Kenneth Turan

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Los Angeles Times
For 2,642 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 66% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kenneth Turan's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 Vertigo
Lowest review score: 0 Stolen Summer
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,845 out of 2642
  2. Mixed: 659 out of 2642
  3. Negative: 138 out of 2642
2642 movie reviews
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per page
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Amour
    A perfect storm of a motion picture, with an icy, immaculate director unexpectedly taking on deeply emotional subject matter.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Hurt Locker
    Overwhelmingly tense, overflowing with crackling verisimilitude, it's both the film about the war in Iraq that we've been waiting for and the kind of unqualified triumph that's been long expected from director Kathryn Bigelow.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 60 Kenneth Turan
    Pulp Fiction
    The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities. [14 Oct 1994]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Zero Dark Thirty
    One reason Boal makes such a potent combination with Bigelow is that her directing style moves us right along. She is so good with both action and creating a convincing look and feel for the film that the time it takes to get up to speed with the complicated plot does not feel like a problem.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    A Separation
    A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Schindler's List
    Quietly devastating.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    WALL-E
    Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, Wall-E gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Carol
    Haynes understands that swooningly beautiful traditional technique bolstered by thrilling performances creates the greatest impact. He has made a serious melodrama about the geometry of desire, a dreamy example of heightened reality that fully engages emotions despite the exact calculations with which it's been made.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Dunkirk
    The surpassing accomplishment of Dunkirk is to make us feel an almost literal fusion with its story. It's not so much that we've seen a splendid movie, though we have, but as if we've been taken inside a historic event, become wholly immersed in something real and alive.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    45 Years
    45 Years is a quietly explosive film, a potent drama with a nuanced feel for subtlety and emotional complications.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Servant
    Glaciers might be melting, the polar caps might be crumbling, but not even the passage of half a century has taken the frozen edge off this brilliantly icy film.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Yi Yi
    Wonderfully humanistic film. Yi Yi investigates the entire melody of life.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Mr. Turner
    Just as Turner's expressive, enthralling work changed the nature of painting, Mr. Turner, anchored in the rock of Timothy Spall's astonishing, Cannes prize-winning performance, pushes hard against the strictures of conventional narrative and ends up pulling us into its world and capturing us completely.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Irishman
    Astonishingly, instead of business as usual, The Irishman is a revelation, as intoxicating a film as the year has seen, allowing Scorsese to use his expected mastery of all elements of filmmaking to ends we did not see coming.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The English Patient
    Rising to crescendos of emotion usually reached only by tenors and sopranos, these characters are the beneficiaries of the luminous writing of the novel and screenplay as well as the expert performances of the actors, especially Scott Thomas.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Crouching Tiger's blend of the magical, the mythical and the romantic fills a need in us we might not even realize we had.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Kenneth Turan
    Jefferson in Paris
    A wax-museum movie that is both bland and reverential despite its focus on the great man's love life, Jefferson is hampered by its disconnected protagonist.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Inside Out
    Inside Out manages to be honest and unafraid but never cheaply sentimental where emotion is concerned, evoking a largeness of spirit whose ability to be moving sneaks up and takes us by surprise.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Sideways
    Exactly written, directed with a surgeon's precision and transcendently acted, Sideways brings emotional reality to a consistently amusing character comedy, making it something to be cherished like the delicate Santa Ynez Valley wines that are the story's vivid backdrop.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    We Were Here
    An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Chimes at Midnight
    A meditation on aging, friendship, betrayal and coming to terms with life's profound contradictions, interspersed with antic humor and some of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed. [01 Jan 2016, p.E4]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    As completely real on the psychological level as its up-to-the-moment visual effects have on the physical.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    First Cousin Once Removed
    Heartbreaking, haunting and unexpectedly heartening, First Cousin Once Removed is an uncommonly moving documentary portrait of a mind in disarray.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Elevator to the Gallows
    A consummate entertainment rich with the romantic atmosphere of Paris in the 1950s. Coming at a turning point in French cinematic history, it drew upon several major talents - director Louis Malle, star Jeanne Moreau, cinematographer Henri Decaë, musician Miles Davis - and achieved near-legendary results with all of them.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Lady Bird
    As warm as it is smart — and it is very smart — Lady Bird marks actor/screenwriter Greta Gerwig's superb debut as a solo director and yet another astonishing performance by star Saoirse Ronan.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Shoplifters
    This wise and insightful film is delicate, poignant and unexpectedly powerful.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Shoah: Four Sisters
    These four, like so many others, opened up to Claude Lanzmann, and the results speak eloquently for themselves.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Inside Llewyn Davis
    While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made Inside Llewyn Davis echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of their best films.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Band of Outsiders
    The wonderful thing about Band of Outsiders is that the daring elements that jazzed audiences then have the same power to intoxicate all these years later.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    There Will Be Blood
    It's important to remember that Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect. So while Day-Lewis' gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in "Blood" tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic.
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