Derek Smith

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Slant Magazine
For 336 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 15% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 83% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 14.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Derek Smith's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 51
Highest review score: 88 Everything Everywhere All at Once
Lowest review score: 0 The Last Face
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 133 out of 336
  2. Mixed: 74 out of 336
  3. Negative: 129 out of 336
336 movie reviews
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    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly plays out as a showcase for Jessica Chastain to bring as much emotional sturm und drang to the woman as she lurches between various states of turmoil.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Black Christmas
    The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Wakefield
    Writer-director Robin Swicord's film seems content to merely carry out its absurdist premise until the bitter end.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is a tour ride through a legend’s formative years that’s more concerned with the familiar signposts than the intricacies of the scenery along the way.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Allure
    Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Sarah Stone have a natural chemistry together that brings a feverish and unsettling intensity to their characters' tumultuous relationship, but there's no reprieve from the dour tone of the film.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    The Good Catholic
    Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    A Good Person
    The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Saturday Night
    There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Pilgrimage
    The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Free Guy
    There’s so much discernible IP baked into Shawn Levy’s film to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel hypocritical at best.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Run with the Hunted
    Some of the film’s narrative threads are frustratingly unresolved, while others are wrapped up in arbitrary fashion.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Violent Night
    Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    The Addams Family
    Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    The Hitman's Bodyguard
    Because it so consistently fails to meld its comic sensibilities and love stories with its generic action premise into a seamless whole, The Hitman's Bodyguard sometimes just appears to be parodying the sort of mess it ends up being.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    Yardie
    The film’s tendency to break the “show, don’t tell” directive becomes especially irksome in its homestretch.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    No Hard Feelings
    What ultimately sinks No Hard Feelings is its inability to convincingly meld its excessively bawdy humor and its Hallmark Channel-level drama of two opposites who help one another to embrace life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Derek Smith
    All I Wish
    Writer-director Susan Walter's film seems almost determined to disprove the causality of social phenomena.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Vincent N Roxxy
    Its gory conclusion is presented with an ostentatious grandiosity that the rest of the film simply doesn’t justify.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Father Stu
    The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Like a Boss
    Its inconsistent, half-baked characterizations would be more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Project Power
    The film is an unwieldy array of muddled ideas that never gel together into a cohesive whole.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Midnight Sun
    Throughout, the film's tone vacillates jarringly between corny, broad humor and unrestrained treacle.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Dolittle
    Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard improves on its 2017 predecessor only insofar as it runs 20 minutes shorter.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    Freelance
    By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    The King's Man
    The film is so caught up in its own idea of national exceptionalism that its tagline might as well be Make England Great Again.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Derek Smith
    The Home
    As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.
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