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 5.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Keith Phipps' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 City of God
Lowest review score: 0 Fathers' Day
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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    We Bury the Dead
    As a horror movie, We Bury the Dead is light on scares (and has a little trouble sustaining momentum in its back half), despite some truly upsetting zombies. But Hilditch’s film works extremely well as a mournful mood piece anchored by Ridley’s thoughtful, melancholy performance as a woman trying to understand the fullness of her loss and the impossibility of recovering the past.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    No Other Choice
    Though the film’s long middle section starts to feel a little repetitive, Park’s filmmaking remains unfailingly sharp and the performances perfectly calibrated to the increasingly absurd, and carnage-filled, situations in which they find themselves.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    Song Sung Blue
    It evens out to an engaging-enough biopic, but if Song Sung Blue had found a way to interpret their bittersweet love story with a Lightning & Thunder-like intensity, it could have been even more.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Is This Thing On?
    For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The film’s fundamental earnestness and Cameron’s gift for astounding visuals and kinetic action scenes usually offset most of the flaws and a nagging sense of déjà vu.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Father Mother Sister Brother
    Death makes what’s left unsaid unknowable. But life can make the gap between parents and children feel unbridgeable, too. Father Mother Sister Brother plays like a long, plaintive sigh of acceptance that this is the way of the world, and perhaps a quiet wish that it might be otherwise.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Anaconda
    It’s as if everyone seemed to think that all the film needed was to assemble the right pieces and the rest would take care of itself. And with pros like these, they almost do.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Ella McCay
    Ella McCay has some fine moments but getting to those little gold nuggets requires a lot of tedious sifting through the sand.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Merrily We Roll Along
    As the record of a landmark staging of a great play, however, this Merrily feels like a gift to all those who wish they could have been there, or want to return.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Hamnet
    Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget.
    • 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?
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Christy
    Sweeney’s transformation is more than just physical. She’s convincing as both the scrappy kid no one expected to go anywhere and the swaggering superstar who began throwing verbal blows at opponents.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Sentimental Value
    Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    Eternity
    One of the film’s greatest strengths is its refusal to oversimplify the matter and a script that allows Turner, Teller, and Olsen to make their characters more than mere type
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Peter Hujar's Day
    The singular word “portrait” isn’t quite right, however. Both Whishaw and Hall deliver lovely, tender performances that capture the friendship between the writer and her subject.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Keith Phipps
    Train Dreams
    Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Nouvelle Vague
    That Nouvelle Vague looks like it could have been made alongside Breathless is its most immediately striking feature. From the aspect ratio to the film stock, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a contemporary production. The tone, however, is wry, knowing, and resolutely comic, even occasionally sentimental.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Bugonia
    At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    It Was Just an Accident
    It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Keith Phipps
    Frankenstein
    Once the film finds its true hero, it becomes exactly as good as the idea of a del Toro adaptation promised: the defining 21st century cinematic Frankenstein.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    TRON: Ares
    Through it all, Reznor and Ross keep the music pulsing in time to the action and for some thrilling, surprisingly long stretches, that’s all the movie needs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    Kiss of the Spider Woman
    While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    A House of Dynamite
    The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Keith Phipps
    Good Fortune
    It’s the work of someone who didn’t take the time to realize he had nothing to say, then decided to say something anyway.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Keith Phipps
    Blue Moon
    Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Keith Phipps
    The Smashing Machine
    Adhering to Kerr’s real-life story allows Safdie to skirt clichés, but it’s really only Johnson’s memorable characterization that suggests Kerr’s story had to be told.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Keith Phipps
    All of You
    Goldstein and Poots play off each other well, creating the sense of a years-deep connection that’s suddenly threatened by what’s changed between them, but also by what’s remained the same. They’re convincing as two people who don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a movie that also doesn’t really know what to do.
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