K. Austin Collins

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Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair
For 250 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 1.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

K. Austin Collins' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Nope
Lowest review score: 30 Infinite
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 148 out of 250
  2. Mixed: 95 out of 250
  3. Negative: 7 out of 250
250 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 K. Austin Collins
    Bacurau
    It isn’t remotely surprising that a political film can be gut-splitting entertainment; if the legacy of the American Western proves anything, it’s this. But Bacurau doesn’t merely reflect that legacy. It outdoes it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Everything Everywhere All at Once
    It’s comically postmodern to the point of feeling almost retro, which also describes Everything Everywhere’s sense of action, its enriched sense of comedy colliding violence, practical materials (like fanny packs) taking their ranks amid the physically superhuman feats of choreography — a mix many of us rightly associate with Jackie Chan.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    MLK/FBI
    The choices that King and Hoover make relative to the public pressures they applied to one another only serve, in Pollard’s recounting of this bitter history, to twine these men together ever so tightly. This is all part of what gives Pollard’s film its deafening urgency, its tingling aura of imminent danger.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 K. Austin Collins
    Test Pattern
    Test Pattern, for its emphatically binary sense of the world as summed up in the differences between these two people, for its literal examinations of blackness and whiteness, and gender, and everything else, somehow avoids falling into the trap of painting the world in black and white. It is a film that — more than presenting the mess of the life — dives in headlong, wisely, cuttingly, and to devastating effect.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Revenge
    Fargeat gets her thrills from all the bad things that make her genre great: Cinematography that’s rancid with heat and color, sound design that delights in every exaggerated crunch and squish.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 65 K. Austin Collins
    In Fabric
    If In Fabric is initially hindered by the literalism of Strickland's vision, it still manages to prove irritatingly suspenseful, at times even pleasurably shocking.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 95 K. Austin Collins
    She Dies Tomorrow
    The thrill arises from the way Seimetz constructs and juggles everything, the balance between what she provides (feelings, memories, sensations) and denies (hard answers, explicit philosophy).
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 K. Austin Collins
    Waves
    The purpose of the fine-grained emotional details keeps getting scrubbed out of Waves as its runtime wears on and reconciliation feels increasingly imminent. The observations are sharp, but the attitudes and arcs that they paint feel overly simple.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Passages
    The actors, working from a script by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, and swept up in Sachs’s characteristically perceptive, subtle dramatic style, make the whims and wills of these people feel consistent and predictable, which is to say, true to life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Totally Under Control
    Totally Under Control is very much in control: It makes the whole of this crisis feel explicable. That proves frustrating. With the tragedy of the pandemic still ongoing, and thus still fresh, it also proves gratingly impersonal.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 K. Austin Collins
    A Hidden Life
    The film never obscures what it’s about. This is, after all, the story of a martyr. But because it’s recounted by a director whose cosmic visions are deliberately meted out through the most minute details, things most other films overlook—the ephemera of everyday experience, the gestures, glances, and sudden flights of feeling that define us without our even recognizing them in the moment—it all feels that much more particular.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    The Eternal Daughter
    How can a movie that seemingly does so little amount to so much? It’s because of the story lurking beyond it all — the psychological battle being waged, so quietly, under the surface of everything.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Version is, unabashedly, a crowd-pleaser — one that arrives at a time when the crowd could use some pleasing. But it’s as thoughtful and, in the way only great comedy can be, soul-baring and honest as it is funny throughout. It signals the arrival of a great movie talent. The joke is on us if we don’t keep her around.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Mank
    Among Fincher die-hards, the result will probably bemuse some, bore many, and thrill a relative but hearty minority. Count me in the minority.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 95 K. Austin Collins
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the West isn’t a source of nostalgic pride or a place we ought to willingly, lovingly reinhabit, like some auteurist-friendly Westworld. Rather, it’s where our great American myths go to die. Buster Scruggs isn’t an act of mourning; it’s laying all that to rest.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    The Assistant
    [Green has] made a powerful movie about the ways power enforces silence, even between assistants and other underlings—people convinced they have everything to lose. It’s a movie about the tragedy of being brought into the fold and conditioned into that silence. And it’s a movie about how a person feels when they believe they have nowhere to go.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Kajillionaire
    Kajillionaire feels in some ways like a relic, harkening back to the recent past of indie quirk but dressing it up in the pain of overgrown kidulthood. The difference between July’s work and those other movies is that the quirks aren’t a mere matter of personality or window dressing, but evidence of a way of being in the world that, to the majority, isn’t quite right.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Top Gun: Maverick
    It’s a fresh-faced gloss on the original, in other words, powered, like the original, by a star who’ll simply never stop being a star. The big mission makes for the most exciting moment; the build-up is worthwhile. When Maverick goes its own way, it tends to lose itself.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 K. Austin Collins
    birth/rebirth
    What gives birth/rebirth its dark, subtle, painful sense of humor, as well as its horror and its thoughtful gravity, is the sense that even the most profound problems of life and death can be approached like problems of science — that the act of trying to give someone you love more life can result in basic trial and error and scientific problem-solving.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 K. Austin Collins
    The Card Counter
    The movie has real moral terror at its center. It gets ugly: It gives that word fresh resonance. This is where it gets things right — what will, one hopes, make it worth remembering.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 K. Austin Collins
    The Sisters Brothers
    The film is rich with male feelings and even manages to have a sense of humor about its own sadness. Phoenix is fine here—his usual loose cannon—as is Gyllenhaal, whose educated snob routine doesn’t overplay its hand an inch. Though I’m tempted to launch a federal investigation into his mutt of an accent. But it’s Reilly who really carries the movie.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 K. Austin Collins
    Sorry to Bother You
    Sorry to Bother You is a surreal ride.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 K. Austin Collins
    High Life
    The movie seems to be a study of the artificial limits we put on our desires—and the ways those desires naturally betray us. This being Denis, she of course goes above and beyond merely exposing those limits; she must also, of course, expose the audience’s limits in the process.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Till
    Chukwu’s script, co-written with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, is interesting for all of the predicaments it stares down and quietly works its way through.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 K. Austin Collins
    Nope
    This is a movie that knows the power of images. It has learned, from the greats of the genre, that what we fear most is what can’t be seen, what’s merely implied.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 K. Austin Collins
    Malcolm & Marie
    The black-and-white glossiness of it, the close-ups, the knock-down drag-out verbal tussles: This is the kind of movie that practically begs comparison to John Cassavetes, while also giving us a lead character who’d berate us for making the comparison. It gets a little boring. Turn the movie off at the 20-minute mark and you can ultimately still say you’ve seen the entire thing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Buoyancy
    It grows thrilling to watch. Rathjen’s careful script and intensive eye for environmental details deliver all of this to us with a steady rhythm.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 K. Austin Collins
    The Marksman
    Not a great movie, but courtesy of director Robert Lorenz, a lean, plausibly entertaining one with all the fixin’s and none of the extra flab of deep, incisive meaning. It’s a buddy movie, a cartel chase, a sentimental redemption story. It’s a comfort watch.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 K. Austin Collins
    Relic
    It’s a horror movie that delays the big scares, foregoes a clean pursuit of answers, and instead piles on details that may or may not “mean” anything. They appear onscreen with a saggy and somewhat overburdened sense of psychological import, pointing toward the broader implications of what’s at play here: a matriarch’s possible dementia, for example. What they really evoke is the richer, more involved and chilling story this movie seems to want to be.
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