Lovia Gyarkye

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The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times
For 345 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Lovia Gyarkye's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Seeds
Lowest review score: 10 Madame Web
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 211 out of 345
  2. Mixed: 127 out of 345
  3. Negative: 7 out of 345
345 movie reviews
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    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Spirit Untamed
    Spirit Untamed is beautiful to look at and occasionally genuinely funny. The stunning and detailed animations saturate Lucky’s world with an impressive array of colors, from the crimson apples she feeds Spirit to the pistachio and emerald-green leaves on the swaying trees.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Rust
    The film is competently made and absorbing at times, but there’s a workaday quality that slows its momentum. It’s a handsomely made project, but a story about such a complicated set of characters should make us feel more strongly, and Rust struggles to accomplish that.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
    The doc circles its subject with a mix of fascination, reverence and minor disgust.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Without Blood
    Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Civil: Ben Crump
    Civil often feels more like an infomercial than a documentary.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    White Bird
    Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Close to You
    The film yearns to capture the stages of this emotional exhumation, but a clunky screenplay makes for a less affecting watch.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Next Goal Wins
    The film works best when Waititi gets out of his own way and lets the characters speak for themselves instead of self-consciously extinguishing any warmth with jokes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Wicked Little Letters
    Wicked Little Letters swerves between comedy and tragedy without ever hitting its stride. The movie is at its best when it doesn’t strain to turn every moment into a joke, instead letting the story breathe a bit.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    Catch the Fair One
    Where there should be intimacy, we get distance. Where one might expect steady meditation, the narrative jitters impulsively.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    The Deb
    Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    The Little Mermaid
    Like other live-action remakes, The Little Mermaid is a neatly packaged story ribboned with representational awareness. There’s enough in it to fill an evening, but it doesn’t inspire much more than a passing sense of déjà vu.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Lovia Gyarkye
    A Lot of Nothing
    The film struggles to maintain the verve of this opening sequence (which nails a specific anxiety of liberal middle-class Black people), subsequently becoming a series of set pieces — some more energetic than others — in search of a thesis.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Rare Objects
    There’s a lot of heart in Rare Objects, a film that tries to render with compassion the jagged aftermath of trauma.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Kinda Pregnant
    Kinda Pregnant doesn’t deliver on charming main characters nor sustainable humor. It’s a staid affair, coasting on its zany premise and a handful of amusing moments.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Sheryl
    When it comes to more rigorous analysis — a bit of pushback, a touch of tension or cultural context — the documentary leaves something to be desired.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    Spiral delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Riddle of Fire
    Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    A Journal for Jordan
    It’s ultimately a mixed bag, with the final moments acquiring an emotional power that should be felt sooner.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Happiness for Beginners
    The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    The Deliverance
    [Daniels] desire to wrest explicit meaning out of the mother’s experience and corral viewers toward a single conclusion unwittingly places The Deliverance in mawkish and disappointingly cartoonish territory.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Candy Cane Lane
    When it comes to holiday movies, Candy Cane Lane isn’t at the very bottom of the pack, but it’s far from the top. . . The narrative careens through uncompelling territory before ending on a forgettable note.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Bubble & Squeak
    This gonzo premise doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and to compensate, Twohy pads the screenplay with quirky antics that tax viewer patience and expose a narrative thinness that’s hard to ignore.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Beauty
    In lieu of a throughline, Beauty offers beautiful, indulgent vignettes — aesthetically pleasing and immersive episodes lacking in ideas but full of vibes.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Freaks vs. the Reich
    Freaks Out seems preoccupied with looking cool and feeling offbeat without considering basic narrative requirements. With such an intense visual language and detailed costume and set design, it’s a shame that the story lacks similar heft.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Cinderella
    The classic fairy tale and its straightforward but powerful lessons in self-confidence, perseverance and the power of imagination provide an alluring foundation for ambitious and visually stunning storytelling. It’s sad that, watching this version, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    The long-awaited third installment of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World sub-franchise is less clogged with distracting detail than its immediate predecessor, but even a more refined plot can’t save the two-hour-plus film from feeling like an endurance test.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Lovia Gyarkye
    The Princess
    Throwing a woman in front of the camera and a few feminist quips into the script does not make these films any less conventional, or necessarily any more empowering.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Lovia Gyarkye
    A Minecraft Movie
    What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Lovia Gyarkye
    Where the Crawdads Sing
    The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.
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