Jacob Oller

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Paste Magazine, The A.V. Club, The Film Stage
For 358 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jacob Oller's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 91 In the Heights
Lowest review score: 0 Five Nights at Freddy's 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 204 out of 358
  2. Mixed: 113 out of 358
  3. Negative: 41 out of 358
358 movie reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    The Perfect Neighbor
    The documentary’s damning look at stand-your-ground laws and the ineffectiveness of police even when they’re doing everything “right” (because the body-cam footage that makes up this film wouldn’t exist if they thought they were doing something “wrong”) is awful and thorough, avoiding cliché through a devotion to fisheye footage. Its upsetting, explicit-bordering-on-exploitative access drives its points into the pit of your stomach.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Jacob Oller
    Turning Red
    An exceptional puberty comedy by way of Sanrio-branded Kafka, Turning Red’s truthful transformations are strikingly charming, surprisingly complex and satisfyingly heartfelt. And yes, so cute you might scream until you’re red in the face.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 34 Jacob Oller
    Poker Face
    The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 48 Jacob Oller
    The Lost King
    The writers are so afraid that we won’t feel the right thing that they embrace a self-effacing humor that ensures we don’t feel anything.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 87 Jacob Oller
    Hundreds of Beavers
    A multimedia extravaganza of frozen idiocy, Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick tour de force—and its roster of ridiculous mascot-suited wildlife is only the tip of the iceberg.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 72 Jacob Oller
    Afire
    The careful control displayed throughout Afire allows its deep, elegant characterizations to persist through the narrative smog, long after the rest of the film burns away.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Grand Theft Hamlet
    A making-of film fueled, like the Let’s Plays and livestreams it’s in conversation with, by the chaos of a plan gone wrong, Grand Theft Hamlet is equal parts charming and cheesy—both due to its experimental setting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Black Box Diaries
    Its devastation is familiar. But because filmmaker Shiori Itō is both survivor and journalist, and recorded her own investigation into her assault in real time, the documentary becomes a thrilling testament to her exceptional, tenacious agency in the face of a hostile world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    Sator
    Sator’s dedication to its own nuanced premise, location and tense pace make it the rare horror that’s so aesthetically well-realized you feel like you could crawl inside and live there—if it wasn’t so goddamn scary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 86 Jacob Oller
    Pig
    Part of Pig’s impactful, moving charm is its restraint. It’s a world only hinted at in 87 minutes, but with a satisfying emotional thoroughness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 67 Jacob Oller
    From Ground Zero
    With little in way of organization, From Ground Zero can oscillate frustratingly between styles, artistic ambition, and production quality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    With its traditions captured in delicate, sweaty vignettes by filmmaker Anna Hints, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’s anecdotes fill your lungs and engulf you, until its women’s secrets drip down your body.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    Little Amélie submerges itself in fantastical ecstasy and melancholy with a magic all its own.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jacob Oller
    A Hero
    Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero spirals out a good deed to all its messy conclusions, providing fertile ground for the filmmaker’s command of aesthetic realism and closeknit interpersonal dynamics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Vulcanizadora
    As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Step
    Step may stumble over its own hurried pace (cramming months of school into montage after montage), but such a method is almost forgivable once you realize that the film is speeding towards an effective finale that will have you cheering no matter what.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Weapons
    Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    Tina
    Where What’s Love Got to Do with It was a midlife coming-of-age—a “Hello, here’s my story”—Tina is a redefining, empowering farewell that adds perspective as she tips her hat and has her happily ever after out of the limelight.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Jacob Oller
    The Things You Kill
    Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 79 Jacob Oller
    Riders of Justice
    Though there’s a bit of a moral jumble to its ultimately productive deconstruction of the revenge movie and it’ll certainly never be a bedtime story, Riders of Justice still has a savvy lesson to impart to the grown-up children raised on the strong and silent type.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Jacob Oller
    A River Below
    A River Below is pure investigative journalism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 89 Jacob Oller
    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Jacob Oller
    Memoir of a Snail
    Though crafted with wry care and a captivatingly scuzzy aesthetic, the bittersweet biography is so miserable that the “sweet” ends up as a cloying chaser to old escargot.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 58 Jacob Oller
    Come See Me in the Good Light
    Learning about Gibson’s ‘roid rage from their treatment, and Falley’s acceptance of it, is a more moving example of their care for one another than much of what the film finds in their shared profession.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 71 Jacob Oller
    Living
    While certainly not an epiphany like the original, Nighy makes Living worthwhile through sheer force of will. In the film’s picturesque, composed, nearly stagnant beauty, he finds something honest in repression.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Jacob Oller
    Divinity
    The resulting film from Eddie Alcazar is shallow and silly pseudo-experimental sci-fi, made by those assured that they were making something edgy and interesting. To err is human, to film it is Divinity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 85 Jacob Oller
    The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    It’s easy to feel as lost or overwhelmed by the flashing lights and exhilarating sights as the central family fighting on one side of the title’s grudge match, but it’s equally easy to come away with the exhausted glee of a long, weary theme park outing’s aftermath.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Jacob Oller
    A Thousand and One
    As the film moves further and further from its inciting secret, watching Inez and her son age, it fades beneath their countless tone-shifting hardships—revealing a film stronger when its close-shot realism is echoed in the script.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jacob Oller
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    More quaintly focused than the exuberant previous film, though with no shortage of eccentric characters or longwinded side stories, Wake Up Dead Man agreeably seeks answers both existential and earthly.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 89 Jacob Oller
    The Sparks Brothers
    The Sparks Brothers is a thorough and charming assessment and appreciation of an idiosyncratic band, and the highest praise you could give it is that it shares a sensibility with its inimitable musicians.
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