Diego Semerene

Select another critic »
Slant Magazine
For 299 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 60% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 8.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Diego Semerene's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Tomboy
Lowest review score: 0 The Roads Not Taken
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 156 out of 299
  2. Mixed: 43 out of 299
  3. Negative: 100 out of 299
299 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 78 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    The Breadwinner
    Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    The Charmer
    Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    Hitler's Hollywood
    Rüdiger Suchsland’s film is a master class in the relationship between image production and ideology writ large.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    Wetlands
    For its general ludic obsession with all things generally thought of as disgusting, the German film Wetlands is stuck in the anal stage.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    The Teacher
    There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
    We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Mitra Farahani rescues the doc from becoming a talking-head fest by embracing her creative self as a character and exposing the travails of her own authorship process.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    I Carry You with Me
    Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    The Stroll
    The Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    The Meaning of Hitler
    Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    Cassandro, the Exotico!
    It wouldn’t be fair to call the film hagiographic, but the director’s empathy, if not love, for her subject hinders her from examining Cassandro’s wounds with much depth.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    Marguerite
    Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    The Bad Kids
    Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    Capernaum
    Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    José
    Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    Sauvage / Wild
    The film is a tale about how those who spiral so far out of control become blind, if not immune, to the severity of their symptoms.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    Notes on Blindness
    Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Mala Mala
    The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    A Chiara
    The film’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    The Wise Kids
    Hovering over the narrative is the fear of the domino effect that change can enact, the dread that one person's "queerness" may perhaps expose everyone else's.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    Liv & Ingmar
    The documentary not only humanizes Ingmar Bergman as the absent lover-cum-father of everyday life, but works as a priceless oral history of cinema.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo
    Very few films accept the contradicting velocities of gay desire, and present them in such blunt yet graceful fashion, the way Paris 05:59 does.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Diego Semerene
    Tomboy
    Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 38 Diego Semerene
    Daughter of Mine
    Unlike My Life in Pink, Daughter of Mine sidesteps all ambiguity, as the film reveals everything about its characters straight away, leaving little room for unexpected complexities about their predicaments to develop.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    Starlet
    The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    Land and Shade
    The landscape seems to push the characters away at the same time that it anchors them into place, suggesting that elsewhere is a promise that only dreams can keep.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    Tehran Taboo
    The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    From Afar
    The film renders visible a very complicated, and awfully repressed, truth not only about gay desire, but desire in general.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Diego Semerene
    4 Days in France
    There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Diego Semerene
    The Great Man
    It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »