t quite do justice to it when she played her in the 2009 movie.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    Underplayed is too gentle a probe to risk targeting industry leaders or fandom for more than a moment here or there.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    In the end, Alone Together is a love story — about the love between Charli and her fans.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Chris Willman
    A highly satisfying HBO documentary ... that wisely places roughly equal emphasis on how the sausage was made and how the culture was changed.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Chris Willman
    Singer does find a slight bit of drama to seize on at about the two-thirds point of the film, which, for understandable purposes of having anything at all happen in the movie, he trumps up to the point it becomes nearly comical.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    There’s some fan value here, all spiritual quests aside, in seeing how accepting the individual Beatles could be of someone they could have taken as an interloper in their lofty midst. Maybe that’s the revelation, then: Sweet, the Beatles.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    The rocker, while never downplaying the danger of the fire he’s played with throughout his life, has to chuckle as he admits he’s led a largely charmed life. We end up charmed, too, if never really riveted.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Chris Willman
    Despite its probably modest budget, “Street Survivors” is actually first-class as convincingly harrowing aeronautical disaster movies go, if you’re a follower of the genre that has Peter Weir’s 1993 “Fearless” to live up to.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    In some sense, Quatro was Jett before Jett was really Jett — laying down the leather law when no female rocker had yet managed the combination of sex appeal and pure machisma.

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