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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Atonement
    The settings are handsome, the cinematography accomplished, the performances first-rate.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Fire Music
    This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    The Host
    When the movie isn't being scary, it's crazily funny, so much so that critical watchers will wonder if Bong might tilt the balance of the picture too far in a comic direction and water down the scares. He doesn't.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Glenn Kenny
    All Is Forgiven (2007)
    The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Beyond Utopia
    Directed by Madeleine Gavin, Beyond Utopia is a bracing and frequently jaw-dropping look at, first and foremost, the discontented people of North Korea who attempt defections doggedly. It’s a more difficult trip than you’d probably imagine.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    The Eternal Memory
    We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Ghostbox Cowboy
    Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Against the Tide
    Against the Tide, a documentary directed by Sarvnik Kaur, depicts environmental disaster with an intimate lens.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Glenn Kenny
    The Lovers
    The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Paranoid Park
    It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Glenn Kenny
    Nossa Chape
    The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Flipside
    Whatever “Flipside” ultimately “means,” it’s ninety minutes well, and often amusingly and movingly, spent.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Glenn Kenny
    After the Storm
    Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    To a Land Unknown
    The sobering note on which the movie ends recalls a stone-cold classic from a sadly long-gone era of moviemaking. The homage actually functions as a token of this movie’s integrity and heartfelt sadness.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    The movie makes canny use of non-linear editing, moving backwards and forwards with engaging fluidity, and it keeps this up throughout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Glenn Kenny
    Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    Nancy
    Nancy exhibits a seriousness of purpose that’s rare in American movies today.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Glenn Kenny
    Personal Problems (1980)
    This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    Eureka
    It’s a movie best received in a relaxed frame of mind. Because much of it is a slow burn, if there’s indeed a burn at all.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Kubo and the Two Strings
    The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Glenn Kenny
    The Other Side of Hope
    Kaurismäki makes these bigots look ridiculous, but he also takes very seriously the damage they do, and the movie’s finale takes that into account.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Glenn Kenny
    Homo Sapiens
    Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Glenn Kenny
    Synonyms
    But the movie is, for all its accomplishment, sketchy, tentative. And there’s something about the conception of Yoav that smacks of self-aggrandizement.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Glenn Kenny
    Adult Beginners
    If you’re a big booster of any of the lead actors (I’m something of a Cannavale partisan myself), this will be worth your time.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Glenn Kenny
    Outcast
    Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Glenn Kenny
    Our Time Machine
    This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Glenn Kenny
    Mystic River
    Perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's "White Hunter Black Heart": how violence--real violence, not movie violence--perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Glenn Kenny
    The Blue Caftan
    The situations in this scrupulous, compassionate, and quietly captivating picture, written and directed by Maryam Touzani, are tense, to be sure. But the movie itself doesn’t surrender to the tension. It depicts unruly passions as they stir the lives of circumspect characters.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Glenn Kenny
    Stray
    Lo wants to make a point, obviously, but I came out of this picture with some questions. And I also thought of an observation made by the music critic Robert Christgau, a metaphorical point addressing a type of artistic preciousness: “If I found a cat trapped in a washing machine, I wouldn't set up a recording studio there—I'd just open the door.”
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