Kevin Maher

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The Times
For 191 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 60% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kevin Maher's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Pride & Prejudice
Lowest review score: 0 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 86 out of 191
  2. Mixed: 85 out of 191
  3. Negative: 20 out of 191
191 movie reviews
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    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    One Battle After Another
    I’m not sure if it’s Anderson’s masterpiece, and though Penn is funny in the role of the crazed colonel, he frequently veers towards cartoonish and almost ruins his scenes. Still, it’s an easy best picture Oscar nomination in the bag.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    No Other Land
    The film is consistently gripping and harrowing, while including delicate moments of optimism, where Abraham and Adra enjoy quiet conversations (sometimes beautifully shot by Szor) over a hookah pipe at night. And then, inevitably, it is back to violence, conflict and hate.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Nickel Boys
    Very occasionally a movie appears that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Anora
    A wonderful movie from one of the world’s best independent directors.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    The Brutalist
    The performances are savagely good, with Pearce and Brody both on awards season form. And it’s shot on rarely seen 70mm film stock, which means that it looks like something beautiful, haunting and strange, but always from the long-forgotten past.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Sound of Falling
    Schilinski is in such control of every frame, every cut, prop and camera move that it’s often breathtaking just to witness the emergence of this grandly interlaced tapestry of grief.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Marty Supreme
    There are gruesome gunfights, car chases, savage beatings and the sense by the closing frames that Safdie has delivered the narrative equivalent of an unstoppable plummet down an especially precipitous flight of stairs. You’ll emerge battered and bruised.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Train Dreams
    Past western, part romance, part philosophical treatise, this Sundance Film Festival stunner also feels like the greatest Terrence Malick film that Malick never made.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Good One
    Towards the end, that mood changes devastatingly. Another film might have needed a murder to send these chills but Donaldson is in such control of the tone, and her cast are on such exquisite form, that a single sentence has massive reverberations.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Cover-Up
    It’s a sobering riposte to the clickbait era.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    No Other Choice
    There is, initially, some heavy slapstick here (the first murder is a calamitous mess) but the bite of the film resides in the richness of its characters and how it delves into the protagonist’s home life.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Kevin Maher
    Two Prosecutors
    His legal ambitions are thus stymied at every turn by missed appointments and disinterested power players, resulting in glacial narrative pacing and a miserably predictable outcome. It is, at best, vaguely Kafka-esque but also, for the viewer, quite the trial.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Black Bag
    Soderbergh knows his spy movies and so is careful to inject the film’s more cerebral proceedings with just the right amount of lore and giddy genre hokum.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    The President's Cake
    It’s a testament to Nayyef’s ingenuous performance and the mesmerising sense of place that the film is always compelling and sometimes bleakly funny, although there are no happy endings.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Sinners
    The ending’s a bit iffy, the action so-so. And yet the genre-mashing audacity (part horror, part historical epic, part musical) is so assured, the characters so rich, and the flights of fancy so ambitious that it’s impossible not to be moved.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Sirât
    This is original, explosive (literally — you’ll see!) and ovation-worthy, cinema.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Darling
    Up there with Blow-Up and Alfie as the definitive Swinging London movie, this Julie Christie breakout has somehow acquired more gravitas over time than those two.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Hamnet
    The ending, set in the Globe during a production of Hamlet, is harrowing, meaningful and magnificently sad. You might want to yell out, “Make it stop!” This is, instantly, the essential Shakespeare movie.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    The Tale of Silyan
    Arguments will rage about how much of this is staged and how much captured. The film-makers have labelled the film “a documentary fable” and that works for me. It’s that place where Ken Loach and David Attenborough meet. In the best possible sense.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    It’s an exquisite portrait of a musical genius at work. And Yoko Ono.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    The Perfect Neighbor
    I’m not convinced that we have the moral right to watch some of these scenes and to witness a tiny traumatised boy at his most bereft and alone. Still, it’s an outstanding, provocative film that is bound to inspire debate. Watch it and discuss.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Pride & Prejudice
    The director Joe Wright’s roaming camera gives every exchange an unexpected urgency.
    • The Times
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Rose of Nevada
    MacKay and Turner acquit themselves handsomely with many silent stares, tortured looks and grimaces. Like all Jenkin’s films, it looks extraordinary and the deliberately “tinny” post-sync sound only adds to the sense that you are watching something ancient, meaningful and quite magical.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Riefenstahl
    It’s not often that films get better on a second viewing, but this dense, challenging and intellectually rigorous documentary about “Hitler’s favourite film-maker” Leni Riefenstahl is one of those exceptions.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    Apocalypse in the Tropics
    Ending with uncertainty, and a sense that Brazil is never too far away from another military dictatorship, this is sobering, essential viewing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Weapons
    Where to start with this utterly gorgeous, commanding, terrifying and masterful suspense thriller? Firstly don’t believe the hype — it’s not a horror. It’s bigger than that. Not a slasher, a creeper, a spooker or a demented killer movie. It’s better than that.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    Warfare
    This is a movie that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget. It’s a sensory blitz, a percussive nightmare and a relentless assault on the soul.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Kevin Maher
    The Voice of Hind Rajab
    It is deliberately punishing material, channelled through unapologetic, galvanising film-making. Politicians should see it. Decision-makers should see it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Kevin Maher
    28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    Gosh, I hope that Ralph Fiennes’s back is OK. Because the 63-year-old certainly did a lot of heavy lifting in this latest instalment of the long-running zombie franchise. I mean that metaphorically, of course, because in this movie it’s up to Fiennes to provide the emotional, intellectual and comedic fireworks.
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