Chris Willman

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The Playlist, Variety
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. Mixed: 11 out of 46
  3. Negative: 0 out of 46
46 movie reviews
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    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    The film picks up more general interest once it moves past the early nobility of the outfit as a band of brothers into the things that cripple the least greatest of groups ... Robertson [is] an articulate and ingratiating tour guide through all this glorious and eventually tortured history.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Chris Willman
    Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Whatever fascination the film holds belongs solely to Del Toro and his vanity-free impression of Escobar as a titan whose potbelly and gym shorts do not put the slightest dent in a charisma that hypnotizes a nation.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Chris Willman
    Labor Day
    A full-immersion exercise in the old-fashioned women's weepie that skews far closer to Nicholas Sparks' brand of contrivance than Diablo Cody territory.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Chris Willman
    Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
    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
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Mountaintop
    I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    Fiddlin'
    Even filmgoers with little taste for these arcane sounds may enjoy the doc, if only for the chance to spend an hour and a half in the company of so many prodigies who’ve put down their phones in the service of taking up catgut.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Chris Willman
    Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash
    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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Chris Willman
    Somebody Up There Likes Me
    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
    • 60 Chris Willman
    Meeting the Beatles in India
    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
    Underplayed
    Underplayed is too gentle a probe to risk targeting industry leaders or fandom for more than a moment here or there.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Chris Willman
    Jason Isbell: Running with Our Eyes Closed
    Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Peter Case: A Million Miles Away
    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
    • 80 Chris Willman
    Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe
    “Because I Believe” is as lovely to listen to as it is to look at.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story
    Beyond just providing a welcome dip into nostalgia, maybe “Building a Mystery” could go some way toward building interest in a reboot.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Chris Willman
    Ozzy: No Escape From Now
    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.
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