Gary Goldstein
Select another critic »For 1,126 reviews, this critic has graded:
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53% higher than the average critic
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12% same as the average critic
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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: | Other People | |
| Lowest review score: | The Remake | |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 555 out of 1126
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Mixed: 408 out of 1126
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Negative: 163 out of 1126
1126
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Gary Goldstein
A laughably cheesy, empty-headed follow-up that makes the mediocre prior film shine in comparison.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 9, 2025
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 6, 2023
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 25, 2023
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 28, 2022
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 14, 2021
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 4, 2021
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 3, 2020
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- 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?- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 20, 2020
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 17, 2020
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 19, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 16, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 24, 2019
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- Gary Goldstein
With its deeply creaky gender and racial themes, this strained film evokes something unearthed from several decades ago, if not before.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 3, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 29, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 15, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 1, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 23, 2019
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- Gary Goldstein
Its timely messages become muted amid a kaleidoscope of settings, characters, brusque action scenes, blunt speechifying and wan romance.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 29, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 17, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 10, 2019
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 20, 2018
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 6, 2018
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- Gary Goldstein
It’s a potentially warm and delicate story that required a scalpel, but saw the blunt end of a sledgehammer instead.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 5, 2018
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 5, 2018
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 21, 2018
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 21, 2018
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- Gary Goldstein
A sluggish film that incessantly tries but never quite hits its big-as-a-barn emotional targets.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 8, 2018
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- Gary Goldstein
The aggressively awful London Fields is, once again, proof that not every successful novel should become a movie.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 18, 2018
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- 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.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 1, 2018
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