For 402 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jake Coyle's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Licorice Pizza
Lowest review score: 25 Dolittle
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 22 out of 402
402 movie reviews
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Despite its grainy, VHS aesthetics, “The Smashing Machine” is a surprisingly conventional and oddly untroubled movie, albeit one that gives Johnson an indie-film platform for one of his finest performances.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Kiri is exceptional in carrying a film in which she’s the only talking, present actor. But that a movie so threadbare manages to feel like too much is both the film’s accomplishment and its failure.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    The question, ultimately, is whether Bombshell ought to have spun quite so snappy a movie out of such a story. It does cartwheels to make a vile tale compelling, and it can feel like a parade of starry impressions rather than something genuine.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Vol. 3 is a messy, overstuffed finale. But you rarely question whether Gunn’s heart is in it. Sometimes it spoils some of that effect by trying too hard to juxtapose tonal extremes, and show off its brash juggling act. Yet whatever this sweet, surreal sci-fi shamble is that Gunn has created, everyone here seems to believe ardently in it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Coyle
    The force is not strong in “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” a shallow “Man on Wire” for social media influencers about a pair of Russian daredevils who stealthily scale urban heights to attain the precious treasure of a much-liked Instagram post.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Gladiator II isn’t quite the prestige film the first one, a best-picture winner, was in 2001. It’s more a swaggering, sword-and-sandal epic that prizes the need to entertain above all else.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a rollicking virtual-world geekfest flooded by ’80s ephemera, doesn’t just want to wade back into the past. It wants to race into it at full throttle. For those who get their fix through pop nostalgia, “Ready Player One” is — for better or worse — an indulgent, dizzying overdose.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Nyad is balanced between Diana’s admirably insane ambition and Bonnie’s loyal (up to a point) support for her friend. In any case, it’s a reminder, like a pail of cold water, of just how good Foster can be.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Coyle
    Honk for Jesus in the end doesn’t aim for anything like the madcap parody of, say, HBO’s riotous “The Righteous Gemstones,” but it may have been more successful if it took the approach of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and kept its camera glued to the first lady of the church.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    There’s a mean potency to the borderland noir of both Sicario films, enough that it sometimes recalls another tale of explosions and drug enforcement agents on both sides of the border: Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” Day of the Soldado is too sober and grim for the sweaty heat of “Touch of Evil.” But it has taken to heart one of its best lines: “All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    When it’s at its best, I’m Your Woman feels like you’ve slipped through a trap door, revealing a hidden pathway in an old genre apparatus.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Shyamalan doesn’t pump up the violence, nor does he rely on plot twists to carry Knock at the Cabin along. Instead, the film works as a brutal, neatly distilled kind of morality play that toys with fatalism, family and climate change allegory.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    While the movie isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is, the Zellners have a sweet, likable sense of humor tinged with tragedy. And they remain filmmakers to watch.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Unsane, a pulpy psychological thriller, is an exercise in both genre and technology. It’s a B-movie iMovie. And it’s 98 minutes of proof that the laborious apparatus of filmmaking can be not only light on its feet, but fit snuggly inside your pocket.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Coyle
    Someone Great has not exactly rewritten the rom-com rule book. Where it distinguishes itself is in the fresh faces of it cast (the rom-com is not known as the most diverse of genres) and in focusing on the hard realities of breakup rather than the fairytale of falling in love.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Both Lane and Costner, direct and earthy performers from the start, have only added depth with age. As long-married Montana ranchers in Let Him Go (in theaters Friday), they’re basically the platonic ideal of an old-fashioned, homespun Americana. They could sell you a mountain of jeans if they wanted to.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Coyle
    As a B-movie with a couple of A-listers, “The Rip” will probably go down as a minor and flawed genre exercise. But even in their lesser efforts, the sincerity of Damon and Affleck’s buddy routine remains winning.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Beau Is Afraid takes a long road — and one with a lot of yelling and sniveling along the way — to not get very far. That could, of course, be the point. But the simpering sad sack Beau — despite Phoenix’s typically committed and sympathetic performance — remains curiously void, stuck in a one-note nightmare.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    But if defying one’s heteronormative programming and entering the Matrix was once a balletic finesse, in “Resurrections” the battle is blunter and the tone less exultant.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    The pleasures of Uncorked are in how it gently eludes stereotype and brings a rich sense of texture to even its smaller moments.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Call Jane distinguishes itself as a stirring portrait of the birth of an unlikely abortion-rights activist.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    What’s most disappointing about the film, considering its origins, is just how distant anything like real life feels. From the first moment Jamie slides on a pair of ruby red stiletto pumps, there’s not any doubt things are going to work out for him.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    Burton’s Dumbo, while inevitably lacking much of the magic of the original, has charms and melancholies of its own, starting, naturally, with the elephant in the room. Of all the CGI make-overs, this Dumbo is the most textured, sweetest and most soulful of creatures.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Many of its twists aren’t hard to see coming, and the movie sometimes lacks the scale needed for a sprawling battle. But a mustachioed Odenkirk with a shotgun is, by most metrics, more than enough firepower for any movie.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    It’s a charming concoction of cliches cribbed from other movies, from Tron to Truman, without its own coding.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Coyle
    Plane is as broadly sketched as its title. Puerto Rico doubles here for Philippines, and most of the story elements, too, feel like they’re stand-ins for basic plot conventions.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Coyle
    While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    For those whose trips to Pandora have made less of an impact, “Fire and Ash” is a bit like returning to a half-remembered vacation spot, only one where the local ponytail style is a little strange and everyone seems to have the waist of a supermodel.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Coyle
    Triple Frontier has the good sense to take a macho, Expendables-like set-up and turn it inward. It just doesn’t go far enough.

Top Trailers