Jeannette Catsoulis

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For 1,835 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jeannette Catsoulis' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 10 Cloverfield Lane
Lowest review score: 0 The Tiger and the Snow
Score distribution:
1835 movie reviews
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Muting adult concerns — like the jackboots of fascism and the ubiquity of male violence — with marshmallow clouds and subtly shifting light, Mr. Miyazaki smooshes fantasy and history into a pastel-pretty yarn as irresistible as his feminism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Often chaotic but never disorienting, the movie’s spirited set pieces — like a wriggling ribbon of undead clinging doggedly to the last compartment — owe much to Lee Hyung-deok’s wonderfully agile cinematography.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The dishiness is fun, but Lady Boss is most penetrating when it lifts the carapace of glamour Collins had constructed, both as alter ego and as armor against her critics.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Even were it not so delightful, Damsels in Distress, set at a fictional upper-crust college, would deserve a watch for its dialogue alone.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    This film belongs to its star.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Ms. Dyrholm, photographed frequently in brutally unforgiving close-up, fully captures the faded charisma of the woman whose life reads like a Who’s Who of the New York midcentury art scene.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    His film opens with a lullaby, and while there is indeed something soothing in his images of repetitive, backbreaking toil, the music also serves as a reminder of childhood lost.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous Alice’s House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Taking a coolheaded approach to hot-button issues, Fly Away overcomes its neatly bow-tied ending with strong performances (including Greg Germann as a sensitive neighbor) and a spare, intelligent script.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The film’s small group of primary characters slips from joy to fury to murderous suspicion with faultless fluidity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The result is a movie that evolves naturally from the filmmaker's compassion for her subject; as much as possible, she remains off camera, and her immense act of charity is never permitted to become the film's focus. Instead this remarkable documentary offers a brief but satisfying look at a defiantly self-sufficient life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    A twisty, small-town thriller that blooms in the shadows and shies from the light, “Sweet Virginia” marshals a relentlessly threatening mood from dangerous secrets and unpleasant surprises.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer), digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences - some desperate, some hopeful, all tragic - into a first-person commentary on the malign reverberations of war.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    By choosing simplicity over specifics, the filmmakers free themselves from the weight of words and open up space for a mood of intense disquiet and unusual sensitivity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Giving "inspirational" a good name, Matt Ruskin's vibrant and soulful documentary The Hip Hop Project sets its universal message to an inner-city beat.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    If Baig’s writing is at times thin and excessively pointed — like a classroom discussion about what it means to live an authentic life — her grasp of mood is spot on.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, Dream Scenario is often funny and frequently surreal.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    This unusually taut sophomore feature from Jim Mickle is more abnormal than most in that its creatures are capable not only of evolving but also of embracing religious fanaticism.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    A warm thank you to those whose work is mostly invisible and entirely necessary.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    A strange, spiky movie that refuses to beg for our affection, Little Sister, the fifth feature from Zach Clark, molds the classic homecoming drama into a quirky reconciliation between faith and family.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Fateful and funny, haunting and magical.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Ms. Purple is a moody, downbeat drama soaked in color and saturated with sadness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    At once polished and punky, Poser is about the maturing of a vampiric personality. Like its music, the movie feels exploratory and raw-edged, yet with a persistent pathos that clings to Lennon and isolates her.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Propriety and recklessness make for uneasy bedfellows in The Deep Blue Sea, a shimmering exploration of romantic obsession and the tension between fitting in and flying free.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    By the end of Howard, it’s the songs we’ll never hear that may haunt us most.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Sad and sweet, and with a rare lyricism, The Cakemaker believes in a love that neither nationality, sexual orientation nor religious belief can deter.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Tipping his hat to the Italian thriller genre known as giallo, Contenti (who wrote the unfussy script with Manuel Facal) sets up a string of witty, highly specific slayings of audience members unaware they’re both voyeurs and prey.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Gorgeously photographed by the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, Dark River is a raw ballad of doom and damage.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Dancing on the line between funny and menacing, the ingenious script (by Stourton and Tom Palmer) is a tonal tease, a limbo where every joke has a threatening edge and every “Just kidding!” only increases Pete’s unease.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    +1
    The movie’s boldness and horrifying logic get under your skin.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, Hoard is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, A Tuba to Cuba swarms with shiny happy people.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Home brilliantly illuminates the invisible damage inflicted by years of deprivation. When survival hinges on trusting no one but yourself, the kindness of strangers can seem too good to be true.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Generous in spirit and nimble in technique, this riveting documentary about the Republican operative (who died of a brain tumor in 1991) reveals a scrappy genius rife with contradictions.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Stretched to 80 minutes, the story (by the director Leah Meyerhoff) almost breaks; that it holds together without compromising its simplicity or emotional authenticity only proves that, contrary to the maxim, you don’t need a gun if you’ve got the right girl.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Even at its most incomprehensible, the propulsive thriller On the Job is never less than arresting.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Essentially a one-man show, The Guilty necessarily vibrates to the rhythms of its lead.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Song of the Sea moves delicately but purposefully from pain to contentment and from anger to love. On land and underwater, the siblings’ adventures unfold in hand-drawn, painterly frames of misty pastels, sometimes encircled by cobwebby borders that give them the look of pictures in a locket.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The film is a riveting portrait of young men in shock and in mourning as the tragedy stirs feelings that have long lain dormant.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    It's brilliantly silly entertainment whose flaws are glaring only in hindsight; in the moment, you'll have much more fun if you stop looking for holes in the script and join Paul in looking for a way out.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Blindingly beautiful and meticulously assembled by the award-winning editor Bob Eisenhardt, Meru easily makes you forget that what you are watching is completely bananas.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Until its surprisingly effective ending, You Go To My Head keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Seoul Searching is rude, funny, silly and poignant. Above all, it’s kind; Mr. Lee understands that belonging is a feeling that many of us may never experience.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Its ideas aren’t new, and at times Ruby and Gensan can feel like recognizable symbols of societal failure. What’s different, though, is the performers’ skill in portraying characters whose extreme mutual dependence is touchingly believable, giving no hint of the damage later revealed.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    In service to a gleefully malicious tone, Mark Mylod’s direction is cool, tight and clipped, the actors slotting neatly into characters so unsympathetic we become willing accessories to their suffering.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    An unexpectedly gripping thriller that seesaws between comedy and horror, I Care a Lot is cleverly written (by the director, J Blakeson) and wonderfully cast.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Though disappointment and loneliness guide its conversations, the movie isn’t bleak; it’s a touching and tender commentary on the need to be seen and the desire to be heard.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    In a movie whose greatest tension comes from wondering whether Chris will violate his parole by drinking a beer, the actors need to be compelling. Easily clearing that bar, Ms. Falco gives Carol a gentle kindness and the emotional intelligence to transform Chris’s ardor into a catalyst.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The irritations and tedium of high school life are staged with refreshing simplicity, while the performers interact with an age-appropriate naturalness the American teenage movie rarely achieves.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    This amiable look at life on the margins gradually accumulates a melancholy that punctures the drollness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Spirited, probing and frequently hilarious, it coasts on the fearless charm of its front man and the eye-opening candor of its interviewees, most of them women.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Slow-moving and inarguably nutty, Lamb nevertheless wields its atavistic power with the straightest of faces, helped in no small measure by an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Poised self-consciously between art and entertainment, Joshua offers imaginative staging and some superb performances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Adam Wingard’s You’re Next strays just enough from formula to tweak our jaded appetites. That it does so without spraying the gore to geyserlike excess says a great deal about Mr. Wingard’s sensibility.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    [A] sneakily compelling documentary.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful, Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together fashions the signposts of the romantic comedy — the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the mutual acceptance — into a wry examination of a very different relationship.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Mr. Murray creates a beguiling, visually rich canvas.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Tiny advances in seduction — like a direct gaze, or the eventual removal of that wig — assume the power of full-on sexual collisions, and Ms. Yaron, with her restlessly darting eyes, easily conveys Meira’s sensual deprivation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, Smile turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Jeannette Catsoulis
    The Outwaters conjures a swoony, dreamlike atmosphere that heightens the shocks to come.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Not until the film's surprisingly touching finale do we learn the source of that friction, in a delicately handled sequence that retroactively floods the story with satisfying context.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Disconnect is naturally gripping. Using unforgiving closeups, Rubin pokes into unexpected corners— not least the different ways in which men and women respond to calamity — and never forces his story's social-media scares to improbable heights.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Using de Chabannes as the film's conscience and moral fulcrum, Tavernier - just as he did in his 1996 film "Captain Conan" - exposes the shame of a meaningless war and the psychological damage borne by those fighting it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Looper, a cocky sci-fi tale with more brass than substance, is rife with these "Say what?" moments.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    I went to school in Aberdeen and know the region well. It's a place of unforgiving winds and magnificent sunsets, harsh farmland and deserted beaches. The people are hardy, hardworking and fiercely self-sufficient, asking little of their government except the will to do the right thing. They weren't Trumped; they were betrayed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Richly photographed by Rob Hardy (who gave Red Riding: 1974 its almost surreal bleakness), this meticulously researched story (Marston spent a month interviewing families trapped in these vendettas) reveals a culture dominated by male pride and patriarchal selfishness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Jeannette Catsoulis
    Narrating as he goes, his humor as warm and dry as the ground beneath his feet, Mr. Soling is an unconventional explorer whose interactions with the long-suffering Ik - the women quiet and watchful, the men seamed and talkative - are politely deferential. He's clearly not there to engage in scientific study; he's simply reaching out across continents on a hunch that even eminent scientists can get it wrong.

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