Marc Savlov

Select another critic »
Austin Chronicle
For 2,177 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 57% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 12 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Marc Savlov's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 54
Highest review score: 100 Dunkirk
Lowest review score: 0 Darkness
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,039 out of 2177
  2. Mixed: 612 out of 2177
  3. Negative: 526 out of 2177
2177 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 73 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    The subtitle of Richard Linklater: dream is destiny is drawn from a line of dialogue found in his equally groundbreaking and hypnagogic animated art film "Waking Life," and it serves as a mission statement of sorts for his entire oeuvre and endlessly curious philosophy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Marc Savlov
    Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Left me with the feeling I've seen much of this before. It's not that I'd like something better, it's just that I'd like something new.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Layer Cake
    Layer Cake is suffused with a stately sense of menace and a sort of doomed existential suave.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Twin Falls Idaho
    At once emotionally charged and genuinely, disconcertingly surreal...a marvel of subdued, genuine filmmaking.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    It's also a doozy of a comedy, matching the dark wit of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels to the stylized theatrics of Matt Helm-era Dean Martin.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    In This Corner of the World
    While In This Corner of the World is bracingly honest in depicting the hardships and tragedies Japanese civilians endured during World War II, it steadfastly remains Suzu’s story all the way through to its – dare I say it? – hopeful conclusion.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    There's so much information and so many finely honed arguments in this ultimately joyous film that it's liable to send audiences scurrying home to their computers to download the bands they've just heard.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    War of the Worlds
    Certainly one of the most lovingly crafted, end-of-the-world, cinematic feasts ever made, a spectacle of destruction and survival not even C.B DeMille could have envisioned.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Marc Savlov
    Thirst
    Taken as a whole, Thirst meanders too far from the crossroads of life and death; it gets outright dull in spots, although they are few and far between.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Marc Savlov
    15 Minutes
    Herzfeld also wrote the screenplay, and so its leaden and obvious tone and the resulting dearth of delicacy rests squarely on him.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 20 Marc Savlov
    Clueless
    Michael Lehmann's "Heathers" followed the same sort of story line to much better effect in 1989, and Clueless leaves you itching to race over to the video store in search of just that.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    It plays very much like it advertises itself: a mixtape – Fear of a Black Planet, then and now.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    The Blue Room
    The Blue Room is mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and, at the very end, viscerally devastating. They don’t make them like this much anymore, but they should.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Almost Holy
    "The Cross and the Switchblade" it’s not; this is the reality of Ukraine today, and Crocodile Gennadiy is a badass man on a mission … from God.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Amreeka
    Amreeka is anything but a depressing digression on American wartime paranoia.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Marc Savlov
    Skate Kitchen
    Skate Kitchen’s mild melodrama meanders all over the place, not unlike the many skateboarders who shred the skate parks and streets, carving hypnotic, slo-mo figure-eights or outrageous triple ollies on every available surface and obstacle.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    The Devil's Candy
    There are blood-red visual motifs all over the place, but The Devil’s Candy isn’t particularly bloody in and of itself. It suggests acts of terrible evil far more than it shows, and is all the more intense for it. Highly recommended.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Straight Outta Compton
    Buoyed by a soundtrack that’ll have fortysomethings cracking open 40-ounces and recalling a marginally simpler, if still chaotic, time in their lives, Straight Outta Compton’s bark is just as snarly-cool as its bite. Take that, Tipper Gore.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Marc Savlov
    Volcano
    Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Marc Savlov
    Mandy
    Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically–inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Marc Savlov
    All the Money in the World
    A surface viewing of the film makes it feel like this is one of Scott’s lesser magnum opuses but on closer inspection this is a story that’s all but contemporaneous given its through-line of amoral acquisitiveness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 67 Marc Savlov
    Imaginary Heroes
    Weaver and Hirsch's flawless performances elevate the film above and beyond the ranks of "Ordinary People" pastiches, and in the end it stands on its own merits.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Alléluia
    Dueñas and Lucas give knockout performances as two twisted souls seemingly locked in a match to the death to determine who is the madder one. I’ll call it a tie, and I’ll also say Alleluia is a grotesque masterpiece. L’amour fou, indeed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Marc Savlov
    The Thomas Crown Affair
    Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 89 Marc Savlov
    Aimee & Jaguar
    That Aimée & Jaguar manages so well in triple duty as a wartime melodrama with a lesbian twist is remarkable.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Marc Savlov
    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Greenwald's doc is pure partisan warfare of the liberal stripe, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Marc Savlov
    The Alamo
    It’s The Alamo, all right, but will anyone want to remember it?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk is not your typical Western retread, to be sure. If someone had told me that it was adapted from one of Joe R. Lansdale’s genre-hopping horror stories I would have believed it. Kudos then to director Zahler, who on his very first film, buries that g--damn tomahawk deep in the audience’s memory.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Marc Savlov
    Men in Black
    Like the inky void of space, there's really not much here, but what there is, is certainly entertaining.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Marc Savlov
    Pi
    Brilliant, surreal, and emotionally draining, this first feature from American Film Institute grad Aronofsky recalls such low-budget sci-fi epics as "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" and more traditional paranoiac suspense films (Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" in particular, but also Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby") and yet manages to be a wholly original animal.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »