Keith Phipps

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The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, The Verge, UPROXX
For 1,277 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Keith Phipps' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Lowest review score: 0 A Life Less Ordinary
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 625 out of 1277
  2. Mixed: 463 out of 1277
  3. Negative: 189 out of 1277
1277 movie reviews
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    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Michael
    If you have an audience that doesn’t mind a story that includes lies, aversions, and omissions so long as it doesn’t get in the way of thinking too much about the songs they love and uncomfortable truths about the artist who created them, you don’t even have to put that much effort into what you’re making up.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Mercy
    It’s rare that a work of science fiction offers a grim vision of the future, then asks us to learn to love it.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Burying the Ex
    There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Little Boy
    In some ways it takes the right approach, attempting to mix moral lessons into a narrative rather than hit audiences over the head with them. But the lessons are so pat that every moment in which Pepper makes a good moral choice feels like an act of self-congratulation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Roar
    However misguided, it’s clearly one from the heart, a movie that should never have happened, and one that’s hard to believe actually exists. Roar is one of a kind. With any luck, it always will be.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    The Gunman
    The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Strange Magic
    Strange Magic certainly isn’t an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Taken 3
    Even Neeson can’t rescue this halfhearted shrug of a movie.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Inner Demons
    Neither Grossman’s uninspired staging nor the performances help much.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Hector and the Search for Happiness
    The film aims for twee, but lands on torturous. It’s narcissism blown up to a global scale, in the guise of a quirky voyage of self-discovery.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Wish I Was Here
    When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    Heaven Is for Real
    As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Son of God
    Excerpted from The History Channel’s 10-part 2013 miniseries The Bible, then given extra footage, Son Of God boils the life of Jesus down to feature-length, but it plays less like a movie than a hastily edited attempt to explore a new revenue stream.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Endless Love
    Pettyfer and Wilde look the parts, but any scenes asking them to emote quickly turn disastrous.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Gimme Shelter
    Though light on drama, Apple’s scenes at the shelter are easily the best part of the film, among the few moments when Gimme Shelter decides to show the effect of faith and charity rather than simply preach it.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Keith Phipps
    The Legend of Hercules
    Where 300 made a virtue of its low budget by stripping the visuals down to their essential elements, the shot-in-Bulgaria Legend Of Hercules mostly just looks rushed and cheap, only coming to life in a handful of fight scenes, and then only briefly.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    CBGB
    No doubt a decent movie could have been made about the behind-the-scenes life of CBGB, but CBGB isn’t it. It’s as flip about the club as it is about Kristal, the music, and the time and place that shaped it all.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Argento's Dracula 3D
    It isn’t just sub-par for Argento, it’s sub-par for virtually any director. It’s a stain on Dracula’s good name, and a waste of time for even those looking for the cheapest of vampiric thrills.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Keith Phipps
    Breaking the Girls
    Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    Chasing Mavericks
    It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    Dredd
    Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    The Apparition
    It's a potentially creepy setting that would give an innovative director a chance to do a lot with a little. Unfortunately, Lincoln isn't one of those.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    High School
    Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    A Little Bit of Heaven
    Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    Act of Valor
    It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    Anonymous
    It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The first Human Centipede had audacity on its side. Human Centipede II has only excess.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    Straw Dogs
    The original was repulsive but impossible to shake. This remake is pure applause bait, which makes it barbaric in ways Peckinpah would never have dreamed.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 0 Keith Phipps
    Apollo 18
    Unpleasant when it isn't dull, Apollo 18 never sells the lost-footage illusion, and never compensates for it with scares. Jolts, sure. Like so many lazy horror directors, López-Gallego knows how to startle, but not how to frighten.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    Conan the Barbarian
    It shouldn't, in other words, be that hard to make a good Conan movie. John Milius did a half-decent job with "Conan The Barbarian" in 1982, but this new film of the same name feels like a half-hearted revamp of virtually any of the Conan rip-offs that clogged up video-store shelves in the '80s.
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