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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    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Riff Raff
    The cast’s enthusiasm, especially that of Coolidge and Murray who are willing to play the most loathsome of people, makes up for a lot.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    This Much I Know to Be True
    The film engages with Cave and Warren Ellis’ creative bond, one that’s produced some sublime work but also self-indulgent noodling (of which there’s a little too much here). Indeed, some might wish the spotlight was on Ellis more, a fascinating character who may be the more musically gifted of the pair, but not as capable of holding the spotlight like Cave – who has his suits, rumbly baritone and carefully coiffed too-black hair.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    RoboCop
    In some ways, the thoughtful, dense script marks an improvement on the original, and the cast is certainly tonier this time around. What’s missing is the original’s evil wit, amoral misanthropy and subversive slipperiness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Tallulah
    There’s so much to root for here it’s painful to concede there’s some hideously on-the-nose, spell-out-the-motivation-in-capital-letters writing that lowers the tone.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Our Son
    All the characters are rounded, fallible and likable in equal measure, and even if the score is a bit syrupy, it’s a pleasant, engaging watch.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa
    This portrait of title subject Lhakpa Sherpa, the only woman to have summited Mount Everest 10 times, is so densely packed with uplifting moments that at times it feels like emotional mountaineering – but the climb has terrific views.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    There’s no doubting Brook and the performers’ commitment to their craft, even if the end result is somewhat repetitive.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    To the Stars
    The period trappings – which must have cost a bomb – are lush and smartly deployed without being heavy-handed, and the two young leads are very watchable.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    Stubby’s minimal anthropomorphism makes him a believably doggy sort of dog, whose expressions and behaviour clearly indicate that the animators spent many hours studying the real thing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Blitz
    While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Tharlo
    As a bit of anthropology offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Prisoners of the Ghostland
    The result is predictably excessive, noisy and more than a little exhausting. But mostly in a fun way, as long as you’re not bothered by gratuitous violence, incoherence and a deep streak of silly.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Dating Amber
    Freyne draws out fizzy, gutsy performances from his two leads, who have a genuine, charming chemistry. The authenticity of their performances is perhaps slightly out of tune with the broad caricatures on display elsewhere, such as the mean classmates, but it's ultimately forgivable given how winning the film is overall.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Jig
    Although there is some insightful observational work, and the dancing itself is aces, pic feels overcrowded with characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The 4:30 Movie
    By far the best thing in the film is Ken Jeong as the theatre manager, preening and ridiculous, dispensing putdowns with surgically precise comic timing.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    How to Please a Woman
    The end result is nowhere near as persuasive or grounded in solid screenwriting as Leo Grande is, but Phillips has always been a charmer onscreen and, like Grande’s Emma Thompson, she’s more than willing to use her talent here to make a case for women learning to manage and take charge of their own pleasure.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    One Way
    Baker, with his scrawny frame and ratty features, can actually act, although he’s consistently upstaged by young Reid, as the stronger performer and the one with the more interesting character story here.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Vicious Fun
    Once the bloodletting starts, Calahan interleaves it with witty asides and the pacing picks up a lot, all combining to make this impish if flyweight entertainment.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    A Dog's Journey
    Don't tell anyone I said this, but the result is not only pleasingly emotionally purgative, but also has some elements worthy of genuine admiration, despite the fact that the third word in the title is one that should now be entirely banished from the English language for its precious, psychobabble connotations.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Shook
    It’s all very 2021, and you can’t help wondering how it will age, but as a launching pad for the director and her cast, it’s a very serviceable platform.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Man Who Saved the World
    Sergey Shnyryov is superb as Petrov’s fictional counterpart, and the present and the past are smoothly sutured together by deft editing and an insistently mournful string score, although it’s sometimes a bit repetitive.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    1945
    The script’s twists are a little predictable and some might query the way the Jewish characters are essentially noble ciphers. But, given the rise of the far right in Hungary at the moment, this is a timely tussle with a nation’s collective sense of shame.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    A Tiger in Paradise
    It’s all quite lovely to look at or even just listen to, making for something that can easily be experienced at home while the viewer is knitting or chopping vegetables.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Listen
    Director Rocha de Sousa here wants to ensure the audience stays on the side of the protagonists. But if you stack the deck too hard, the whole house of cards risks collapse.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales
    The look is cute, deceptively simple and suggestive of the illustrations in children’s books, however, the 2D minimalism is executed with a high degree of craft. It is hard to make something like this look so easy and effortless.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Seeing Allred
    This woman, for all her flaws, is clearly a warrior first and foremost.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Caveat
    The final endgame is a little unsatisfying, but this is a very interesting debut for McCarthy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Pacifiction
    Quite watchable, even sort of plot-driven — for a Serra film.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Suzi Q
    This is a fan-servicing but not necessarily hagiographic documentary.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Half of a Yellow Sun
    Half of a Yellow Sun is the kind of ambitious literary adaptation that wants it all kinds of ways, not all of them compatible.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Flashback
    This pulpy multiverse brain-teaser is reasonably compelling to watch – at least in this reality. In another, it’s straight to video garbage, and in yet another, it’s won the Palme d’Or.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Last Spy
    Still fully in possession of every marble at the ripe old age of 100, Sichel reflects to camera on his middle-of-the-action view of events during the cold war, and a little tea gets spilled along the way, but not so much that he’s likely to get in any trouble for revealing state secrets. Still, he’s unabashedly critical of some CIA operations, such as the plots to destabilise leftist regimes including that of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Lux Æterna
    It's all business as per Noe usual.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Canary Black
    As visual wallpaper it’s serviceable enough, providing a constant backbeat of blam-blam gunshots and explosions, mostly at night.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Catch the Fair One
    It takes proper acting talent, boosted by strong direction from Wladyka, to pull the film along the way Reis does. She’s vulnerable, frightening and relentlessly physical.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Percy Vs Goliath
    Walken keeps you watching thanks to his inherent charisma, still undimmed in his late 70s.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Americana
    It doesn’t quite lasso the bronco, but the ambitions of writer-director Tony Tost’s yarn are ambitious and interesting, and he has at least assembled a cracking cast to tell it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    A Glitch in the Matrix
    What’s missing from this fecund brew, which you could imagine being twice as long, is any kind of judgment or analysis of the subjects.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Tales from the Lodge
    With well-timed rhythms and backchat, the ensemble is quite credible as a gaggle of slightly obnoxious, mildly likable millennials on the brink of middle age.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Clerks III
    Like the junk food that the central characters sell in their convenience store, it’s a strangely moreish brew that you enjoy but feel faintly guilty about consuming, like nachos with cheese-flavoured sauce or a blue slushy ice drink.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Cure
    It’s hard to outline what makes this work interesting without spoiling it, but let’s just say that as a satire it has helicopter parenting, sinister medical innovation to extend lifespan, and our obsession with youth and beauty in its sights. It’s a shame the final chapters don’t quite coalesce these fertile themes in more satisfactory fashion, and the film just ties everything up with some cursory violence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    I Used to Be Famous
    This schematic but sweet-natured comedy drama drives down a narrative track as straight and comfortingly predictable as an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Moonshot
    Most welcome of all is the generous sprinkling of good one-liners thanks to screenwriter Max Taxe’s witty script, solid direction from Christopher Winterbauer, and a cast with nippy comic timing.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Freelance
    The package as a whole, with its sun-bleached palette and colour correction that makes its blues pop, is reasonably entertaining, perfectly suited to watching on an airplane while flying to your next holiday destination.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Ava
    Mysius loses control of the tone, and the wayward direction of the last half hour, which unfolds mostly at a gypsy wedding and goes on 15 minutes too long, suggests difficulty finding resolution, a common problem with first films.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Major
    The producers have clearly paid up for the extras, sets and visual effects making this a lavish work, never dull for a second of its ample running time – even if some viewers may find the sentimentality a little hard to digest.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog
    It succeeds in walking the tonal high beam without falling into soul-destroying bleakness on one side or a saccharinely fake happy ending on the other. That’s no mean feat.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Other Fellow
    The film is more than a little repetitious, especially as it twice shows the black-and-white archive clip of Fleming explaining how he chose the name James Bond.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Difret
    It’s tempting to give this more of a pass because the subject is so noble and so few African-made films make it over here, but it has to be admitted that the some of the acting is a bit ropey and the script is a little too on-the-nose at times.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Archenemy
    Small, imperfectly formed but quite entertaining all the same.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    A pleasant, polished, but somewhat by-the-numbers effort.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Exposing Muybridge
    The most surprising among them being Gary Oldman. The actor, an English emigrant to California like Muybridge himself, makes some acute observations about Muybridge’s style, technique and mien and adds a bit of Hollywood pizzazz to a story that’s crying out for a biopic.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Killer
    If the plot is a little sketchy, the action, conversely, is drum tight.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Spine of Night
    It’s best not to think too hard about it and just let the striking imagery and saturated colours wash over your retinas.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Seventh Day
    Writer-director Justin P Lange finds a satisfying way to update the possession-exorcist theme for a new generation grown wary of the Catholic church’s old ways, particularly in the wake of the abuse scandals that have shredded the clergy’s credibility in recent years.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Kind Words
    It's to the script's credit that it doesn't tie up the story in cute little bows and instead leaves a number of questions unanswered by the end.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Them That Follow
    The cast commit gamely to the material, although the script is a bit underwritten, making sudden shifts in character a little odd and a bit random.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    The Sweet East
    The section where Lillian tumbles down a film-making rabbit hole is by far the most amusing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Only Lovers Left Alive
    A sweet but slight love story about world-weary hipster bloodsuckers.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Leslie Felperin
    Jade
    One might be tempted to describe West as rocking her huge natural hairdo, but rocking doesn’t do justice to its glorious volume; it is practically a supporting character in its own right, and one that calls to black heroines of yore, such as Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones back in the 1970s. Furthermore West has a nice way with a quip and has presence to spare, so while the script doesn’t exactly stretch her acting range, she holds the screen.
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