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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    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Blue Caprice
    For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 0 Dana Stevens
    Salinger
    That mystery is certainly hardy enough to withstand the voyeuristic onslaught of this self-aggrandizing, lurid documentary, which leaves the viewer feeling that we’ve been given a tour of Salinger’s septic tank in hip waders without ever getting to knock on his door and say hello.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Dana Stevens
    The World's End
    The World’s End not only makes a more than worthy conclusion to the Cornetto trilogy — it stands on its own as one of the sharpest, saddest and wisest comedies of the year.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Lee Daniels' The Butler
    The director’s sometimes absurd bravado — along with Forest Whitaker’s grave, wise performance in the title role — is what gives this outsized and sometimes lumbering film its irrefutable emotional power.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Dana Stevens
    Elysium
    Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    The Spectacular Now
    This movie’s human scale, its unaffected compassion for every one of its far-from-perfect characters, is what kept me on its side throughout.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    The To Do List
    This thin, floppy comedy never quite became the high-spirited summer sex romp it clearly set out to be. I haven’t quite figured out yet why The To Do List doesn’t work, when so many elements within it seem to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Blue Jasmine
    Jasmine attains the paradoxical state of being fascinatingly tiresome. The same pair of words might be used to describe Blue Jasmine, which, whether you like it or not, surely counts as one of Allen’s more unexpected films of the past decade
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Dana Stevens
    R.I.P.D.
    With its low-stakes chase scenes, obvious-from-the-get-go villains and nonsensical plotting, this feels more like a 96-minute-long episode of Scooby-Doo that's been laboriously translated into another language and then back into English.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Dana Stevens
    The Act of Killing
    Among the most profound, formally complex, and emotionally overpowering documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s also, by turns and sometimes at once, luridly seductive and darkly comic and physically revolting — a movie that makes you want to laugh and cry and retch and run out of the theater, both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it, too.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Dana Stevens
    Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station’s wrenching power lies in the specificity of its storytelling and the ordinary human warmth of the world it conjures. You walk out of it, not shaking your head over an abstract social problem, but grieving the senseless death of one flawed, complex, tragically young man.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Pacific Rim
    Coming out of Pacific Rim I felt energized rather than enervated, excited to describe certain nifty details of the film’s wacked-out imaginary world to friends, maybe even ready to … sit through certain parts again?
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Sweetgrass
    Though Sweetgrass has moments of great beauty, the film is never nostalgic or idealizing about its human or ovine subjects. It shows the relationship of human and domesticated animal—and the relationship of both to nature—as a productive and symbiotic yet often brutal struggle.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    I'm So Excited
    Nevertheless, I’m So Excited (in Spanish, the title is Los amantes pasajeros, meaning both “the fleeting lovers” and “the passenger lovers”) looks fabulous, talks dirty, and sometimes makes you laugh, which is really all you can ask of a fleeting lover.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    White House Down
    Even as the story accrues preposterousness, the action moves along crisply, and Tatum and Foxx hit a nice buddy-movie vibe.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Monsters University
    Though this is a sweet, clever, gorgeously animated movie I’d be glad to take my kid to on a Saturday afternoon, I’m not sure it’s one I’d insist all my grownup friends drop what they’re doing to see.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    World War Z
    Given how efficiently World War Z has delivered jolts and screams over the course of its sleek 116-minute running time, it’s easy to forgive this rushed and slightly muted finale.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Man of Steel
    If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Much Ado About Nothing
    This Much Ado About Nothing — while perhaps not an adaptation for the ages in every respect — is as bracingly effervescent as picnic champagne.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    After Earth
    In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Before Midnight
    Linklater may not have set out to make a decade-spanning triptych of poetic meditations on youth, young adulthood, and middle age, but he, Hawke, and Delpy have accomplished exactly that. The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Frances Ha
    Frances Ha feels like a collaboration between two people in love, and not always in the best way. There are too many scenes in a row that make the same point.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Star Trek Into Darkness
    He’s (Abrams) caught some of the spark of the first Star Trek without either mimicking or desecrating the original.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    The Great Gatsby
    It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Iron Man 3
    Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Dana Stevens
    Pain & Gain
    A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    For all the contemporary relevance of the issues it explores, there’s something morally and aesthetically muffled about The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Nair is so busy making sure we never lose sympathy for her handsome and charming protagonist that the film ultimately founders in a tangle of humanist platitudes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Dana Stevens
    To the Wonder
    I didn’t like the movie at all — found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious — but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Evil Dead
    Though it never channels the raw DIY energy of the original Evil Dead series — what big-budget version could? — this polished, clever remake remains true to the spirit of the original, which was at once viscerally terrifying and weirdly lighthearted.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.
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