John Anderson

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Los Angeles Times, Variety, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post
For 564 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1 point lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

John Anderson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Museo
Lowest review score: 0 Nothing Like the Holidays
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 326 out of 564
  2. Mixed: 198 out of 564
  3. Negative: 40 out of 564
564 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 John Anderson
    Class Action Park
    Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way, the interviewees are all charmingly surprised that they lived through their teenage years and there’s a remarkable amount of action footage from the park, considering that it predates cellphones. (The animation by Richard Langberg is amusing, too.) Where the film has a problem is Mulvihill.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 John Anderson
    Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn
    A rehashing of decades-old race relations in New York, or anywhere in America, might seem superfluous given more recent events, but Mr. Muhammad’s point isn’t to stir up anger. It’s to decry damage—the waste of a promising young life and the collateral wreckage visited upon a family and friends.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 John Anderson
    Waiting for the Barbarians
    With a screenplay by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee from his 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians is a parable of depressingly timeless relevance, which means it’s faithful to its source material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 John Anderson
    Out Stealing Horses
    Lushly visual and much of its cinematic power arises from the seductively dreadful space and starkness of the Norwegian landscape in winter. And in the way Mr. Moland and his cinematographer, Rasmus Videbæk, use their delicately detailed, even painterly depictions of the flora and fauna surrounding the film’s very complicated people to put the latter in their cosmic place.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 John Anderson
    Spinster
    What’s increasingly bewildering and perversely curious is how unpleasant Spinster is, in almost every regard: The lighting is atrocious, the framing is erratic and Ms. Peretti’s comedy, which is generally about demolishing the banalities that constitute most human interaction, may well have the audience saying, “Well, of course Gaby’s alone. She’s intolerable.”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 John Anderson
    Howard
    The Ashman story itself is the stuff of a Broadway musical. It just needed some music—what’s here is doled out in penurious and unsatisfying morsels.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 John Anderson
    An American Pickle
    It has some savvy things to say about social media, assimilation and a specifically American condition: the peculiar mix of embarrassment and pride (and guilt) one can harbor about one’s ethnic origins. With a character who brings it all back home.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 John Anderson
    The Go-Go's
    As director Alison Ellwood shows in her briskly entertaining documentary—The Go-Go’s—the band’s members can explain away, with enormous charm, the naked ambition that made them the most successful “girl group” ever.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 John Anderson
    Hamilton
    How does it play? With the same verbal and musical fireworks as the stage version, and with the same emotional kick, which is rooted in the casting.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 John Anderson
    Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Anyone expecting some kind of righteously indignant, stentorian rant from Ms. Meeropol will be disappointed. In fact, she does something far more surgical: She makes Cohn ridiculous. She makes him close to an object of pity. He would have hated nothing more. Call it revenge by pathos.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 John Anderson
    Spelling the Dream
    There is often a pulsating musical score buoying the action, such as it is; family snapshots appear, the histories of the individual kids are told, their approaches to competitive spelling are explained, and there are interviews with mothers and fathers who, someone warns, should not be stereotyped as “tiger parents.”
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 John Anderson
    We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    Mr. Miranda may be the drawing card of We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, but director Andrew Fried has made a documentary about friends, rhythm and, in every sense, time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 John Anderson
    Bad Education
    It’s a delicate and memorable performance by Mr. Jackman. Ms. Janney does the whole Long Island thing as well as anyone ever has. The most resonant character, though, might be Rachel, whom Ms. Viswanathan imbues with the indignation of youth—something the rest of the characters have long outgrown, but which the story was always going to need.
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