Gregory Nussen

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Screen Rant, Slant Magazine
For 173 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 60% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Gregory Nussen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Lowest review score: 10 The Strangers: Chapter 3
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 89 out of 173
  2. Mixed: 55 out of 173
  3. Negative: 29 out of 173
173 movie reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Gregory Nussen
    The Voice of Hind Rajab
    Director Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab is a shattering docu-film which utilizes a novel mix of real audio and footage with actors' reconstruction in a Herculean effort to make this profound loss even more immediate. Hers is a utilitarian mission: to embed the audience in the sensory experience of being in a war zone without letting them scroll past or swipe to the next video.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Gregory Nussen
    Yes
    Yes is an astonishing protest film whose comedy belies a broken heart.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    Miroirs No. 3
    Miroirs No. 3 is a bucolic, poetic film of simple beauty with light, magical touches about the ability of a stranger’s love.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Gregory Nussen
    Baahubali: The Epic
    If cinema does go the way of the dinosaurs someday, it is at least good to know that the limits of its power are still being tested by the likes of Rajamouli, whose work reaches so far outside the frame it seems to magically reach out of the screen itself, into the audience's beating heart.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    Left-Handed Girl
    Left-Handed Girl is ultimately quite optimistic while never succumbing to the saccharine.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Gregory Nussen
    Eagles of the Republic
    The film would've been better served had it stuck to either satire or tense drama, but whatever the case, the climax of Saleh's film is aces and as taut as can be.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Gregory Nussen
    Anniversary
    The chamber drama of a rich family in collapse is only successful as much as the context within which it exists, and, because that context is as slippery as it is, Anniversary just feels toothless.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Gregory Nussen
    Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The film's best attribute is the romance between Bruce and Faye. White and Young's chemistry is palpable, and Cooper solidly helps us understand why an artist on the verge of overwhelming fame might be interested in a working-class single mother, whose planted smile belies the pain of someone abandoned and bereft. There's a nuance here that the rest of the film sorely lacks and needs.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Gregory Nussen
    Regretting You
    Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    The Oval Portrait
    The combination of crime film and romantic gothic horror never really gels. It is successful in its invocation of old Hollywood (including a very fun opening credits sequence), and its horror beats are effective, but it doesn't work in total.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Gregory Nussen
    The Serpent's Skin
    It's a breathtaking film from a new visionary of the queer indie scene.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    Good News
    Ultimately, the film is successful in having its cake and eating it too. It is both a tense political thriller and a crackling satire of drunken power. The comedy of the first two-thirds becomes the horror in the last, as these people’s willful ignorance of danger becomes terrifying in its potential repercussions.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    The film is so well put together, constructed with such warmth, that it does paper over its own indulgence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 10 Gregory Nussen
    Vindication Swim
    What results is an utter slog from start to finish.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Gregory Nussen
    Stay
    The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Gregory Nussen
    The Mastermind
    Through the period and genre trappings of a 1970s heist film, Reichardt explores the inherent isolation of staying neutral at a time of ballooning cultural and political unrest.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 80 Gregory Nussen
    The Twits
    While the film may thematically point to real-world struggles in the United States, The Twits is mostly an accessible story about the power of empathy in the face of naked evil, all to the tune of about a thousand fart jokes.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Gregory Nussen
    Mr. K
    At its best, Mr. K is like being immersed in Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. More often, however, it's like living inside a trash heap.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Gregory Nussen
    Maintenance Required
    Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Gregory Nussen
    John Candy: I Like Me
    Through the amazing array of talking heads Hanks assembles to share their relationship to Candy, we are left with the distinct impression that there just wasn't anyone else like John. A grand man indeed, in a grand documentary to suit him.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Gregory Nussen
    Beast of War
    This is classic B-movie creature-feature stuff.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 30 Gregory Nussen
    A House of Dynamite
    Bigelow's film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people's positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    The Ice Tower
    It is the type of film that asks for a deeper engagement than it is willing to offer, but Hadžihalilović may just be pulling us into her conception of image-making as a process of self-actualization. If that is the case, the film does well to break from Andersen's tragic tale for something a bit more existential.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Gregory Nussen
    Dead of Winter
    Thompson and Greer really are extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête nearly saves Kirk's enterprise from the doldrums.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    American Sweatshop
    What the film does exceedingly well is make us see the inherent irony of moderating online violence to the exclusion of the real-life violence in front of our faces.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Gregory Nussen
    Waltzing with Brando
    In the end, Waltzing with Brando will leave you with more questions about the man than you probably had going into it, which would be interesting enough if Fishman leaned harder into the murky waters of this particular celebrity's mythology. But, like the land upon which Judge tries to build an island escape, the film is in a constant state of drowning under its own ambition.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Gregory Nussen
    London Calling
    Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it's in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    Doin' It
    That the film is so admirably sex-positive, especially as it is from the too-often silenced perspective of female pleasure, makes it all the more refreshing.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Gregory Nussen
    One Battle After Another
    A battle cry of uncompromising political ideals, One Battle After Another is amongst Paul Thomas Anderson's most forceful work.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    Best Wishes to All
    The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    The Amateur
    The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 12 Gregory Nussen
    Locked
    Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    Notes on Displacement
    It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    Juror #2
    Juror #2 casts a morally inquiring side-eye at the American legal system, questioning whether it’s reasonable to convict anyone on the basis of something so fallible as memory.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    September 5
    The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Pepe
    As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Wolfs
    The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Mother of All Lies
    Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    Sing Sing
    In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    June Zero
    June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Power
    Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Egoist
    Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Animal Kingdom
    The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Good One
    The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Breaking Ice
    The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Gregory Nussen
    Night Swim
    There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Gregory Nussen
    Anselm
    Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Royal Hotel
    In this film of clammy anxiety, the potential of male violence is made to feel as scary as the actual article.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    A Haunting in Venice
    In the end, any attempts that A Haunting in Venice makes at connecting post-war trauma to Halloween and the ability to commune with the dead are non-committal, and the script doesn’t do enough to communicate why any of that matters.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    El Conde
    The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    The Mountain
    Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Haunted Mansion
    The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Cobweb
    As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Gregory Nussen
    Barbie
    The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Gregory Nussen
    The Miracle Club
    In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    The Line
    The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Gregory Nussen
    Earth Mama
    Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    The Little Mermaid
    This Little Mermaid feels more or less like two-hour-plus cosplay with the texture and gravitas of a Disneyland sideshow.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    Fast X
    Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Sanctuary
    This is a theatrical story told in a purposefully and self-consciously theatrical manner.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Gregory Nussen
    Book Club: The Next Chapter
    The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Eight Mountains
    The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Gregory Nussen
    Paint
    The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    Air
    Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Gregory Nussen
    Tótem
    Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Gregory Nussen
    Scream VI
    It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Gregory Nussen
    The Innocent
    The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Gregory Nussen
    The Last Dragon
    Though it is sometimes a bewildering mess, the film totally works in spite of its more ludicrous intentions, a standing piece of proof that the more specific a piece of work is, the more universal it somehow becomes.
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