Keith Phipps

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Polygon, Slate, The Reveal, TV Guide Magazine
For 58 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Keith Phipps' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 90 Crawl
Lowest review score: 30 Michael
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 31 out of 58
  2. Mixed: 25 out of 58
  3. Negative: 2 out of 58
58 movie reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    Mother and Child
    Garcia shoots Mother And Child with minimal flare, an approach that keeps the focus squarely on the cast, whose moving work helps pave over some of the narrative’s lumpier patches.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Lord of the Flies
    Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    The Omega Man
    If nothing else, The Omega Man remains worth seeing for its remarkable shots of Heston wandering through an abandoned metropolis.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 10 Keith Phipps
    Life and Debt
    Tough to respect a documentary that doesn't play fair. Anyone interested in the subject would be better off spending Life And Debt's torturous 80-minute running time with a good article on the topic.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    The Truth About Charlie
    Though indisputably a thriller, Charlie abandons itself to little cinematic rhapsodies, self-reflexive asides, and montages of Paris locations cued to a soundtrack of cool French pop, all of which often seems more vital than the main order of business.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    Piglet's Big Movie
    Though it's tough to find much fault with a film so sweet, Piglet's Big Movie never lives up to its title.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Keith Phipps
    Cloverfield
    It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    Burn After Reading
    This feels like a second-shelf Coen comedy, particularly when compared to their no-less-shaggy "The Big Lebowski."
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Troy
    Troy does look good--so good, in fact, that it takes a while to reveal itself as a thundering dud with much action but little personality, human drama, or brains.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Keith Phipps
    Daughters of Darkness
    Strikingly shot and notable for Seyrig's monstrous, Dietrich-like character, Daughters is a psychosexual horror film that's gripping almost up to the very end.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Spade can still be funny when he lets himself be mean, and Dickie Roberts shows glimmers of that dynamic, but they're muscled out by lazy slapstick and maudlin stuff.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Rollerball
    Only those attracted to "Waterworld" or "Last Action Hero" level big-budget disasters need bother with this one.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    The Country Bears
    It has the courage to feature some refreshingly lousy bear costumes, but the film seems likely to send most kids tugging at sleeves for the cinematic equivalent of Space Mountain.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Cold Creek Manor
    In one of the most laughable confrontations between humanity and nature since Elisha Cuthbert stared down the cougar on "24," Quaid's family runs amok in the house, as each member simultaneously discovers a carefully placed snake meant to scare them off the property, almost as if the snakes were working off a timer system. The film never recovers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    To Be and to Have
    An early shot of two turtles crawling through the classroom establishes the film's deliberate pace, and To Be And To Have benefits from the care.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Stateside
    A mess.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Keith Phipps
    The Crazies
    The crazies themselves could be a lot more terrifying. Without the rotting ickiness of proper zombies, they just seem like methed-out Iowans looking for a fix. That’s scary, but not scary enough.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 16 Keith Phipps
    Jingle All the Way
    If there is a bottom of the Hollywood barrel, Jingle All The Way has been gleaned from the filth upon which that bottom rests.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Scream
    Finely crafted, tense, scary thriller from start to finish.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    Land of the Lost
    It doesn't help that neither Ferrell nor McBride bring their best material, with McBride offering yet another variation on an angry redneck, and Ferrell falling back on Ron Burgundy-like bluster and nonsense exclamations.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Accepted
    The ideal viewer of Accepted probably won't have seen any college comedies before. Or any slobs-vs.-snobs movies like "Caddyshack." For those who have, it's kind of a snore.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Odd Man Out
    Though he has little coherent dialogue after a certain point, Mason is ideal as the embodiment of unsteadiness, physical and moral.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Wattstax (re-released)
    Now an invaluable time capsule, the film has to transcend its own conceptual messiness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 67 Keith Phipps
    Ramona and Beezus
    Ramona And Beezus has the undeniably nice, pleasantly uninspired feel of film designed to kill time with the kids on a rainy weekend.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Torque
    Torque has a sense of humor about itself, but the laughs stick in the throat.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Stage Beauty
    As historical speculation, it's clever enough. As a film, it glows with flop-sweat.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    By the film's halfway point, the subplots have all started to head in the most obvious directions imaginable, which is too bad, since they all have real potential. Ferrera's story of spending the summer as an out-of-place ethnic element in the milk-white suburbs stays interesting the longest, in large part thanks to her performance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    House of Usher
    Working from a script by Richard Matheson that spins Poe’s story to feature length, Corman, cinematographer Floyd Crosby (father of David), and composer and exotica icon Les Baxter create a hallucinatory swirl of a movie that has the feel of an especially sharp nightmare.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Keith Phipps
    The Switch
    Turns out it's hard to make one man swapping his sperm for another's seem cute, as much as The Switch tries.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    It's a horror film better suited for skittish cats than humans.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    Panayotopoulou's background in photography shows in the way she lets her chiaroscuro lighting mirror her characters' emotions. It also shows in the still-life quality that Hard Goodbyes never quite gets beyond.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    The Ignorant Fairies
    His Secret Life's languid pace and general aimlessness keep getting in the way.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    While fleeting moments from Pearce and Luis Guzmán (as Caviezel's loyal servant) suggest the film might have been even more fun had they been allowed to loosen up a bit, the finished product still offers little cause for complaint.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Mango Yellow
    It's a lot to suffer through for a film that has nothing to say, but insists on saying it anyway. Repeatedly.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    The Haunting in Connecticut
    As a piece of storytelling, The Haunting In Connecticut is pretty lazy. As a horror movie, it’s lazier still, bringing out every annoying shock-cut and disorienting sound-design trick of the last decade.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    A Woman Under the Influence
    Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Lost Highway
    A slow, ponderous, ultimately unsuccessful exercise in cerebral nihilism.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 58 Keith Phipps
    Halloween II (2009)
    Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    An overstuffed would-be epic.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Keith Phipps
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Video veteran Sanaa Hamri directs with smooth competence, and the leads all go pleasantly through their paces, but there are no surprises.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    He Got Game
    There's not a relationship in He Got Game that feels right, especially the one between Washington and Allen, and if that doesn't work, neither does the film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    The Yellow Handkerchief
    It’s nice to see a film unafraid to be quiet and sensitive, but one good gust of coastal breeze would blow this one away.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Keith Phipps
    American Graffiti
    A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Keith Phipps
    Wild Style
    The story of a much-admired graffiti artist who is tempted by the possibility of mainstream success, Wild Style is extremely clumsy as a drama, with awkward dialogue and even more awkward acting. However, as a showcase for many aspects of the incredible outpouring of creativity that took place in New York during the late '70s and early '80s, it can't be beat.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    One Swallow Brought Spring
    Carion and his gifted leads never take the easy way out. Instead, they let the characters get acquainted against the slow change of the seasons, taking their relationship along unexpected turns.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Night of the Comet
    Night Of The Comet borrows freely from everything from The Omega Man to Romero’s zombie films to Repo Man, but it never borrows so heavily as to feel like a rip-off of anything.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Monsieur Ibrahim
    Adapting a novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, François Dupeyron uses handheld cameras and some jarring edits, but, prostitutes and all, this is storybook material: heartfelt, pleasant, cuddly, and a little too insubstantial to stick in the mind for long.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    The Ladykillers
    Already as dark as London soot, the comedy hardly needed work to bring it in line with the Coen brothers' sensibility, but the remake moves to a beat of its own, one unexpectedly in sync with the gospel music dominating its soundtrack.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    The Cookout
    Gives virtually every cast member a shot at humiliation.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Keith Phipps
    Playtime
    Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Saint Ralph
    Scott can invest just about any scene with heft and intelligence, but neither the material nor his co-star give him much help.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Lilo & Stitch
    With its sharp wit and its portrayal of how broken families sometimes fit back together, Lilo would make a fine summer double feature alongside "About A Boy," another film that stays funny while dancing around a tiny abyss.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Babe: Pig in the City
    Maybe it could have worked had the movie found a story worth telling, but it simply drifts from depressing incident to depressing incident, resembling the nightmare of an adorable but deeply emotionally scarred pig. Anyone with fond memories of Babe ought to avoid this mirthless, dispiriting sequel.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Keith Phipps
    Extreme Measures
    While Extreme Measures is competently directed by Michael Apted, and is never really boring, it's nothing we haven't seen before. And though it attempts to make an important point about the value of life, by the end viewers will only be reminded that they are two fruitless hours closer to the grave.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    Gran Torino
    Eastwood directs with his usual relaxed pace and bursts of intensity, a style that's pleasing to watch--and which, also as usual, never fully compensates for any shortcomings of the script handed to him.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Promises
    "I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Ghost Chase
    For all the difficulties facing young filmmakers attempting to make it in Hollywood, many services are designed to aid their struggle. Film schools, for example, can help young visionaries hone their technical skills and expand their knowledge of film history. But more helpful than anything, if Ghost Chase is to be believed, are the ghosts of long-dead butlers who take the form of midget extraterrestrials.
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