Gary Goldstein

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For 1,126 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 12% same as the average critic
  • 35% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Gary Goldstein's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Other People
Lowest review score: 0 The Remake
Score distribution:
1126 movie reviews
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Gary Goldstein
    A laughably cheesy, empty-headed follow-up that makes the mediocre prior film shine in comparison.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    It’s only October but your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived. It’s called She Came to Me, a mishmash of flimsy, fanciful and far-fetched notions dressed up as a screwball New York rom-com. Given its pedigreed cast and filmmaker, the results are doubly sad.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    It opts for too many broad, clunky or far-fetched beats to move the story and its requisite emotional needs forward, rather than weave a more organic, effectively lived-in and, yes, genuinely funny tale.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Gary Goldstein
    Overall pacing is flaccid and too many scenes peter out when they should punch. But perhaps the movie’s biggest infraction is that there’s hardly a chuckle in it.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Casanova, Last Love, which looks at the famed 18th century philanderer’s infatuation with the supposed “one true love of his life,” is a dull and uninvolving portrait that, despite its sumptuous settings and costumes, never takes flight.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Convoluted doesn’t begin to describe the sci-fi drama Bliss, which starts off intriguingly enough but loses its way once it attempts to explain itself, before surprising us entirely in the end — and not in a particularly satisfying way. How this loopy film got made may prove its biggest mystery.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 10 Gary Goldstein
    The movie is disturbingly reckless, needlessly brutal and deeply homophobic. Later attempts to wedge in a few nice moments between James and Kareem fall flat.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 10 Gary Goldstein
    The movie, filmed over several start-and-stop years (credited director Eric Etebari completed the shoot) contains lots of weak dialogue, heavy-handed faith talk, awkward voiceovers, thin characterizations and illogical plot turns. Any questions?
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    It’s Jasmine’s inept and unprofessional behavior during the film’s climactic trial that really sends the film into absurdist territory. It’s outdone only by a final sequence of events with a horror-show twist that might best be described as bonkers.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Unfortunately, much of the acting (save by Bagatsing and Rachel Alejandro as Quezon’s vigilant wife, Aurora) is so spotty that it undermines the story’s potential tension and emotional heft.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    This indulgent, overlong film takes a solid hour for its bigger themes of love, loss and guilt to settle in. By then, however, the movie has tried our patience to the point that many may not care.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    With its deeply creaky gender and racial themes, this strained film evokes something unearthed from several decades ago, if not before.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Director Jaki Bradley can’t quite pull the story’s disparate strands together to form an effective narrative, much less a lucid finale. There’s a potentially nifty gay noir lurking about, but this “Ferry” misses the dock.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Gary Goldstein
    Save Mailer’s pushy “New Yawk” accent, the leads do what they can with their unconvincing characters and the rusty plot, but it’s a hopeless effort. Nice opening title sequence though.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Gary Goldstein
    With its overly arch dialogue and characterizations, airless gentility and forced period trappings it seems that the harder writer-producer Karen R. Hurd and director Barry Andersson strive for authenticity — on what’s clearly a deeply limited budget — the less convincing the film feels. The often stodgy acting doesn’t help.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Its timely messages become muted amid a kaleidoscope of settings, characters, brusque action scenes, blunt speechifying and wan romance.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 10 Gary Goldstein
    Actions and emotions turn on a dime, chuckles are few and it’s clear this predictable film, directed by John Asher, doesn’t quite realize how retrograde and often offensive it is — which makes it all even worse.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    [Martini's] filmmaking instincts, undercut by the script’s meandering, episodic structure, prove too self-indulgent and heavy-handed to tell the kind of emotionally involving tale about post-traumatic stress disorder among returning soldiers that he clearly had in mind.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Gary Goldstein
    This astonishingly bad film, adapted by writer-director Raghav Peri from a novel by Michaelangelo Rodriguez, mishmashes such big topics as genocide, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, child abuse, alcoholism and mental illness into a painful, inadvertently laughable stew.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    It’s a valiant but awkward effort.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    It’s a potentially warm and delicate story that required a scalpel, but saw the blunt end of a sledgehammer instead.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Write When You Get Work doesn’t work. Not as a romance, not as a Robin Hood-tinged caper flick, not as a social commentary on racial inequity or classism, and not as a male-buddy picture — all elements director Stacy Cochran attempts to wedge into her often muddled, under-focused script.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Despite scads of stiff exposition and constant proclamations of Salvador’s genius, the brash, eccentric, weirdly mustachioed artist remains an elusive and puzzling force. That he’s played, unconvincingly from teen years to death, by an often annoying Joan Carreras doesn’t help.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    Despite a skillful use of color, lighting, framing and music, the movie’s artificiality might have played in a short film but becomes tedious and pretentious when stretched to 90 minutes.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gary Goldstein
    A sluggish film that incessantly tries but never quite hits its big-as-a-barn emotional targets.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Gary Goldstein
    The aggressively awful London Fields is, once again, proof that not every successful novel should become a movie.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Gary Goldstein
    The movie, based on the novel “Seventy Times Seven,” is so laden with hoary gay stereotypes and references (enough with “The Golden Girls”!), anachronistic name-checks (Charo? Jeff Stryker?), groan-worthy silliness, overplayed emotion and amateurish crafting it never had a prayer.

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