Gary Thompson

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Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer
For 358 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Gary Thompson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Lowest review score: 25 Trapped in Paradise
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 255 out of 358
  2. Mixed: 77 out of 358
  3. Negative: 26 out of 358
358 movie reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    The Little Stranger
    Waters' novel was content to let the evil within Hundreds Hall remain shapeless and nameless. Director Lenny Abrahamson's (Room) movie wants to give it definite shape, and even a name, though the movie is not better for it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Juliet, Naked
    You could call Juliet, Naked a romantic comedy, and you could probably predict with some accuracy how the relationships play out. But it's the details here that count, and they paint a substantive and truthful picture of middle age, and the way it is acquainted with regret and failure.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    The Wife
    It's Close who nearly rescues The Wife, grabbing control of it in the crucial final moments, managing to transcend the script to suggest a more complex portrait of Joan, whose life choices form their own narrative, with their own reward.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    Kin
    Kin positions itself as a B-movie cobbled together from sci-fi favorites of the past, and so we grant the movie wide latitude to be goofy. It's meant to be out there. Even by those lax standards, though, Kin tries the patience.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    Operation Finale
    Isaac and Kingsley are game, and their scenes have decent dramatic tension, but of course the outcome is never in doubt, and in the end, Weitz is left to rely on more contrived thriller elements to give the movie a finishing kick, which feels nonetheless like a letdown.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Support the Girls
    This is another fine performance from Hall, who's given a good character to play by writer-director Andrew Bujalski.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    We the Animals
    The story is nonlinear, a collection of images that can suddenly assemble into an emotion.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    Mile 22
    The action is frantic and brutal, and the movie itself has an ugly tone.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Alpha
    The movie will play in IMAX theaters and 3-D, which is the best way of seeing it. Director Albert Hughes (yep, the same guy who along with brother Allen did Menace II Society and Dead Presidents) and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (the recent creep-out Goodnight Mommy) capture and construct some compelling images.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Crazy Rich Asians
    Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy and a fairy tale, and it helps to keep the latter in mind as you ramp up suspension of disbelief to necessary levels.
    • Philadelphia Daily News
      • Posted Aug 14, 2018
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    The Meg
    The movie is a cheerful pastiche, unpretentious and efficient, and the giant shark, when it finally shows up, is a pretty good special effect, although I’m not sure I’d value it at $150 million (the amount of Chinese money it took to make the movie).
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    Puzzle
    Khan and Macdonald make it watchable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    BlacKkKlansman
    The title promises something of a biography, but I left the movie wanting to know more about Stallworth.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    Generation Wealth
    Greenfield makes an ambitious attempt to tie all of these things together as symptoms of capitalism gone wrong in Generation Wealth, although her thesis is weakly argued, and thinly sourced – the movie often turns out to be a curiously insular polling of family, friends, and high school and college classmates.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Night Comes On
    Night Comes On isn’t a docudrama, but it’s informed enough to give us a sense of the obstacles facing young women like Angel.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    The Spy Who Dumped Me
    A bawdy, bloody but only sporadically funny spy spoof and buddy comedy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    Blindspotting
    It comes off as fairly organic, at least until the ending, when the device is undercut by an outrageous narrative coincidence that works against both the feeling of spontaneity and the admirable nuance that defines most of the movie.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Gary Thompson
    Eighth Grade
    Writer-director Bo Burnham is after something different here, a complex, thoughtful and funny look at the way the internet can insert itself into the coming-of-age search for identity.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    [Cruise] makes the movie fun to watch with his age-defying eagerness and death-defying stunts that bring a reasonably human scale back to blockbuster action, benumbed of late by the low-stakes digital fakery of special-effects movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    The cast is uniformly fine, although Rooney Mara is stuck playing a composite of various women that feels, well, like a composite of various women.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    The Equalizer 2
    [Washington] portrays McCall as a penitent, a fellow making up for past sins by helping the powerless, the abused (the movies could stand to be less invested in the grisly spectacle of this abuse). He’s advocating in others the kind of personal reform he seeks in himself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Dark Money
    [An] informative documentary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has been brought in to class up the dialogue, and add some one-liners.... In addition, director Parker does some clever things visually.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Gary Thompson
    The King
    At times, Jarecki seems to be actively avoiding insight and empathy.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Leave No Trace
    Leave No Trace, is less story-driven than Winter’s Bone (which made a star of Jennifer Lawrence), more lyrical, more attuned to the melancholy of the novel and its quiet portrait of a young woman caught between dependence and independence, love and fear.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Gary Thompson
    Sorry to Bother You
    The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely – in its own surreal way (nods to Idiocracy and The Island of Dr. Moreau), it stands as one of the few Hollywood movies to show an awareness of chronic low-wage pressures in our full-employment economy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    Skyscraper
    OK, so it’s ridiculous, but slightly ridiculous action movies are Johnson’s brand (they’re actually making a sequel to San Andreas), and what fans want in the context of that silliness are reasonably competent action and suspense.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Gary Thompson
    Boundaries
    Plummer and Farmiga seem like a potential dream team, but the pairing instantly feels wrong – they don’t scan as father and daughter, and Plummer’s continental bearing seems ill-suited to his character’s backstory.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Gary Thompson
    Whitney
    Whitney offers an informed and moving portrait of a complex, talented woman who was poorly understood, and often cruelly judged.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Gary Thompson
    Ant-Man and the Wasp
    There’s too much convoluted plot...and the movie at times feels big and ponderous, like Ant-Man when his malfunctioning suit does the opposite of its normal effect.... There are also too few jokes, and though Rudd and Peña work like mad to get laughs, they come up well short of optimal levels achieved in Thor: Ragnarok.
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