Ed Gonzalez

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For 255 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 31% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 66% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ed Gonzalez's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 Deep Red
Lowest review score: 12 Nurse 3D
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 116 out of 255
  2. Mixed: 51 out of 255
  3. Negative: 88 out of 255
255 movie reviews
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    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Happy Campers
    Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Downton Abbey: A New Era
    A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    12 Hour Shift
    The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    Children of Paradise (1945)
    Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    The Cordillera of Dreams
    For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Downton Abbey
    Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    End of the Century
    Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Smallfoot
    There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    Climax
    Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Sorry to Bother You
    For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Disobedience
    In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Red Sparrow
    The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Road Movie
    The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    The Florida Project
    Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Nile Hilton Incident
    The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Incredible Jessica James
    Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Elián
    It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Junction 48
    At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Lovers and the Despot
    The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Don't Breathe
    The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Viral
    The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Train to Busan
    When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Hardcore Henry
    The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Microbe and Gasoline
    Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Sicario
    Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Tangerine
    Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Avengers: Age of Ultron
    The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    It Follows
    Though visionary, David Robert Mitchell's film abounds in undigested ideas and dubious sexual politics.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Good Lie
    This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    The Guest
    David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Dolphin Tale 2
    Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Cannibal
    It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Purge: Anarchy
    DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Boyhood
    Richard Linklater's film is an experiment in time, and one that's attentive to the audience's sense of empathy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Willow Creek
    Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Cold in July
    While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Quiet Ones
    If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Locke
    The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Oculus
    Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Under the Skin
    Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Den
    The film is dizzyingly creepy in its refracting of horrors through the cascading windows of computer programs we've come to understand more intimately than our own selves.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Grand Piano
    Eugenio Mira thrills in watching his main character attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist's wily physical maneuvering.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Her
    A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    The Immigrant
    In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Abdellatif Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that's striking.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Prisoners
    Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Una Noche
    Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Cockneys vs Zombies
    Matthias Hoene allows the cockney swears to flow as deliriously as the truly convincing blood splatter, offering a few unexpected gut-busters along the way.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Pacific Rim
    Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Maniac
    Its audio-visual overload testifies to a group of filmmakers' belief that some films are made to be remade.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Byzantium
    Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Post Tenebras Lux
    Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Passion
    Passion is a serpentine, gorgeously orchestrated gathering of all of De Palma's pet themes and conceits, a symphony of giddy terror where people perpetually hide behind masks, both literal and figurative.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    To the Wonder
    Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Rabbi's Cat
    Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Rise of the Guardians
    This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Sleep Tight
    The states get higher with every breadcrumb Luis Tosar's creep lays down, and the film derives sometimes remarkable corkscrew tension from watching him being backed into a corner.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Cloud Atlas
    Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Holy Motors
    Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Keep the Lights On
    More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    Las Acacias
    This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Step Up Revolution
    The film busts a fierce move but never relishes the unique cultural essence that its gentrifying baddie threatens to snuff out.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Killer Joe
    It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Take This Waltz
    Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Pariah
    It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Carnage
    One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Skin I Live In
    This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Fright Night
    One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Final Destination 5
    If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    The Ward
    Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    Polytechnique
    Though it's as schematic in construction as Incendies, the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Leap Year
    Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    A Better Life
    Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Underground
    Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Apocalypse Now Redux
    With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Ghost World
    Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Ed Gonzalez
    The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Clash of the Titans
    These fantastical He-Man epics were common in the early ’80s (Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and The Beastmaster were all variations of the same theme), and while Clash of the Titans remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Trauma
    Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    In the Mood for Love
    In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Phenomena
    The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Imitation of Life
    The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Ed Gonzalez
    Aliens
    Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Ed Gonzalez
    Suspiria
    Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Sleeping Beauty
    Just as the film’s gorgeous backdrops suggest characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads hauntingly convey the filmmakers’ idea of fate and love locked in a cosmic struggle.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    Cat People
    Unjustifiably compared to the original film upon its release, Schrader’s Cat People is more of an erotic reinvention of the Bodeen story. Though Schrader keeps the Fangoria crowd at bay with a series of grisly tableaus, he remains less concerned with the body-horrific than he does with the rituals of sex—mandatory and otherwise.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    The Lair of the White Worm
    Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film’s delirious demeanor.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Ed Gonzalez
    They Came Back
    It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world.
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