Katie Rife

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IGN, IndieWire, Polygon, RogerEbert.com, The A.V. Club, TheWrap
For 545 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 60% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 36% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Katie Rife's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Little Women
Lowest review score: 0 The Haunting of Sharon Tate
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 363 out of 545
  2. Mixed: 160 out of 545
  3. Negative: 22 out of 545
545 movie reviews
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    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Katie Rife
    The Lodgers
    It’s a serviceable period ghost story that’s slight in story and not exactly subtle in themes, but contains a few genuinely striking images and atmosphere to spare.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Charlie's Angels
    The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Katie Rife
    SuperFly
    When the new SuperFly does show flashes of street-smart wit...its energy is infectious. Mostly, though, it needs to take its hero’s advice and take things up a notch.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 69 Katie Rife
    Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Allowing both love and money to complicate the primal enjoyment of watching muscular men in sweatpants gyrate ends up diluting the film’s once-simple pleasures. Maybe you can’t have it all.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Over Your Dead Body
    This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Much of what’s around them is rote and uneven, but Kunis and McKinnon are a comedic duo worth hanging on to.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    Everything, Everything
    The film does have its charms. The outside world, when we do reach it, is as gorgeous for the audience as it must appear to someone seeing it for the first time.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Katie Rife
    Azrael
    Weaving’s expressive face and boundless energy make her a compelling heroine, and her will to survive is unstoppable.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 83 Katie Rife
    The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    An overlooked gem in the annals of low-budget horror.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 58 Katie Rife
    Woman Walks Ahead
    Despite the sensitivity of its storytelling, and Chastain’s career-defining passion for playing headstrong, independent women like Mrs. Weldon, it also never really comes to life.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Satanic Panic
    It’s campy, it’s gory, it’s a little bit titillating, and it features one of those novelty performances from famous actors that tend to bring a lot of press to otherwise under-the-radar productions.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    How to Be Single
    You might say that How To Be Single suffers from the influence of its older, more put-together sister Sex And The City, right down to the sappy montage and voice-over it needs to tie everything together at the end.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Katie Rife
    Kids vs. Aliens
    In keeping with our current “poptimistic” age, “Kids Vs. Aliens” keeps the aggressive neon splatter, but loses the cynicism—a choice that, for all the F-bombs and fake blood, makes it a surprisingly pure film.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Bird Box
    In the end, Bird Box’s most significant shortcoming is that it’s just too inert and unfocused to work as sci-fi horror.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Project Power
    You might as well spend a couple hours with this film on in the background, but don’t expect much about it to stick with you—except for the jaw-dropping Henrietta Lacks monologue. You may need to pop a pill to forget that.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Katie Rife
    Taurus
    Taurus isn’t meant to lionize its protagonist. But even in offering a cautionary tale, all it can deliver is shallow provocation and monotonous cliché.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    Rough Night
    To compare Rough Night to another relatively recent female-led comedy, the film incorporates its violence with less tonal whiplash than in the 2013 Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy "The Heat," not only because of the tone set by the hard-R dialogue, but also because the dead body jokes are more "Weekend At Bernie’s" than anything.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Katie Rife
    Accidental Texan
    What’s unclear is whether this project is clumsy, but earnest, or a cynical attempt to sell a shoddy film to the “DVD section at Walmart” crowd.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Katie Rife
    Wolf Man
    Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is impeccably made, with a unique take on werewolf lore. But the emphasis is on craft over storytelling.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Holidays
    Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 42 Katie Rife
    Hillbilly Elegy
    Like the book, the film version of Hillbilly Elegy goes for easy over honest every time, which is one reason why the former has been sharply criticized by those it claims to represent.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Katie Rife
    The Hunt
    A movie that jumps on buzzwords like “canceled” like a hungry dog on a juicy steak, but never coalesces into a coherent statement about, well, anything.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Katie Rife
    Hot Frosty
    Frothy, self-aware, and straining for laughs, Hot Frosty is a cup of whipped cream with no hot chocolate.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Katie Rife
    Bloodsucking Bastards
    So while this is all rather dumb, it’s dumb fun, and aside from some incongruous soundtrack choices—the credits music encourages us to “burn down the disco,” which, sure, but during office hours?—director Brian James O’Connell plays all of his tonal elements right, which is to say fast-paced; goofy; and very, very bloody.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Katie Rife
    The Boss Baby
    Basically, this movie is exceedingly clever until it isn’t, finding creative ways to explain outrageous plot points until it gets tired and starts bombarding its young target audience with chase sequences instead.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    The Night Eats the World
    In the end, though, it’s the very concepts that make The Night Eats The World sound insufferably pretentious on paper — namely, its high-minded ideas and emphasis on small moments — that tip the film toward intriguing rather than, well, zombifying.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    A Dog's Way Home
    This year’s entry into the winter animal-movie canon, A Dog’s Way Home, comes this close to just being a simple, cute animal movie, until the humans complicate things.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Things Heard & Seen
    Like many Netflix originals, Things Heard And Seen is the cinematic equivalent of a mass-market paperback, neither good enough to haunt the viewer nor bad enough to haunt the résumés of its cast and crew.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 67 Katie Rife
    Paradise Hills
    This accessibility actually hurts the film, exposing the flimsy balsa-wood architecture under all those frills.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Katie Rife
    The Devils
    Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.
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