Glenn Kenny

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Premiere, RogerEbert.com, The New York Times
For 1,918 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Glenn Kenny's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Shadow
Lowest review score: 0 Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,189 out of 1918
  2. Mixed: 470 out of 1918
  3. Negative: 259 out of 1918
1918 movie reviews
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Glenn Kenny
    The Burial
    Directed by Maggie Betts from a script she wrote with Doug Wright, The Burial develops into a lively courtroom drama with wide-ranging pertinence. Of course its two lead actors give the bravura performances you’d expect from them, but they don’t eat the scenery — they take the material seriously and invest in it with welcome nuance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Glenn Kenny
    Like Crazy
    An energetic, visually attractive but ultimately irritating comedy-drama.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Glenn Kenny
    Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind
    Lightfoot is frank about sizing up that work — the movie opens with him expressing disdain for the sexism of his early hit “For Lovin’ Me” — and he’s refreshingly up-to-date in his perspectives about today’s music.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    The Last King of Scotland
    Whitaker's Amin is the kind of raging lunatic that only an actor who has made a specialty of quiet caginess could pull off so convincingly. It's great, and scary, to see Whitaker turn it up to 11 for once.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Dune: Part One
    I’ll always love Lynch’s “Dune,” a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie IS “Dune.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    The Strangler (1970)
    The sensibility behind “The Strangler” is sufficiently unusual and stalwart.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Glenn Kenny
    Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
    The animation is handsome, the graphic settings understated but intelligently detailed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Munich
    This lengthy, nuance-filled story about how eye-for-an-eye stuff differs from theory to practice is one of the most considered, thoughtful, and involving movies of its kind.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Eno
    The film works most of the time, largely because its subject is such interesting — and warm — company.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Glenn Kenny
    Miss Hokusai
    While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Glenn Kenny
    Radio Dreams
    The movie’s tree-falling-in-the-forest-with-no-one-to-hear-it denouement is an apt but not entirely hopeless metaphor for the condition of its characters.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Neighborhood Watch
    One is hard-pressed to understand why grown-up thrillers like this one don’t get bigger pushes, but if you’re a “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” type when it comes to genre, do have a look at this. It’ll very likely hit an old-school sweet (or sour) spot or two.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Glenn Kenny
    Harry Benson: Shoot First
    The filmmakers are themselves too celebrity besotted to comment in a meaningful way on how Benson’s career balanced depictions of the rich and famous with in-the-trenches risk-taking.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Youth (Spring)
    Wang’s non-adherence to narrative lines deliberately prevents the sense of sustained drama. Still, every sequence has some emotional or dramatic hook to make it engaging.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Howl's Moving Castle
    The plot is pretty convoluted, but Miyazaki has a very good handle on it and lavishes his customary heart, humor, and inventiveness on every situation he depicts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    House of Sand and Fog
    Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly create characters that live and seethe with absolute credibility, and Ron Eldard’s Lester is a subtle portrait of a good man who lets himself go bad, first out of boredom, then out of erotic fixation.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Glenn Kenny
    Far From Men
    What it falls back on, rather than the troubling truth illuminated in Camus’ story, is the movie-standard gaze of compassion, here proffered by Mortensen, who, it must be admitted, does it well.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Glenn Kenny
    American Woman
    The performances are excellent, and Ingelsby’s dialogue largely rings true. But while the movie is indeed considered and conscientious, it’s also careful. It doesn’t risk going over any edges itself. And it shows more than a few instances of fussy and telegraphing Conspicuous Direction.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Glenn Kenny
    Calendar Girl
    This affectionate portrait is also well grounded. Finley is remembered as a hard worker among other hard workers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Glenn Kenny
    Carry-On
    While the picture doesn’t break any new genre ground, it has several jaw-dropping set pieces, including an incredibly physical fight inside a speeding car. Collet-Serra’s staging is excellent throughout.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Suspended Time
    Structurally sound while at the same time lacking anything you could call a “plot,” “Suspended Time” invites you to listen in your own life to that which is often neglected or unheard.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    The Duke
    The Duke is not his all-time-best picture, but it’s a very strong one, and it showcases his varied strengths as a filmmaker rather nicely.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    The History Boys
    There's no one today writing English dialogue as sharp as Bennett's, and hearing it delivered expertly is a pleasure worth sitting through some dodgy montages for.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    A Mighty Heart
    What does not work, in a movie where almost everything, including dramatic rhetoric, has been kept on a modest scale up to this point, is the heavy-handed way Winterbottom (and Jolie) contrast the pain of loss with the pain of begetting toward the end.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    The Ghost of Peter Sellers
    The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 25 Glenn Kenny
    Mommy
    Willfully over determined and perversely stylized.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    The Duchess of Langeais
    The first masterpiece of 2008 -- at least by American release date standards -- the latest film from master French director Jacques Rivette is a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Glenn Kenny
    Jay Myself
    It’s a fun journey.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Utama
    Utama sounds a warning even as it casts a spell, and the spell is one of life and death and eternal returns and never-ending struggles, and the rest we can try to take when the work is done for the day.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Breach
    The procedural aspects of the story are briskly done, and Chris Cooper's portrayal of the traitor Hanssen is a typically Cooperesque marvel.
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