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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    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Fear
    One Battle After Another
    In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 David Fear
    Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 David Fear
    Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
    Despite the mix of succession-focused handwringing and a lot people busily running around, extremely little actually happens in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — certainly not enough to justify a third feature.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Frankenstein
    It’s neither del Toro’s best nor his worst, but this feels like the movie he was born to make, and the one he would have died trying to get done.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    Christy
    Christy is a decent movie, and a way better proof-of-concept regarding Sweeney’s willingness to go the distance for a project.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Everyone seems to be having a blast, and the filmmaker knows how to take both the ensemble he’s assembled and his congregation of Knives Out fans — call us Blanc-heads — to church, literally and figuratively.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 David Fear
    Hamnet
    Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    John Candy: I Like Me
    Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    The Roses
    Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    Caught Stealing
    Caught Stealing is a decent wild ride through the past, filled with enough memory-bank fodder and hairpin turns to keep anyone engaged.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Splitsville
    You’ll still spend close to two hours wondering whether Splitsville wants you to walk away thinking that you’ve seen something semi-sweet or almost irredeemably sour. The key is recognizing how satisfying things feel when they somehow manage to split the difference.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    Honey Don't!
    The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Fear
    My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Nobody 2
    The universal rule of sequels dictates that you give viewers another helping of the same thing yet somehow make it different, the sort of koan that only makes sense to lifelong Zen masters and studio suits. Yet, against the odds, the creators of this continuation have managed to do more than just produce a carbon copy with a new number after the title.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 David Fear
    Fixed
    Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 10 David Fear
    War of the Worlds
    This War of the Worlds isn’t bad or even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s a secret third thing, a hodgepodge of shoddy CGI and dead-eyed reaction shots from Ice Cube that make you feel like you can identify individual brain cells mid-death cycle.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Weapons
    This is a tale that’s carefully crafted as much as told, with hints hiding in plain sight and surreal touches that add more to the vibe than the momentum. But you never feel like you’re in the hands of someone who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Together
    It’s bone-chilling romantic cringe-comedy, in the form of a public nightmare. And for a split second, a movie so dedicated to getting under horror fans’ skin truly succeeds in making you want to crawl out of yours.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 David Fear
    Happy Gilmore 2
    The rule for sequels is: give them the same, only different. Happy Gilmore 2 adheres to this concept beautifully, along with doling out enough blatant fan service to choke a one-eyed alligator. (R.I.P., Morris.)
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 David Fear
    Oh, Hi!
    No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 David Fear
    The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 David Fear
    I Know What You Did Last Summer
    It’s the sensation that you’re watching something that’s sloppy, overthought, undercooked and can’t decide whether it wants to honor the original (it fails), add to both the in-house lore and the longstanding genre tropes of the slasher canon (it does not), or some combo of both (two missed opportunities for the price of one).
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    Superman
    It’s faint praise, even in the post-MCU era of the genre, to say that Superman is a solid superhero film; the caveat is hiding in plain sight. What Gunn has pulled off is something more complicated, more interesting, and far tougher: He’s given us a Superman movie that actually feels like a living, breathing comic book.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 David Fear
    40 Acres
    Deadwyler is what makes 40 Acres feel like there’s something special happening here. The script has brains. Her Hailey has heart and soul. She gives us the postapocalyptic hero we deserve.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 David Fear
    The Old Guard 2
    It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 David Fear
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    So why the hell does this feel so generic, so by-the-numbers, so instantly forgettable? The whole thing resembles the blockbuster version of a readymade, assembled from various, recognizable spare parts and elevated only by virtue of its name.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Fear
    Sorry, Baby
    Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 David Fear
    M3GAN 2.0
    The overbaked, underwhelming, narratively restless movie itself is 0.0 percent watchable.
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