Elise Nakhnikian

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Slant Magazine
For 99 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Elise Nakhnikian's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 88 Nuts!
Lowest review score: 12 Taken 3
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 58 out of 99
  2. Mixed: 16 out of 99
  3. Negative: 25 out of 99
99 movie reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Room
    The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Miss Hokusai
    It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Merchants of Doubt
    An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Beauty Is Embarrassing
    Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Girl Model
    The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Citizenfour
    Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Like the work it illuminates, the doc feels formally impeccable yet utterly unstaged, a vivid distillation of a distinct and precious life.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    True to its title, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical novel has the loosely structured, unfiltered feel of a young person's diary.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Starred Up
    The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Elise Nakhnikian
    Nuts!
    Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    All In: The Poker Movie
    The film has a shambling charm that actively disputes an unspoken notion that a documentary must be well-structured in order to effectively land its points.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Sand Dollars
    It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    The Wonders
    Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Horses of God
    Nabil Ayouch's film allows us see how young suicide bombers--"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them--might deserve our pity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Last Hijack
    It intriguingly invites us to think about the mundane forces that can drive a seemingly ordinary guy like Mohamed to do something so desperate and cruel as piracy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    The Farewell Party
    A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    The Waiting Room
    Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Call Her Applebroog
    It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Chicken with Plums
    A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Under the Shadow
    The film's horror is spookily and movingly expressive of the tenuous position of women in 1980s Iran.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Donald Cried
    Finding the drama and humor in everyday situations like these isn't easy, but Avedisian makes it look as natural as swinging on a vine.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    2 Days in New York
    It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Stray Dog
    Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Güeros
    A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Headshot
    This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Elise Nakhnikian
    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.
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