Laura Sinagra

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Village Voice
For 119 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 21% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 74% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 17.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Laura Sinagra's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 48
Highest review score: 90 Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
Lowest review score: 10 Alex & Emma
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 24 out of 119
  2. Mixed: 69 out of 119
  3. Negative: 26 out of 119
119 movie reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Laura Sinagra
    Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Laura Sinagra
    Girlhood
    Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Laura Sinagra
    Junebug
    It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Laura Sinagra
    OT: Our Town
    Kennedy takes pains to illuminate aspects and insights that buck cliché.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Manic
    Often the script (co-written by Michael Bacall, who plays sardonic bipolar rich kid Chad) rings clear with mouths-of-babes declamations that all pained kids spew before downing adulthood's suck-it-up Kool-Aid.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Watermarks
    Though Zilberman's affection for the women leads to some indulgent digression, the doc's low-key tone (and lack of the stock, timpani-backed Nazi iconography) throws certain anecdotes into powerful relief.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Wattstax (re-released)
    Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Mad Hot Ballroom
    Like "Spellbound's" glimpse of the darker side of childhood competition, Mad Hot Ballroom--a look at New York City schools' fifth-grade ballroom dance program--is best when exploring issues of class and gender and definitions of success.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Union Square
    The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Tupac: Resurrection
    Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    White Chicks
    Harmless slapstick fun.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    Beyond the buzz of iconoclasm, our explorers find a regular troubled marriage, only with three sides to every problem.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Lightning in a Bottle
    Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Travelers and Magicians
    In interviews, Norbu has compared the editing process to meditation. While his pacing echoes that of polestars like Ozu and Makhmalbaf, his edits make striking events out of mundane motions like hands moving under running water and mouths meeting cups of butter tea.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    The Sea Inside
    Unfortunately, Bardem is confined by more than Ramón's paralysis. He also must work within the limits of a partially numbed script.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    In Her Shoes
    The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    MC5*: A True Testimonial
    Bravely bucks the "Behind the Music" arc, conveying a reality of constant flux, a sense of the band being jerked in many different directions.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    With Awesome's insistence on professional sound--only a few times do we get sonically dropped into the cavernous, thumping Garden--and cuts to pristine close-ups of things like Mixmaster Mike's admittedly sick scratch detail work, it plays like a hype victory lap rather than a boundary-smashing study of fan curiosity or pathology.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Teknolust
    A quiet tour de force for Tilda Swinton, who plays researcher Rosetta Stone and her feisty but fragile alter egos.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Army of One
    If you can handle the truth, Sarah Goodman's entropic doc is as exquisite a basic training in banal U.S. Army culture as you're likely to find.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    I'll Sing for You
    The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    The Station Agent
    Manages to explore the darker facets of friendship without being dark.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Laura Sinagra
    Fade to Black
    The film has a feel similar to his songs--airtight, forthright, never spat till they're set.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    How to Deal
    As Mom, Allison Janney easily dominates every scene she graces, as does Morning Zoo jock papa Peter Gallagher.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    Winter Solstice
    What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    Veer-Zaara
    With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights manifesto and a plea for amity between India and Pakistan.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    D.E.B.S.
    Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Laura Sinagra
    Separate Lies
    Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."
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