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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Dekalog (1988)
    These despairing, ambiguous pieces are always emotionally unsettling, and that is due in part to Kieslowski's complete assurance as a director. His spare, minimal visual preferences dominate each episode. The camera work is fluid and precise, and the films are so rich they seem to be feature-length though they're not.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Godfather
    Overflowing with life, rich with all the grand emotions and vital juices of existence, up to and including blood. And its deaths, like that of Hotspur in "Henry IV, Part I," continue to shock no matter how often we've watched them coming. [16 Mar 1997, Calendar, p.7]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Vertigo
    An audacious, brilliantly twisted movie, infused with touches of genius and of madness. A disturbing meditation on the interconnected nature of love and obsession disguised as a penny dreadful shocker. [13 Oct 1996, p.C5]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Touch of Evil
    No amount of repeated viewings can dull the edge of its sinister ambience or soften the visual excitement Welles brought to this quintessentially cinematic film. [Director's Cut]
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Army of Shadows
    As someone who was part of the Resistance, Melville knew enough to neither melodramatically glorify nor cynically devalue the heroism he presents. This is people doing what needed to be done, Army of Shadows says, this is the way it was.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Moonlight
    Moonlight is magic. So intimate you feel like you're trespassing on its characters souls, so transcendent it's made visual and emotional poetry out of intensely painful experience, it's a film that manages to be both achingly familiar and unlike anything we've seen before.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Beautifully crafted, movingly acted, still involving and entertaining, this is just the kind of film people are talking about when they say they don't make them like this anymore.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Kenneth Turan
    Pan's Labyrinth
    With Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro has made his most accomplished film to date, a dark and disturbing fairy tale for adults that's been thought out to the nth degree and resonates with the irresistible inevitability of a timeless myth.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Hoop Dreams
    By focusing on the personal side of the city game, Hoop Dreams tells us more about what works and what doesn't in our society than the proverbial shelf of sociological studies. And it is thoroughly entertaining in the bargain.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    King in the Wilderness
    Though this film is simple to summarize, to understand and experience the powerful emotional charge King in the Wilderness conveys, it simply must be seen.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Rififi (re-release)
    One of the great crime thrillers, the benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against, it's no musty museum piece but a driving, compelling piece of work, redolent of the air of human frailty and fatalistic doom.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    This is a film with a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Battleship Potemkin
    The most bravura 69 minutes in film history. [18 Mar 2011, p.D9]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    A Streetcar Named Desire
    Of the great American films -- and make no mistake, it belongs in that group -- A Streetcar Named Desire remains one of the most misunderstood, underappreciated and surprisingly forgotten. [26 Sept 1993, p7]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Roma
    Though it takes the risk of appearing too quiet too long, Roma and its melding of the personal with a glimpse of a society veering toward collapse is incontestably persuasive, a film whose like we are not likely to see again.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Spirited Away
    Prepare to be astonished by Spirited Away.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Toy Story
    Although its computer-generated imagery is impressive, the major surprise of this bright foray into a new kind of animation is how much cleverness has been invested in story and dialogue.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Killer of Sheep
    Killer of Sheep is a wonder any number of ways...but the greatest wonder of all is that this 1977 film, made for $10,000 by filmmaker Charles Burnett while he was still at UCLA’s film school and shot on weekends in Watts with a mostly amateur cast, still has the power to move us.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Shop Around the Corner
    The onscreen chemistry between James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan was the stuff of legend, never better displayed than in this Ernst Lubitsch romantic charmer. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    12 Years a Slave
    This is impressive filmmaking, but it is not easy to take in.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Manchester by the Sea
    Powerful, emotional filmmaking that leaves a scar, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By the Sea is heartbreaking yet somehow heartening, a film that just wallops you with its honesty, its authenticity and its access to despair.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Battle of Algiers
    Achieves its success through a combination of attitude and technique, uniting, to exceptional effect, a way of viewing the world morally while looking at it physically.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    A Hard Day's Night
    It enables us to recapture exactly the delightful sensations felt all those years ago when we and the world were young and exciting together.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Ratatouille
    Ratatouille is as audacious as they come. It takes risks and goes places other films wouldn't dare, and it ends up putting rival imaginations in the shade.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Children of Paradise (1945)
    As a piece of romantic/dramatic cinema, its peers are few, its superiors simply nonexistent.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Lady Eve
    Preston Sturges was arguably the most gifted writer-director of sound comedies Hollywood has ever produced, and this Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda standoff is his masterpiece. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Gravity
    Gravity is out of this world. Words can do little to convey the visual astonishment this space opera creates. It is a film whose impact must be experienced in 3-D on a theatrical screen to be fully understood.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    Beauty and the Beast
    Wised-up as well as traditional, with a striking and detailed look and a strong storyline, it is sure to charm a wide audience both now and for a long time to come.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    The Social Network
    Smartly written by Aaron Sorkin, directed to within an inch of its life by David Fincher and anchored by a perfectly pitched performance by Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is a barn-burner of a tale that unfolds at a splendid clip.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Kenneth Turan
    I Am Not Your Negro
    What makes I Am Not Your Negro a mesmerizing cinematic experience, smart, thoughtful and disturbing, goes well beyond words.
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