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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    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Avengers: Endgame
    Avengers: Endgame throws in plenty of laughs along the way. In fact, in the long stretch between its appropriately somber opening chapter and an emotionally grueling finale, it may be the most lighthearted and character-driven Marvel movie since the giddy comic entry "Thor: Ragnarok." Endgame consists almost entirely of the downtime scenes that were always secretly everyone’s favorite parts of these movies anyway.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    A Time for Drunken Horses
    Because of its relentlessness, its crawling pace (the 77 minutes pass like 2 1/2 hours) and its sometimes confusing story, A Time for Drunken Horses may not be for every taste, but it's still an affecting, and in its way beautiful, movie.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Blue Ruin
    Blue Ruin is a Clint Eastwood vigilante fantasy with an anti-Clint at its center—small-statured, round-faced, nervous Dwight (Macon Blair), whose burning desire to avenge the long-ago murder of his parents doesn’t make him one whit less terrified of actually doing it.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Up and Down
    It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    The Saddest Music in the World
    Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Frankenstein
    Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    The Island
    Glossy, witty eye candy with some moderately chewy stuff in the middle. This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be. It's an impressive product: a triumph of cloning that almost convinces you that it possesses a soul.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    1917
    1917 doesn’t solve the problem that was posed 100 years ago by the historical convergence of modern warfare and modern image-making technology. No movie can provide a final answer to the question of what it means to film a war. But Mendes’ stunningly crafted entry in the genre will now become a part of a long history of imperfect representations of that unrepresentable conflict.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 20 Dana Stevens
    The Substance
    After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Murderous Maids
    Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Dana Stevens
    Last Orders
    Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Son frère
    Stringent, clinical and almost unbearably moving.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Logan Lucky
    Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Kung Fu Hustle
    For all its punches, kicks, whacks and thumps, the movie does not have much impact, and for all its affectionate nostalgia, it produces a strange kind of amnesia. It knocks the sense right out of your head, and its own as well.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Fancy Dance
    Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Dana Stevens
    The Town
    An autopsy for The Town would list multiple causes of death.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    Hitch
    An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Nope
    It’s such an original and idiosyncratic expression of its creator’s vision that sometimes the movie seems not to have yet made it all the way out of his head and onto the screen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Finding Dory
    What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum — even more than Nemo, Finding Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases, bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion — this new movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    The Wind Rises
    Though it’s just slightly over two hours long, The Wind Rises has the historical sweep of a David Lean picture, complete with panoramic shots of migrating populations against a background of disaster and a romantic orchestral score by Miyazaki’s longtime musical collaborator, Joe Hisaishi.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Dana Stevens
    The Virgin Suicides
    Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Our Song
    So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Dana Stevens
    Reconstruction
    Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Dana Stevens
    Dallas Buyers Club
    This is a movie that traffics in deep hindbrain emotions: fear and rage and lust and, above all, the pure animal drive to go on living.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Dana Stevens
    Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.
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