David Rooney

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The Hollywood Reporter, Variety
For 1,354 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Rooney's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 The Hand of God
Lowest review score: 10 The School for Good and Evil
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 836 out of 1354
  2. Mixed: 434 out of 1354
  3. Negative: 84 out of 1354
1354 movie reviews
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    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Mother Mary
    Some might be willing to find depth in his stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona. I found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Outcome
    Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 David Rooney
    The Electric State
    The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 David Rooney
    Kraven the Hunter
    Punishingly dull.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Red One
    This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    The Crow
    The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Borderlands
    Roth’s messy storytelling is so anxious to get to the next blast of rote action — amped up by Steve Jablonsky’s hard-working synth and orchestral score and lots of shoddy CGI — that the characters have scant opportunity to form real bonds.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Ricky Stanicky
    A sad demonstration that what was once considered outrageous, transgressive and anarchic now just seems crass, tired and witless.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Wonka
    Young audiences may well be enchanted, but I’m sad to report I found the whole confection sickly sweet and hopelessly twee.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Enea
    It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    She Came to Me
    She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 David Rooney
    Falling for Christmas
    This sub-Hallmark dreck made by a bunch of hacks that don’t deserve to be named is the first film out of Lohan’s Netflix deal and her first feature in three years. Not to beat up on a former child star who has overcome more than her share of demons, but if this is the best vehicle she could find, waiting another three might not have been a bad idea.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 David Rooney
    The School for Good and Evil
    This is a uniquely tiresome slog — madly over-plotted, thuddingly derivative, insanely overlong and slathered in a big symphonic score that strives to infuse momentum into a saga with minimal emotional stakes.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Bullet Train
    For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Jerry and Marge Go Large
    This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Jurassic World Dominion
    Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Hunt
    What this twisty espionage thriller ... doesn’t have enough of is character depth or storytelling coherence.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Deep Water
    Lyne’s take on the material, scripted without distinction by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith’s story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    The Adam Project
    The result is neither funny nor thrilling, just exhausting.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Don't Look Up
    A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Cry Macho
    This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 David Rooney
    America Latina
    For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Reminiscence
    In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Italian Studies
    The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 David Rooney
    Infinite
    Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Chaos Walking
    The characters are uninvolving, the emotional stakes never fully take hold and the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 David Rooney
    Cherry
    Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 David Rooney
    Locked Down
    A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.
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