Diego Semerene

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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 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
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    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    Gerontophilia
    It chooses the delicateness of a fable instead of the narrative recklessness we've come to expect from Bruce La Bruce.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    Going Down in LA-LA Land
    Director Casper Andreas does a good job conserving a simultaneous sense of disgust and attraction for the way big-city dreams end up stripping off wannabes from everything but their bodies.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    José
    Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    A World Not Ours
    Mahdi Fleifel's usage of a domestic archive of home-video images inherited from his father lends the doc a simultaneous sense of historical gravitas and intimacy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Diego Semerene
    Closet Monster
    It's when Stephen Dunn dares to inhabit the how and not the what of queerness that Closet Monster feels authentic and deliciously strange.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Earth
    With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Private Desert
    Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Sassy Pants
    Sassy Pants has a slightly ludic atmosphere akin to another tale of teen alienation, Dear Lemon Lima, but it unfolds like a fable in which only Bethany doesn't feel like a canned caricature.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Cargo
    Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Summer of 85
    François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Let My People Go!
    Without a consistent stylistic playfulness to match the histrionic scenarios, the action often feels just plain silly.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Against the Current
    Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Uncle Frank
    When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    On a Magical Night
    Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Two Lives
    The film's educational impetus is to announce to the world that even picture-perfect Norwegians continue to pay a heavy price for the horrors of WWII.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Invisible Life
    Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Free Ride
    Shana Betz's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes the film seem like empty dramatization.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    The tension between the amateurish interviewer and the star interviewees gives the documentary a layer of authenticity that its otherwise formulaic structure and storytelling fail to find.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    White Girl
    It's an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Girl Asleep
    From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    The Magician
    The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    Autoerotic
    Autoerotic's take on the me-me-me generation's inability for actual contact seems appropriate, but it lacks the nuance that makes "Denise Calls Up" so delicious to watch.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    The Plough
    The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Diego Semerene
    This Is Not Berlin
    Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.
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