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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    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Keith Phipps
    The Island of Dr. Moreau
    As a sci-fi action movie, the latest Moreau is sub-schlock. As a thinly veiled post-colonial allegory, it's dangerously close to racism. Either way, it's one of the most ridiculous movies in a ridiculous summer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    American Sniper
    A lesser filmmaker, and a lesser actor, might have made American Sniper into an unthinking bit of jingoism. Eastwood and Cooper keep finding respectful complexities in Kyle’s story, until the film reveals itself as too simple to have much use for them.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    The Grandmaster
    Wong’s usual concerns overwhelm the film, and though his pairing of fisticuffs and longing is sometimes awkward, he surrounds the awkwardness with some of the most beautiful images in his career. In Wong’s world, beauty goes a long way.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 33 Keith Phipps
    My Soul to Take
    As for the 3-D, much ballyhooed in the film's advertisements, it's another muddy conversion that does little but make the film's unconvincing blood effects look a little darker. It's good, theoretically at least, to have Craven back. But why come back for this?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Sweet Virginia
    It’s a film about lonely people in an isolated part of the world, the sort of place where people go to disappear and sometimes slip further away than they’d intended. It’s also one of the most suspenseful and uncompromising noirs of recent years.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Jay Kelly
    Though Baumbach lays the groundwork for a satire of Hollywood excess, he instead delivers a familiar but elegant depiction of successful men reflecting on choices they can’t undo, the damage created by those decisions, and the limited time they have left to make right what they still can.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Happy Endings
    There aren't a lot of laughs in Happy Endings, and those that sneak in are pretty wry. There's no comedic snap either, and while that seems not to be the point, humor might have helped with the film's often-sluggish pacing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Alias Betty
    A lot goes on, and it doesn't always make sense. But the cast embodies Rendell's ability to incorporate shrewd observations on human behavior into the framework of a crime story, and Miller has a great eye for the places on the Paris outskirts where the lives of haves and have-nots intersect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Antz
    The story is well-told, but so familiar that it renders the surrounding film a bright, shiny, dispensible bauble, an amusing diversion but not much more.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    DysFunktional Family
    If its star were more consistently funny, it might have worked, but the film opens with a string of dreadful Sept. 11 gags and takes a while to recover.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Big
    It’s a funny, bittersweet film that opens as a cautionary tale about growing up too fast, but deepens into a movie about the unplumbable gulf between childhood and adulthood, and what it feels like to stand on either side, wishing for a way over.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Keith Phipps
    The Hangover
    It's an agreeably unambitious comedy that might be called a romp, if that word didn't imply a little too much energy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 85 Keith Phipps
    The Square
    The humanity behind The Square‘s jabs save it from seeming nihilistic but they also implicate everyone watching. The film seems less nasty for having such a well-developed protagonist, but also that much more squirm-inducing for anyone who recognizes a bit too much of themselves in Christian’s unexamined attitudes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    A Borrowed Identity
    The director’s observant approach to the material helps pave over the frustrations.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Keith Phipps
    Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    The Company
    It should be a personal triumph or a personal tragedy, but it's neither: just another moment between curtain-rise and curtain-fall in the glorious business of creating beauty.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    It's more Thompson-for-beginners than an exhaustive inquiry, but as introductions go, it's thorough and thoughtful.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    Black's sadistic streak remains as uncomfortable as it ever was, and his direction is very much in the house style of producer Joel Silver. But both elements perfectly suit the material, which sneaks in a lot of sly stuff beneath the slick surface.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    Zootopia 2
    It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    The New World
    However complicated the historical issues at play, the poetic introspection that consumes The New World's characters could only take place in a Terrence Malick movie. But, here at least, history and lyrical drift go together surprisingly well.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The imagery eventually becomes the only reason to keep watching. This is the first of an announced trilogy, but it already feels as long as the 20th century itself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    It could all be done much more efficiently, but any other approach would lose Tsai's unique mix of stone-faced comedy and dewy-eyed lyricism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Keith Phipps
    Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    Zhang Yimou is a master of intimate character pieces.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Keith Phipps
    Thirst
    Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Polyester
    Polyester splits the difference between Waters’ earlier cult movies and his later mainstream work. A melodrama that touches on everything from punk rock to abortion to pornography.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Stevie
    Neither condemning nor forgiving, the film is a model of documentary evenhandedness, even though James makes no claims of objectivity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Road to Perdition
    Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Zodiac Killer Project
    There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.
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