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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    • 39 Metascore
    • 53 Katie Rife
    Escape the Field
    While efficiency and originality are both pluses in genre filmmaking, neither of them should come at the expense of creating an immersive world that sparks the imagination, or characters the audience actually cares about. With both of those qualities so woefully underdeveloped, Escape the Field feels not only like a midseason episode, but a premature series finale.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The Kitchen
    While the film boasts a refreshing premise — mob wives taking over their husbands’ territory when the men land themselves in jail — what lingers afterwards is the stale taste of its lukewarm execution.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    A Dog's Purpose
    So what is a dog’s purpose? To provide gentle, forgettable entertainment for moviegoers who lament that “they” don’t make “nice” movies anymore, apparently. For the rest of us, it’s more like a 100-minute nap.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Green Night
    It’s not an unbearable film, but it’s not a particularly consequential one either, despite the boldness of its themes. In this case, a star’s big comeback comes not with a bang but a whimper.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Keeping Up with the Joneses
    Director Greg Mottola deserves some credit for trying to give the film a little bit of cinematic flair, something that’s lacking in many Hollywood comedies these days.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The Addams Family
    Anyone who’s still engaged by the end of the movie is probably too young to remember the original.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Like a Boss
    If you’re looking for something truly groundbreaking—or hilarious—Like A Boss isn’t it.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Men in Black: International
    Director F. Gary Gray, while experienced in both action and comedy, also struggles to keep the film’s picaresque plot on track.
    • 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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    This movie can’t decide how it wants to look or what it wants to say. You could even call the jumble of styles and tones “quirky,” were you so inclined.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Dough
    Dough makes smoking pot seem about as edgy as falling asleep in front of the TV.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Bleeding Love
    It’s a film that’s been thought out but doesn’t reach any new conclusions; that assembles some good elements, but doesn’t really consider how they all fit together. The truthful elements are not enough to overcome the clumsy and cliché ones, and in the end it’s a film that’s more satisfying before you know how it ends.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The Greasy Strangler
    It’s not an attractive comparison, but The Greasy Strangler in some ways recalls "The Human Centipede III," in that it raises questions about a filmmaker’s relationship with the viewer. This is a far better and less offensive film than Tom Six’s, but it also comes custom-built to discomfit the majority of its audience.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Bombshell
    The film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold, hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    All Day and a Night
    Cole had a key part in one of the biggest game-changers in Black cinema this decade: a co-writing credit on Black Panther. But where that film was expansive and forward-thinking, this one feels like a throwback—and not in a good way.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The Glorias
    The result is a choppy mix of timelines, color schemes, and differing levels of realism that’s too unfocused to really inspire.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Holidays
    Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Burden
    Overly simplistic piece of Southern poverty porn, which asks questions it’s not really prepared to answer and proceeds from a set of dubious assumptions that undermine whatever nuance it does possess.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Books of Blood
    Beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Mortal Engines
    This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Spark: A Space Tail
    As far as animated films go, the script for Spark: A Space Tail is clunky but inoffensive, falling far short of your average Pixar production creatively but largely sidestepping attempts at tongue-in-cheek “adult” humor in favor of groan-worthy puns à la the title.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    You can’t just have two hours of kaiju slapping each other around like a gargantuan WWE highlights reel.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Lords of Chaos
    Åkerlund’s understanding is more like contempt, in a film that downplays the bigotry of the Norwegian black metal scene and shrugs off the severity of its actions with a “boys will be boys” approach that has no reverence for the scene, but doesn’t provide any insight into it, either.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Shepherd
    Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    The Bad Batch
    Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Halloween Kills
    The problem isn’t that Halloween Kills is about nothing more than brutal nihilism; that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for a horror movie to be. It’s that it tries to be about so many things on top of brutal nihilism that it loses its grip early on.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Katie Rife
    Hellraiser: Hellseeker
    Hellseeker at least tries to work itself into the larger Hellraiser mythos by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty. But like Inferno, it falls so far short of its ambitions that only the most dedicated and generous fan could give it the benefit of the doubt.
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