Kenji Fujishima

Select another critic »
Paste Magazine, Slant Magazine, The A.V. Club, The Playlist, Village Voice
For 194 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 25% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 72% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kenji Fujishima's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 91 Reds
Lowest review score: 10 Honeyglue
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 106 out of 194
  2. Mixed: 51 out of 194
  3. Negative: 37 out of 194
194 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    All I See Is You
    Take away Forster’s hard-working visual style, and what All I See Is You essentially presents is a standard relationship drama, with two generic, privileged people at its heart who don’t become any more striking even as the tensions between the two gradually reach a breaking point.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Crown Heights
    The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    The Ticket
    If Fluk’s film has any impact at all, much of it is thanks to Dan Stevens, who brings an empathy to James that occasionally complicates the director/co-writer’s two-dimensional view of the character.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    After the Hunt
    While its desire to question absolutes is admirable, there’s a hollowness at the film’s core that prevents it from having a more pointed impact beyond surface provocation.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    5 Flights Up
    Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Sing Street
    All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Morgan
    The film's makers lose trust in the intellectual heft of their material and chose to prioritize empty sensation instead.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Chicken People
    Haimes seems less interested in examining this unfamiliar world and the people involved than in shoving them into feel-good platitudes about following your dreams.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Fraud
    Fraud adds up to little more than a formally provocative but thematically tired stunt.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    The Purge: Election Year
    Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Rough Night
    To some degree, Rough Night's attention to character detail compensates for its weaknesses as a comedy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Bettie Page Reveals All
    Mark Mori goes a bit overboard in hammering home his appreciation of Bettie Page's significance, allowing the film to occasionally lapse into repetitiveness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Darling
    There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Man Up
    Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    The Ataxian
    Some of the biking footage is pretty in a generic way; for the most part, we're told rather than shown how astonishing the riders' athletic feats are. More off-putting is the film's reflexive canonization of its subject.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Eddie the Eagle
    It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Low Down
    There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Sisters
    A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Martyrs
    It's hardly a desecration of Pascal Laugier's 2008 French horror film of the same name, but that assumes the original is a canonical text.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Dean
    One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Empire of Light
    In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Where to Invade Next
    As informative and passionate as he often is on screen, Michael Moore also always toes the line toward shooting himself in the rhetorical foot with his own thuggish persona.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Maestro
    With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    A Hologram for the King
    Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    The Journey
    Paisley and McGuinness's intellectual back and forth is rendered so compellingly that one wishes the filmmakers didn’t feel a need to resort to a surfeit of momentum-killing plot contrivances.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Who is Dayani Cristal?
    As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    My All American
    All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Misconception
    The even-handedness of Yu's gaze throughout the first part of the film, alas, isn't sustained in the second and third chapters.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    A Little Chaos
    Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kenji Fujishima
    Like Crazy
    Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »