David Fear

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Rolling Stone, Time Out
For 1,267 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Fear's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
Lowest review score: 0 Madame Web
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 537 out of 1267
  2. Mixed: 641 out of 1267
  3. Negative: 89 out of 1267
1267 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Dumb Money
    Gillespie and his movie-star cast aren’t trying to short squeeze the topic for statuettes. They’re just laying out what happened, why it happened, and why it mattered in the most audience-friendly manner imaginable, then take the whole thing to the moon. And it’s the lack of pandering in the way that they do it while also drawing clear battle lines that make it a surprisingly safe bet. We like the stock here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    La Llorona
    La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Fear
    Dune: Part Two
    The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    The Fighter
    You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Apollo 10 1/2 starts off as a fantasy, a family comedy and a loosey-goosey flashback. It exits as a tribute to imagination, which — like so many of Linklater’s best movies — uses something personal as a jumping-off point for something poignant, funny, expansive, and ultimately moving.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    The Naked Gun
    For the first half hour, Neeson’s reboot of The Naked Gun series is easily one of the most hilarious things to hit theaters in ages.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Deep End (1970)
    You think you're in for another coming-of-age movie about getting into someone's pants until you realize Deep End's real goal is getting under your skin.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    How to Have Sex
    That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Fear
    Thunder Road
    It’s a matter of opinion whether Thunder Road is one of the best films of 2018, a distinction best left for listmakers and marketers. (Cue “It, Me” copping to the former.) But I can say it’s one of my favorites, the sort of experience where you walk out of a theater 90 minutes later and feel like something inside you has shifted two klicks to the left.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 David Fear
    Walking Out
    If their contribution to the man-vs-nature genre isn't exactly top-tier, Walking Out still hits its marks in terms of father-son melodrama with an uncanny precision.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 David Fear
    The Highwaymen
    The best thing about The Highwaymen by a long shot is seeing Costner tap back into that Gary Cooper mode he once perfected and add older, wiser touches to it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Conclave
    Do not come to Conclave in search of some divine messages about power, corruption and lies percolating within a sacred space. Just embrace it for being the type of gobsmacking, pope-up-the-jams entertainment that will have you genuflecting with gratitude over its over-the-top ridiculousness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 David Fear
    Brawl in Cell Block 99
    If many male stars of a certain age are destined to become late-act action heroes, we hope this is Vaughn's "Taken," and his particular set of skills will continue to involve dishing out such graceless, effective hurt.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    The Law in These Parts
    Justice is blind - but there are cases where fingers start weighing down the scales. That's the j'accuse that Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's documentary puts forth regarding Israel's rule of law in its post-'67 occupied territories.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Fear
    Official Competition
    The movie would hit every bullseye it needed to even without her near-surgical deconstruction of the narcissistic monsters who scream “action” and “cut.” With Cruz’s take on artistic “genius,” however, this satire officially becomes a work of actual genius.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 David Fear
    Contemporary Color
    This may be one of the few rockumentaries since Stop Making Sense to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Black Swan
    Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    The Painter and the Thief
    You can be successfully creative or you can end taking a much more crooked path. As The Painter and the Thief so ably demonstrates, your life is worthy or compassion and consideration regardless.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 David Fear
    Our Children
    It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    i'm thinking of ending things
    Somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Lurker
    A portrait of a sycophant as a pure, unbridled sociopath, Lurker understands the relationship between fame and fandom all too well.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Oki's Movie
    Forget the snark about him ransacking Eric Rohmer's bag of tricks; the gentle ironies and droll, bitter wit here prove Hong is the French New Waver's heir apparent.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
    Guggenheim and his subject also want to show what it’s like to be Michael J. Fox right now, and that’s really where this documentary, which premiered at Sundance today, turns into something else entirely — something beyond praise or tragedy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Sr.
    For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Les Misérables
    An actor with a handful of shorts under his belt — including a Cesar-nominated 2017 one that served as the basis for this feature — Ladj Ly juggles a variety of perspectives, subcultures and intersecting storylines like a pro.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    BlackBerry
    There’s something so compelling about what [Howerton's] doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Public Speaking
    By the end of this funny, insightful doc, you get a sense of an extraordinary mind that both fueled and fed the zeitgeist. Don't miss it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Dìdi
    You can add Sean Wang’s Dìdi to the short list of films that fine-tune the personal into the universal, and turn a magic-mirror reflection of its creator into a shared wavelength.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    After Yang
    As you find yourself instinctively reviewing those own seemingly insignificant moments in your own life, the ones that you hold so dear, while following this cyber-compassionate movie to its conclusion, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the long game that the film’s creator is playing.
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