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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Far from the Madding Crowd
    The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Drinking Buddies
    Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Cataldo
    Dogman
    The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Bird People
    Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Jesse Cataldo
    Aloft
    The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    Louder Than Bombs
    Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    Venus in Fur
    After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    I Used to Be Darker
    The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    Bastards
    Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    The Drop
    With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    Do Not Resist
    Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    Sightseers
    This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Nocturnal Animals
    Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    Farewell, My Queen
    Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    Outrage
    It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Cataldo
    Another Earth
    The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    The We and the I
    A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Jesse Cataldo
    The Innkeepers
    Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Jesse Cataldo
    The Patience Stone
    While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Cataldo
    The Grey
    There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.
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