Dana Stevens

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Slate, The New York Times
For 1,386 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Dana Stevens' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Killers of the Flower Moon
Lowest review score: 0 Sorority Boys
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 783 out of 1386
  2. Mixed: 462 out of 1386
  3. Negative: 141 out of 1386
1386 movie reviews
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    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    The Devil Wears Prada 2
    Ultimately, if you are a big enough fan of the first Devil Wears Prada to have ever texted a friend (or in my case a daughter) that viral video of Bowen Yang flawlessly lip-synching the “cerulean” speech, this sparkly sequel provides a satisfying balance between nostalgic callbacks and intelligent updates to suit a more contemporary, if sadder, media landscape.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Mother Mary
    The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    The Drama
    As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Project Hail Mary
    Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    Wuthering Heights
    For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Wake Up Dead Man marks not just a return to form but an expansion of the series’ potential.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Jay Kelly
    Is it OK if, as a critic who has at times found the director’s work to be astringent to the point of sourness, I enjoyed without unreservedly loving this foray into warmer, more humanistic territory?
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    Hamnet
    A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    Wicked: For Good
    The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Sentimental Value
    Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Nouvelle Vague
    Nouvelle Vague is an affectionate portrait of the artist as a young nutjob with absolute faith in his vision, and an invitation for creators of all kinds to believe in their own similarly implausible dreams.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Blue Moon
    Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director’s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Dana Stevens
    Bugonia
    Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Frankenstein
    Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    A House of Dynamite
    A House of Dynamite...is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    The Smashing Machine
    Benny Safdie’s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark’s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character’s and the actor’s interiority.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Dana Stevens
    One Battle After Another
    The magnificent One Battle After Another stays true to the spirit of the reclusive author’s best books: It’s a brainy meditation on our dystopian present that’s also a whacked-out roller coaster ride.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    Spinal Tap II’s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Highest 2 Lowest
    Highest 2 Lowest moves with a swagger and self-confidence that perhaps oversells what the script actually has to offer, but it’s hard to resist the draw of seeing Lee and Washington collaborate for the first time since Inside Man in 2006.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Freakier Friday
    It’s a good movie for a late-summer legacy sequel, not a candidate for the all-time comedy pantheon. But every new generation of mothers and daughters, as they struggle to balance their love for each other with their quest to discover themselves, deserves a body-swap comedy of their—our—own.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Superman
    Even if this Superman remains an anomaly in the superhero-movie cosmos, the discovery of the winningly un-macho David Corenswet—without a doubt the best Superman since Christopher Reeve, who like Corenswet was a hunky Juilliard graduate with a bashful, dimpled smile—is enough to lift this new version of the long-beloved character into the sky.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    28 Years Later
    There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Materialists
    There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    The Phoenician Scheme
    For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Friendship
    Especially during its third-act descent into the surreal netherworld of its protagonist’s mind, Friendship plays out as if it were a 97-minute-long I Think You Should Leave sketch.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Sinners
    It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    Warfare
    I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.
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