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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    If Alex Wheatle proves less powerful than the other films in this series, that’s in large part because of the strengths of the series. Every entry in Small Axe is a study in expansive miniatures. None of these films flexes its muscle by way of length. They burrow. Alex Wheatle’s primary imperfection is that it almost doesn’t burrow enough. The intricacies of Wheatle’s inner life feel almost rushed through or limited in their illustration. I wanted to know more about this young man — which is also a sign that the film is doing something right.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Dolemite Is My Name
    It feels at times like a Tracy Jordan spoof of a movie, and not always for the better. But that doesn’t stop Dolemite from being funny, or from giving Murphy room to do the things he likes to do.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Corsage
    Corsage is not a great movie, but it’s good at detailing one woman’s circumstances. It doesn’t browbeat us with meaning, which it had every right to do, but instead attempts something humbler.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    The White Tiger
    Bahrani’s take on Balram’s present-day circumstances is eventually so restricted to the beginning and end of the film that it begins to feel like a foregone conclusion, rather than like the curiosity that it is.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Zola
    Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Something in the Dirt
    Ultimately, Something in the Dirt doesn’t quite convince as a genuine mystery — and it doesn’t seem to be meant to. Having fun with the artifice of it all — the loose “documentary” format, the well-played and visibly signaled “clues” scattered throughout — seems far more to the point.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    No Sudden Move
    It’s a thrill ride from a director who, recently prone to intriguing, one-off experiments, knows we didn’t exactly need reminding that he’s still got it, but reminds us anyway — flaunting what he has because, well, he can.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    King Richard
    Despite its well-worn triumphant narrative, King Richard proves convincing at giving credence to the idea of Williams as a fact already stranger than fiction — the kind of man you can’t help but feel is a real character, in the everyday-life sense of that phrase: a one-of-a-kind guy, hard to reproduce.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Emily the Criminal
    As a social tract, Emily the Criminal is more impassioned than wise. As a thriller, it fares better — in that case, no one’s asking for wisdom.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 K. Austin Collins
    Zombi Child
    I don’t find Bonello cold. I find him alert, alive, and frequently inspired—if unexpectedly limited, at times. Zombi Child amounts to a curiously fragmented display of his talent. But much of the good stuff is here.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Notturno
    Notturno is not journalism. Yet from its very outset it raises the same questions about itself and its own making, about the film’s ability to show what it shows, because what it shows is often so immediately intimate — private to the point of making a viewer want to avert their eyes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 K. Austin Collins
    The French Dispatch
    Even when the film doesn’t entirely work, there is, simply, joy in watching Anderson work.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Emily
    Frances O’Connor’s Emily, her directorial debut, takes a familiar literary biography and garnishes it with the right kind of creative liberties — the vibrant, suggestive kind.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Titane
    Yes, it’s a gender-morphing, misery-and-mystery tour of sensational and at times incomprehensible events, rife with questionable life choices and odd twists of fate. There are absolutely ideas at work here about gender and sex and all the rest. But it’s the movie’s sense of play that feels most striking.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 65 K. Austin Collins
    True History of the Kelly Gang
    The script has enough sexual pathology humming under the hood to stoke sufficient curiosity about the depths of Kelly‘s strangeness. It doesn’t exploit these ideas nearly enough, though it makes up for that lack with a carnival of likable faces: Hunnam, McKay, Nicholas Hoult, the rising star Thomasin McKenzie.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Dune: Part One
    It takes seriously the challenge of adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel, and keeping all its big-picture implications in full view. It earns its distinction as a faithful adaptation — and proves a satisfying movie, too.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Armageddon Time
    Armageddon Time isn’t a movie about bad people or good people. It’s more shocking because it’s more banal: It’s a movie about people. It doesn’t excuse peoples’ choices. But it knows that it cannot change them.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    On the Rocks
    It’s a little zany, a little blue, emotionally jagged, adventurously all over the place. If you’re a romantic, though, the movie’s inciting incident — the bomb that detonates all the problems to come — probably plays like something closer to a scene out of a horror movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Long before Palm Trees becomes an outright film about sex work, it establishes itself as a film about the dire social transaction that sex can be — an old story, tragic every time, and effective here.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Creed III
    Creed III is very much a boxing movie. But it’s got a gnarled, contingent conflict at its center that’s a little too knowing for the movie not to have a little more than usual on its mind.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    The World to Come
    The World to Come is full of inversions, deviations from the usual themes, complicated as it is by interlocking contrasts, unexpected emphases. This is a movie in which love springs in winter, whereas spring beckons devastation.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Free Chol Soo Lee
    Free Chol Soo Lee is not a true crime documentary. If anything, it goes out of its way to avoid becoming one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Supernova
    As a film about two gay men in their middle age, Supernova does all the right things, anchors its sense of conviction in rhythms and silences, in-jokes and private conflicts, that cohere into a natural portrait of being together. In a word, it’s a solid, emotive drama, all the more so for the pain at the movie’s center being equally natural, valid, inevitable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Funny Pages
    Owen Kline’s script is boisterous, funny, and very much committed to the bit. This is a movie about junior independence, after all, about a slightly full-of-himself young talent who’s journeying out on his own for the first time. So Kline makes sure the journey is memorable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    News of the World
    This movie, like Hanks and Greengrass’s Captain Philips, only excites — quite capably — when it needs to. Greengrass’ trademark efficiency as a storyteller is very much here. But more often the movie sticks to the contemplative: a moody character study with dashes of hillside danger and inner turmoil and post-war social conflict and all the rest — the allspice seasoning of the adult western genre.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    The Inspection
    This is not a tale of a young man who can “pass” and, knowing that it may matter to his survival, toughens up, puts on a masculine drag. It’s a movie intent on showing us that this is all drag — it’s all put-on, all available to the play of identity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 K. Austin Collins
    Fire Will Come
    Fire Will Come is a movie that will go down easy for the right viewer, a movie strangely energized by an unexpected dash of suspense. But the film’s ideas, the questions it sends aloft as we watch, remain stuck in our throats.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 K. Austin Collins
    Ammonite
    What Ammonite needs is to dig deeper and imagine more — to find a Mary Anning of its own to excavate what’s hidden inside it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 K. Austin Collins
    Nanny
    Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 K. Austin Collins
    Promising Young Woman
    The movie is sturdy and stylish, full of ideas and fun to watch, strange as it may seem to say. If it doesn’t always maintain the sharp effectiveness of its opening, it’s proof of a writer-director willing and able to stay ahead of the curve.
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