Leslie Felperin

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The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety
For 845 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Leslie Felperin's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Toni Erdmann
Lowest review score: 10 Hector and the Search for Happiness
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 377 out of 845
  2. Mixed: 440 out of 845
  3. Negative: 28 out of 845
845 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Dream Horse
    Like horse racing, filmmaking is a high-risk gamblers' game, but the team behind Dream Horse, the resulting dramatization of the Vokes' story, have surely bred a winner with this endearing, determinedly crowd-pleasing adaptation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    My King
    The director, her co-screenwriter Etienne Comar and the exceptional cast led by Emmanuelle Bercot and Vincent Cassel have an acute enough eye for the manners and mores of these archetypes to make the material feel consistently fresh and alive.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Bethlehem
    The film comprises an impressive directorial debut for Adler who demonstrates a confident grasp of pace, place and thesp handling.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Make Me Famous
    As a narrative, it gets a bit repetitive by the time we get to France, but the abundance of home video footage from back in the day, and campy dirt-dishing from the interviewees, makes for a touching look at halcyon period in New York history, before the last shabby corners of Manhattan were gentrified beyond all recognition.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Bad Apples
    The end result is a nifty ethical puzzle about balancing the needs of individuals versus those of the community. Still, it’s best not to take the plot too seriously given the wild implausibilities that come into play in the third act.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
    Through it all we see Richard O’Brien himself, sometimes jamming on a guitar and dropping crisp bon mots, right up to the end when he gets just a little bit weepy thinking about it all. Adorable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Beatriz at Dinner
    A little more subtlety and a more nuanced approach to the dynamics of this culture clash would have made the film that little bit more effective.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Seeing Allred
    This woman, for all her flaws, is clearly a warrior first and foremost.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Leslie Felperin
    Slither
    The cast certainly seems to be in on the whole joke, or at least must have felt all those hours in the makeup chair getting swaddled in latex was worth it in the end.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Night Call
    It feels confident, inventive and as grippy as duct tape throughout.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Righteous
    Sure, this is a talky movie, big on debates and low on action, and may feel somewhat theatrical – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the performances are this subtle, expressive and electric.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    My Old School
    Simply designed animation, modeled on the look of cool cartoons of the time such as Daria, adds an extra comic jauntiness. You could say, to use a popular slang term from the 90s, this puts the “mental” back in experimental, but in a good way.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Ambassador
    Brugger ensures it's a fairly entertaining excursion, especially when he starts to enjoy getting into character as the nefarious white man in Africa.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Anchor and Hope
    It’s a thoughtful, honest and touching work, especially for women who love women, and also love canals.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    PG: Psycho Goreman
    It’s no surprise to learn Kostanski has worked as a special makeup artist on bigger budget projects such as Suicide Squad and It, but this proves he has a way with actors as much as a knack for latex and fake blood.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Kill Boksoon
    Like a lot of topline Korean films, this prestige action thriller is a little too long at 137 minutes, but it’s consistently entertaining throughout, and quite well-suited given the length to being viewed on a streaming platform.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    This Is GWAR
    Even if the antics shown here aren’t really your thing, it is still a hoot seeing Gwar members get interviewed by a game Joan Rivers: you can tell that beneath all the latex most of them are sweet, normal folk who remained loyal (mostly) to one another and shared a vision for the group.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Kubi
    This challenging, extremely violent, ravishing-looking, intricately plotted adaptation by Kitano of his novel is of interest for its fresh take on a musty genre. That said, it could feel like a slog to watch for viewers who aren’t fans of sword-wielding, screaming samurai movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    The Green Wave
    Mixed-media approach is eye-catching, and the subject is unquestionably powerful, but the sentimental score and stridently drawn imagery detract from picture's impact.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Surfer
    In the end, the film feels too rollicking and self-parodying to be taken seriously, but it strikes just the right tone to make it a fun Midnight movie.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Jealousy
    More tightly scripted than Garrel’s usual rambles, the comedy-drama also has an unexpected emotional warmth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Paper Tigers
    Tran adroitly layers the fight sequences, filmed with fluidity and at least substantially performed by the main actors themselves, between frothy layers of blokey banter.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Damsels in Distress
    Stillman proves he still knows how to write crackling, articulate dialogue for quirky preppie characters whom he loves laughing at as much as with.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Nowhere Boy
    A respectable but surprisingly conventional feature-debut effort from Brit artist-turned-helmer Sam Taylor-Wood.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Wrecking Crew
    The whole package is an easily digested guilty pleasure.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Sometimes Always Never
    Whimsical and wistful, if occasionally a little too self-consciously kooky, British comedy-drama Sometimes Always Never constructs a pleasant portrait of a mildly unhappy family living in the English northwest.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Hipsters
    Although a massive hit at home, taking approximately $16 million at the wickets, this great-looking but tonally uneven pic won't jive with audiences quite so well anywhere else.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    No Man of God
    Both actors contribute knife-sharp timing and the kind of intensity needed to make this essentially two-man setup work.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Alpinist
    The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more measured, sideways look at the weird dropout culture around climbing would have been more interesting.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Save Yourselves!
    For the most part it manages an adept balance between satire, sincerity and sheer silliness that’s ultimately winning.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    The Balconettes
    Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    They Will Have to Kill Us First
    Although many of the stories told here are deeply harrowing and the film sometimes seems to be trying to bite off too much, at least there’s a happy ending of sorts.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Anything for Jackson
    Altogether, it’s a richer devil’s brew than you would expect, crisply edited and moodily shot – even if the last act doesn’t quite hit the spot.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Werewolves Within
    This goofy horror comedy, based on an online game of the same name, just goes to prove that if you have a great cast, smart direction and witty script you can just about get away with murder.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Glassland
    Like the emotional equivalent of a massage with a sandpaper loofah, the film leaves you feeling raw and tender, thanks particularly to the knockout performances from the small cast, especially Collette.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Our New President
    Without taking any particular stand on whether the Russians decisively swung the result of the 2016 election or just nudged it along, the film makes it clear just how insidious, relentless and brazen their propaganda effort was, seeding memes that metastasized virulently throughout the world.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Kitchen
    The Kitchen also has plenty of inventive ideas, creates heady atmospheres in both its dark and lighter moments, and features vivid performances with a large ensemble.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Founder
    Hancock's apparently irrepressible penchant for folksy Midwestern types and perky montages dilutes any cynicism or misanthropy that might have given this material the edginess it deserves.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Angels' Share
    An amiable comedy about young Glaswegian roughnecks discovering the world of whisky, The Angels’ Share finds helmer Ken Loach and long-term screenwriting partner Paul Laverty in better, breezier form than their rebarbative prior effort, “Route Irish.”
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Wander Darkly
    Some may find this a path too well trodden by other movies, but what's refreshing is to see it through the eyes of a female protagonist for a change.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Leslie Felperin
    The Report
    Audaciously cerebral and unabashedly granular, writer-director Scott Z. Burns' political thriller The Report, a dramatization of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 probe into the CIA's use of torture in the wake of 9/11, is practically pornography for policy wonks.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Users
    Poetic, painterly work Users looks and sounds stunning, but remains thematically a little too diffuse for its own good as it meditates on our children and the future they will inhabit, where perfect machines replace imperfect parents.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Audrey
    Even if you watch it alone on a laptop with a bottle of cheap beer and a dried-up turkey sandwich, Audrey is a pleasure. That's mostly due to the still-incandescent star power of its subject.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Kung Fu Killer
    The fight scenes are terrific, but the haphazard plotting, off-the-peg characterisations and drippy music elsewhere lack flavour.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    The film feels a little too eulogistic, too reliant on hyperbole and too in love with its own gimmicks to make it more than just a serviceable crowd-pleaser.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Landline
    The farcical elements in the plot take far too long to gel, and Robespierre and company push too hard at mixing sad, silly and sweet.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Jolt
    Altogether, this is flyweight fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Archies
    The whole shebang is quite bizarre but sort of works, thanks to the brisk pacing of the editing and the joie de vivre that directors Zoya Akhtar and Ryan Brophy inject into the proceedings.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Bad Reputation
    The big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Mothering Sunday
    Even the lush world-building of the visuals here, committed performances especially from Young, and stream-of-consciousness editing aren’t enough to conjure the wry, melancholy, and, above all, intensely literary interior voice of the book’s protagonist.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Moebius
    A gloriously off-the-charts study in perversity.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Cold Fish
    Like most Sono pictures, too long. But its gleeful humor and dare-you-to-watch aesthetic will help it rack up kills at specialty fests.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    One Floor Below
    A very fine if not exactly groundbreaking film about, as the title hints, perspective and distance.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Young Ahmed
    In the end, Young Ahmed feels like little more than a pained shrug, elegantly made, yes, but vaporous and virtue-signaling an empathy that's more gestural than heartfelt.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Seventh Fire
    This documentary, by the first-time director Jack Pettibone Riccobono, is a deep drink of bleak. But there are incidental moments of beauty or startling surreality to marvel at.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    American Star
    Director Gonzalo López-Gallego creates a strong frame around the characters in both visual and narrative terms, while a lovely score credited to Remate, mixed with well-chosen soundtrack cuts, creates a limpid poignancy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Puzzle
    This directing debut for experienced producer Marc Turtletaub (Little Miss Sunshine, Loving) ticks along pleasantly, driven by an efficient if slightly bland script by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Idol
    The director and his regular editor Eyas Salman notch up the tension by beautiful degrees as Mohammed overcomes each obstacle with ingenuity, charm and, hokey but true, sheer singing skill.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Dario Argento Panico
    It’s sort of impressive how much director Simone Scafidi allows Argento’s dark side to show through all the hype about his genius.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Kalki 2898 AD
    It’s all a lot, as they say, but those with a taste for maximalism will swoon over the goods on offer here.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    White Girl
    Seductive and repellent by turns, it’s a title that will provoke fierce love-or-hate reactions, but there’s no question it augurs the arrival of a powerful, audacious new directorial talent.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Paddington In Peru
    While Paddington in Peru sadly lacks the absurdist wit and decidedly dark edge that elevated the first two Paddington movies, it’s serviceable enough given its limitations.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Drone
    Without stridency but with a clear sense of purpose, director Tonje Hessen Schei compiles a mix of original interviews and footage and archive material and simulations to explore the history of drones.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Kills on Wheels
    Writer-director Attila Till’s plucky comedy-drama isn’t quite the radical representation of disability it seems to think it is, but has its heart in the right place.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
    Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Leslie Felperin
    Frankie Freako
    At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    The Good Lie
    The Good Lie is a touching, generous-hearted movie, sensitively directed by Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) working with a smart, sly, long-gestated script by Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire).
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    American Made
    This is yet another hyper-competent, boyishly devil-may-care character that offers Cruise, famous for his derring-do on set, a chance to do his own stunts and fly a plane; it’s not a role all that far out of the ageing megastar’s wheelhouse.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Kill the Jockey
    In the end, it all feels a bit like a fashion film or some other branded exercise in style — except that the brand is Ortega’s peculiar and unique vision.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    V/H/S/Beyond
    Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Glasshouse
    This tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet).
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Saving Mr. Banks
    Taken strictly on its own terms, Saving Mr. Banks works exceedingly well as mainstream entertainment.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Beauty and the Beast
    It’s a Michelin-triple-starred master class in patisserie skills that transforms the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush into a kind of crystal meth-like narcotic high that lasts about two hours. Only once viewers have come down and digested it all might they feel like the whole experience was actually a little bland, lacking in depth and so effervescent as to be almost instantly forgettable.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Leslie Felperin
    Paradise: Love
    Repulsive and sublimely beautiful, arguably celebratory and damning of its characters, it’s hideous and masterful all at once, “Salo” with sunburn.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Miss Americana
    What's ultimately very endearing about Swift is her intelligence and self-awareness, qualities that also make her music compelling, sophisticated and capable of appealing both to adolescent kids and hipster musicologists.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Hockney
    An officially sanctioned but pleasingly gush-free cinematic monograph.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Believe
    In the end, the film is so guilelessly unabashed about its hokum that it becomes sort of endearing in a way, and one can’t but admire the likes of Cox, McElhone and Toby Stephens as the boo-hiss bad guy for fully committing to the corn.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    Animals
    The book Animals is based on, a well-reviewed literary work originally set in Manchester, has been adapted by the novelist herself, Emma Jane Unsworth. So why does the end result feel so inert and contrived, even if it's exceedingly pretty to look at?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Audition
    In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Tharlo
    As a bit of anthropology offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Coherence
    Byrkit’s parable about choices and how they make us who we are has an eerie potency.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil
    Ma, with his natty suits and ruthless glare, brings heft and humour to the proceedings and easily upstages his pretty-boy co-stars.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    100 Nights of Hero
    It all feels like the film is setting up for nested tales within tales, but instead the layers don’t go that deep. Nor does the film offer up much in the way of thematic substance beyond love (between women) is grand, men are mostly bad, and matriarchal societies are better than patriarchies.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Leslie Felperin
    Coup de Chance
    This mostly competent but largely uninteresting, bordering-on-silly work upholds the Allen tradition of just carrying on as usual
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    A Desert
    Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Leslie Felperin
    To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    The end result is pleasant but bland.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Sleeping with Other People
    Sleeping With Other People is a brittle, bawdy, frequently funny romcom that might be too smart for its own good.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    The Listener
    The whole collaboration feels undeniably stagey, but it’s still an empathic and frequently moving work that touches on the sheer volume of callers that workers like Thompson’s character, often unpaid volunteers, must contend with every day.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Mimosas
    With such an elliptical tease of a plot, which jumps back and forth temporally disdaining explication, some may feel a little of this travelogue goes a long way.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Swiss Army Man
    It’s entirely to the directors and the two lead actors’ credit that what sounds like a bunch of overextended body humor gags of the most juvenile variety evolve, by sheer repetitious attrition, into something bizarrely poetic and strangely touching.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Chinese Puzzle
    A pleasing walk in the park for all involved, not exactly profound, but appealing to both long term fans of the franchise and accessible to newcomers.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Tamara Drewe
    Adapted from a comicstrip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which was itself based on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," picture represents a satirical but soft-biting swipe at contempo middle-class mores among Blighty's chattering countryside classes.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Bombay Rose
    There is a palpable sense that this was made by someone who knows Mumbai backwards and truly loves its ochre-colored streets, cluttered sidewalks and peeling billboards advertising old movie releases, right down to every frayed shred of paper.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Sleep Furiously
    Picture's tone is far more poetic than polemical.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    Downton Abbey
    Downton 2.0 is literally bigger, broader, more gem-encrusted, punctuated with more drone shots and monarchist pomp, and has all the major cast members back in place.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Mafia Inc
    The constant shifting between Italian, English and Québécois-accented French adds an extra texture, and the performances are as sharp as the suits.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Leslie Felperin
    Futuro Beach
    It’s an immensely likable movie, impeccably acted and wise about the nature of exile.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not
    Best of all, Zenovich and her editor, splicing and dicing 50 years of archive material, get across Chase’s abundant talent at its best, particularly his masterly command of the pratfall, and his immaculate comic timing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Maya and the Wave
    Yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Leslie Felperin
    To the End
    Due to the fact that the canvas is broader this time around — and the subjects Lears has chosen to focus on don’t have four discreet, parallel narratives that we can see through to the end — there’s inevitably less coherence to this film strictly in terms of storytelling. Instead, each of these women is trying to make a difference in the climate crisis in very specific ways, but for all of them history keeps interfering.
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