Matt Zoller Seitz

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New York Magazine (Vulture), Newark Star-Ledger, RogerEbert.com, Salon
For 734 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 68% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 29% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Matt Zoller Seitz's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Shoah: Four Sisters
Lowest review score: 0 Alice Through the Looking Glass
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 594 out of 734
  2. Mixed: 87 out of 734
  3. Negative: 53 out of 734
734 movie reviews
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    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Balls Up
    Wahlberg should not be cast in any role predicated on the idea that he’s good with words and ideas. Hauser is one of the best actors in the English language and will escape this disaster and do more great work, so there’s that.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Hallow Road
    Hallow Road is an earnest attempt to make a movie no one has seen before, only to end up with one few will want to watch again.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Dirty Weekend
    A decent idea for a low-budget movie that never gets past the idea stage, and after a brief while, you may start to question whether it should have been a movie at all, much less a 90-minute one.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Holy Hell
    Holy Hell should have dug a lot deeper and told its story with a lot more finesse. What happened? Maybe, after all these years, Allen was still too close to his subject?
    • 23 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Music
    There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    American Folk
    Despite a few good scenes and ideas, and a final ten minutes that will be affecting for anyone who lived through the aftermath of the attacks on New York, the end product often feels like a standard-issue high concept romantic comedy with scaffolding of 9/11 solemnity built around it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Most Wanted
    A mediocre film that's unaware of the poor choices it's making is much harder to watch than a bad film that relishes its stupidity and poor taste. At least the second kind of film can be fun.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Dark Night
    I've seen this film twice and I'm just not convinced it's all that interested in the subjects it claims to be interested in. And that's a deal-breaker of a problem.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Pixie
    The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."
    • 55 Metascore
    • 12 Matt Zoller Seitz
    I Love You, Daddy
    This is not a film about individuals who have lost their moral compass, but a movie that lacks one, by a director who also lacks one but for many years did a convincing impression of a man who never lost sight of true north.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    David Brent: Life on the Road
    The film is quite repetitive, essentially a very long sketch, and offers little in the way of character development for supporting players. In contrast to the original "The Office," everyone else is there mainly to stare in shock at David as he offends people or does something stupid.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Irrational Man
    It is not merely a bad film. It is a collection of notes for a film that never quite evolved to the rough draft stage, much less cohered into a finished movie. That makes it more dispiriting than other notorious Woody Allen misfires.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    The Penguin Lessons
    Based on a 2016 memoir by Tom Mitchell, “The Penguin Lessons” wants to be a thoughtful light entertainment about ideals and courage, but ends up seeming grotesquely misguided.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Mr. Right
    If truth in advertising applied to movies, they would have titled this one "Reheated Cultural Leftovers."
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Can We Take a Joke?
    The film will play well among standup comics who feel they've been muzzled by humorless slogan-spouting liberals, bluenoses and the generally squeamish.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Millers in Marriage
    Millers in Marriage isn’t a science fiction movie. Which is unfortunate, because if it were, we might’ve gotten a decent explanation for why one minute of the characters’ lives makes you feel as if you’ve aged a month.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Leap!
    Co-directors Éric Summer and Éric Warin and their collaborators seem determined to crush the life out of an original premise and many promising characters by stealing every available page out of a substandard American studio animated feature’s playbook.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Irresistible
    But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Play Dirty
    Although it has a solid cast, some amusing bits, and lots of imaginative violence, “Play Dirty,” a comedy-thriller-action movie about the theft of already-stolen treasures in a plot to topple a dictator, is easily the most forgettable of Shane Black‘s films, as both writer and writer-director.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 12 Matt Zoller Seitz
    The Last of Robin Hood
    The problem — and wow, it's a big one — is that none of these actors have material firm enough to shape into a bona fide performance.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 12 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Flower
    The cast's heroic exertions fail to save Flower from its own worst tendencies.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    A Million Little Pieces
    It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins exists as proof of the invulnerability of a certain movie template and as a Frankenstein patchwork of previous films.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Wish Upon
    Wish Upon is another one of those movies that would be memorable if it were a lot better or a lot worse.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    The Circle
    Has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Old Dads
    Old Dads has a great cast, but it's barely a movie. That's a shame, because it's the directorial debut of Bill Burr.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 12 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Unfrosted
    A handsomely produced, nearly empty experience, "Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story" is hard to describe because it's tough to tell what the filmmakers were going for, much less argue about whether they achieved it.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    The result is an oxymoron: a frenetic slog. That’s unfortunately what happens to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Matt Zoller Seitz
    Fountain of Youth
    When future generations of media scholars need an example of a work that gathered up and displayed with peerless skill all of the techniques yet devised for a new medium—in this case, second-screen entertainment, which superficially resembles cinema or television, but is meant not to make any demands on anybody—”Fountain of Youth” might be the work that they they name-check.
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