For 304 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Dave Calhoun's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
Lowest review score: 20 The Last Face
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 3 out of 304
304 movie reviews
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Dave Calhoun
    We Are Aliens remains visually engrossing and, as storytelling, it’s mostly sophisticated and intelligent.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Dave Calhoun
    As a portrait of the man, it’s selective but not so much as to feel shallow. It fleshes out his qualities and weaknesses while preserving much of the enigma. Which is exactly what you imagine Cantona himself would want.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    The Man I Love doesn’t feel so much like a portrait of a time and place rather than something more essential and human: a portrait of a passionate and loving character caught in a final performance he didn’t ask for, and which he wishes would never end.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    Heroes are often given big speeches and major acts, but heroism is finally defined in Moulin as saying nothing and doing nothing – resisting with the full force of your body and your mind.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Dave Calhoun
    It opens no major storytelling doors in the Star Wars universe – and is unlikely to herald a new era of Star Wars in cinemas. Indeed, for fans of the series it could feel like several fresh episodes of the streaming show given a major boost of scale, imagination and budget. Still, as a standalone film, it’s perky and good-looking, with rousing set pieces.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger. But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    As a storyteller, writer-director Hafsia Herzi is not coy, but she’s careful, allowing intimacy to emerge with the same tentativeness as it does for Fatima.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Dave Calhoun
    It’s a deeply raw and honest film. It’s bleak, but it also has a musical, black-comic, big-hearted spirit that pulls you through the despair.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity, but even Bono seems to know when it’s best just to keep quiet and move on.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of life to the next.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    It’s a film of deep empathy, but a tough one, too.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Dave Calhoun
    It shouldn’t all be so funny, but it is, and it’s to Baker’s huge credit that he’s able to inspire laughs and huge enjoyment from this madcap story without leaving you feeling that the woman at the heart of this mess has been short-changed and exploited for our pleasure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    As a storyteller Cronenberg usually tells stories with more verve and storytelling power than this.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    Its bitty flashback approach to Fife’s earlier life feels shallow, and the dynamics around the recording of his memories too often feel bogus, with Thurman’s character’s complaints feeling especially repetitive and one-note. But the sting of mortality is felt just strongly enough, and Schrader offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed view of the near-impossibility of finding a neat closure on life’s mistakes and failures.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    Some who found his last two films an eccentric romp might end up feeling like some of the unfortunate folk in this – bruised, battered and stuck – but anyone who shares Lanthimos’s pleasure at swatting his humans like flies will surely extract wry pleasure from it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    As history, I’d take this account with a pinch of salt – it feels too enamoured by certain elements of its antihero’s story and blinkered to others – but as an exercise in capturing the man’s self-engineered legend, it’s energetic and engrossing.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    Caught by the Tides is more a montage of music and miscellaneous episodes than anything representing a traditional drama. It’s strongly propelled by music – from Chinese classical music to techno to rock – and it’s a heady visual mix of styles and formats: from grainy, phone-like footage in a documentary style, to much more pristine and considered imagery.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Dave Calhoun
    Given the ingredients (the deeply personal vision; a cast including Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Laurence Fishburne; the big budget; the years of gestation), it’s fair to wonder why it ends up being, one, so little fun, and two, so deadening on an intellectual level.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    If ever a film puts its arm round a kid and says: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you’, that’s Bird and Bailey. She’s a character you feel Arnold would lie on railtracks to protect – and that’s a powerful, moving instinct to share.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    Wang’s film feels less like an exposé than an eye-opener; a portrait of a reality that feels almost otherworldly in its distance and difference.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    It finds genuine humour in its characters’ almost down-and-out lot, but it’s fully on their side – the side of those trampled on by modern times.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Dave Calhoun
    It’s a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    Oddly, the comedy of this partnership is dialled down, and the film’s few wisecracks don’t really land. It’s adventure, though, that everyone really wants from an Indiana Jones movie, and on that front it delivers and then some by prising open the old box of tricks and performing them one-by-one with care and respect. Add to that the rousing familiarity of John Williams’s score, and it all amounts to a comforting if not especially challenging reboot.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    As you’d expect from Kore-eda, it’s all told with the utmost detail and care, and a gentle score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto only adds to the overarching air of thoughtfulness and empathy.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    It’s impossible entirely to recreate the effect of being in the room with this play, but this ear for eye is still essential for the art and power and relevance of tucker green’s unique wordplay.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    This is some flu: it plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Dave Calhoun
    This is a smart, meaningful first film, with nods all over the place to classics like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as more recent obvious touch points like Get Out. It’s not all subtle, but then neither is prejudice.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Dave Calhoun
    This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Dave Calhoun
    Only Pedro Almodóvar could wrap a cry of pain about Spain’s inability to come to terms with its recent dark history into a gorgeous-looking melodrama about two mothers drawn by fate into a complicated, painful and ultimately nourishing relationship.

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