Lisa Schwarzbaum

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Entertainment Weekly
For 1,979 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 70% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 28% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Lisa Schwarzbaum's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 Big Night
Lowest review score: 0 Valentine's Day
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,280 out of 1979
  2. Mixed: 520 out of 1979
  3. Negative: 179 out of 1979
1979 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Carnage
    In such an audience stroker, where casting is everything (on Broadway, James Gandolfini brought exciting menace to the role of Mr. Longstreet), Winslet and Waltz jell while Foster and Reilly flounder, unable to make sense of what kind of people they're supposed to be.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Sitter
    A needlessly frenzied, pseudo-raunch comedy that whips up a whole lot of R-rated antics only to arrive at crunchy PG-13 lessons in love and tolerance.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Coriolanus
    With its warring factions, citizen uprisings, guerrilla insurgencies, political intrigue, bloody warfare, family tensions, and homoerotic subtext, Coriolanus is one of the year's best political thrillers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Young Adult
    Young Adult bumps along with nasty swerves, middle finger proudly in the air, toward an ending blessedly free of anything warm, fuzzy, or optimistic. Now that's adult entertainment.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    A Dangerous Method
    Intelligent conversation about the interplay of erotic and destructive urges takes place over cups of tea in fine bone china. Yet the movie is a radically modern story about sex.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Shame
    The biggest surprise in Shame is how distanced, passionless, and merely skin-deep the director's attention is - how little he cares about the subject of his own movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 67 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    My Week with Marilyn
    Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder. Working opposite a suitably florid Kenneth Branagh as that high thespian Sir Larry.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Hugo
    Hugo both ticks and flies by, a marvel meant to be pulled from the cabinet and enjoyed again and again.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Muppets
    For kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    What we learn in this all-pain/no-pleasure episode is that marriage feels like a life sentence, weddings are miserable events, honeymoon sex is dangerous and leaves a bride covered in bruises, and pregnancy is a torment that leads to death in exchange for birth.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Tomboy
    The startling power of Tomboy, a beautiful, matter-of-fact French drama about a young girl who wants to be a boy - and for one singular summer around her 10th birthday passes as one - begins with the one-of-a-kind natural performance by Zoé Héran as Laure.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Another Happy Day
    As the groom's brassy-babe stepmother, Demi Moore does her own share of scenery chewing, but at least she looks like she's having fun.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Happy Feet Two
    Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more "Finding Nemo" than National Geographic.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 33 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Jack and Jill
    In one form or another, you get exactly what you pay for at an Adam Sandler comedy. Otherwise the man wouldn't have earned zillions.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    The pace is quick, the violence is rough, and the visual style is documentary as Padilha hammers home his point: Someone is forever in the pocket of someone else as The System constantly adapts to protect itself.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Le Havre
    The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Dragonslayer
    With its propulsive punk-rock soundtrack and beautifully rough cinematography, Dragonslayer makes you care about this scrawny young man, skating to nowhere.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Tower Heist
    Tower Heist is the cinematic version of a Trump property: overblinged, eye-catching, and essentially tacky.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 58 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Double
    The twist in The Double slack mystery-thriller is revealed with a shrug about a third of the way in. After that, it's all about Gere looking grim, and Grace looking stricken as he learns what we already know.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Like Crazy
    Like Crazy tells the truth, simply: Love is thrilling. And - just because of the way life happens - sometimes love hurts.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Anonymous
    Thumpingly silly yet self-serious period-piece what-if.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Skin I Live In
    Allusions to "Vertigo," "Rebecca," and Georges Franju's great 1960 French horror movie "Eyes Without a Face" are intentional: The Skin I Live In is, above all, the creation of a movie fanatic who loves to look.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Fireflies in the Garden
    The resentments acted out at the dining table by the rest of this miserable family - gathered for a graduation celebration that turns into a wake - are so oppressive that Eugene O'Neill might ask, ''Too much?''
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Melancholia
    A movie masterpiece...is Lars von Trier's ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Martha Marcy May Marlene leaves a viewer hanging, quite literally, lost in an enveloping fog of mood without resolution. Olsen, meanwhile, definitely marks her arrival.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Thing
    The other thing The Thing has got going for it is a welcome hint of dour Scandinavian sensibility sneaked in by director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. whenever there's a pause in the unexceptional antics of aliens consuming humans.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    The Way
    There's a contemplative loveliness to The Way, an affecting personal project both for Emilio Estevez, who wrote, directed, and plays a small role, and for his father, Martin Sheen.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Footloose
    Stepping into sacred shoes once worn by Kevin Bacon, Wormald handily owns the role for a new audience. Same goes for a terrific Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) in the sidekick role of Willard so memorably originated by the late Chris Penn.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Real Steel
    Real Steel is directed by "Night at the Museum's" Shawn Levy, who makes good use of his specialized skill in blending people and computer-made imaginary things into one lively, emotionally satisfying story.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Benda Bilili!
    This unsentimental, smartly assembled film is equally attentive to the cacophony of African poverty and the balm of harmony provided by these pied pipers of hope.
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