Jesse Cataldo

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Slant Magazine
For 137 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 63% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jesse Cataldo's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Battleship Potemkin
Lowest review score: 12 The Ledge
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 95 out of 137
  2. Mixed: 26 out of 137
  3. Negative: 16 out of 137
137 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    At War
    It’s always clear who’s right and who’s wrong, which material interests each is representing, and who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Dogman
    The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Under the Sun
    Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Journey to the Shore
    Kurosawa allows for a few brief flights of fancy, further abandoning realism for whimsical bursts of glowing color, but otherwise it's a humdrum slog of a voyage.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Two Shots Fired
    The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    White God
    It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Fury
    The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Mood Indigo
    Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Palo Alto
    It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    The Monuments Men
    George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Beyond Outrage
    If Takeshi Kitano does go forward with the rumored third volume, hopefully he'll conceive of some fresh angle on this increasingly dry material.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Here Comes the Devil
    The film is eventually revealed as less interested in subverting or playing off its influences than rigorously retracing them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Philomena
    A human-interest story that claims spite for human-interest stories, the film has some pretty divisive issues at its core that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    This Is the End
    It's disheartening that, despite some half-hearted overtures toward shifting the comedy paradigm, the filmmakers make little attempt to expand their comedic palette.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    The Happy Poet
    Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Nobody Walks
    The whole thing comes out feeling kind of featureless, beaten flat by its own sense of fairness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Head Games
    While Steve James's documentary is persuasive on an informational level, it doesn't do enough to explore the human side of its subject matter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Detropia
    Seems to be looking for answers, but the ones it finds are too close to the surface to be satisfying.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Beloved
    Ultimately crammed at a frustrating juncture between period-piece froth and seriously conceived drama, never tipping its hand toward either.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    While the documentary offers us a story that needs to be told, it does so in very non-Joffrey ways.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Elles
    The film is ultimately draining because of the way it handles Anne, stranding a potentially dynamic character in two dueling scenarios, both of which are drab and unsurprising.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    The Hunter
    The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Red Tails
    Where Spielberg has made WWII a venue for his sanctimonious side, a platform to convince viewers that war is indeed hell, Lucas is still in a state of pre-adolescent fascination with the conflict.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    London Boulevard
    A movie like this lives and dies by its finer details, and London Boulevard screws up by applying the same broad brush to its entire cast, meaning every character gets the same amount of shading.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    The Thing
    You can tell a lot about the film from its rough handling of the materials supplied by its predecessor, using these commonalities both to identify the bond between the two and signal how much further it's willing to push things.

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