John Powers

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L.A. Weekly
For 47 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 37% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

John Powers' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Japan
Lowest review score: 30 A Decade Under the Influence
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 47
  2. Mixed: 18 out of 47
  3. Negative: 1 out of 47
47 movie reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 John Powers
    Gangs of New York
    Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 John Powers
    K-19: The Widowmaker
    K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers' Handbook.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 John Powers
    A Decade Under the Influence
    One wonders what exactly Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme thought they were doing in this documentary, which doesn't so much look at the period as genuflect before it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 John Powers
    City of Ghosts
    Dillon doesn't yet possess the directorial chops to give his story the necessary snap; the action too often feels poky and muffled. But he does have a strong sense of place, and the movie's almost worth seeing just for Jim Denault's exquisite cinematography.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    8 Mile
    Eminem plays Rabbit with riveting, flamboyantly expressive intensity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 John Powers
    The Italian Job
    Not only are the action sequences well-paced and witty, but Gray neatly draws out the comic high spirits in Wahlberg's ensemble of crooks.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    Oasis
    At once a romantic melodrama, a sharp social comedy and a fierce political commentary on Korean society's cruelty to social outcasts. It's also a triumph of artistic indirection: Not a single scene plays out the way you expect. This is a film that gives humanism back its good name.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    Femme Fatale
    I haven't admired a De Palma film since "Carrie," or even enjoyed one since "Scarface," so it must mean something that Femme Fatale gave me one of the best times at the movies I've had this year.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 John Powers
    Human Nature
    Although a few moments are hilarious, this would-be romp remains laboriously earthbound when it should be swinging gaily through the trees.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 John Powers
    Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen
    Brave, gifted, haunted and poor, these kids are so heartbreaking that you wish Shou had the good sense to give their lives the attention he lavishes on himself.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    In Praise of Love
    In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 John Powers
    Bruce Almighty
    Carrey's schizophrenic new effort gives you both at once -- it drowns his hilarious physicality in an ocean of sap.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 John Powers
    Winged Migration
    Astonishing both for the beauty of the birds and for its sheer technical brilliance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 John Powers
    The Saddest Music in the World
    The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 John Powers
    Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Pettigrew assumes that Fellini was a genius, and while this film won't convince any skeptics, the maestro's fans can sink into it like a hot bath.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 John Powers
    28 Days Later...
    The movie is mercifully uncontaminated by the smarty-pants self-reflexiveness that has sucked the lifeblood from nearly all post-"Scream" horror pictures. Clever enough not to be too clever, Boyle and Garland play their story straight -- they just want to give you the creeps -- and, by so doing, bring the undead back to cinematic life.
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