Melissa Anderson

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Village Voice
For 371 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 30% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 67% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 8.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Melissa Anderson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 The Royal Road
Lowest review score: 0 Another Happy Day
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 142 out of 371
  2. Mixed: 175 out of 371
  3. Negative: 54 out of 371
371 movie reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Leviathan
    Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Melissa Anderson
    Snitch
    Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Melissa Anderson
    Safe Haven
    Hough emits all the charisma of a personal assistant.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Side Effects
    If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh's final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Nana
    A fiction film that documents the unpredictable, unscripted actions of its pint-size lead, Nana offers new ways of thinking about childhood, or, at the very least, about children in movies.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Yossi
    For many of the film's brisk 84 minutes, Fox eclipses his earlier work-and several other same-sex tragedies-by immersing us in his protagonist's quiet turmoil.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    LUV
    Although Common and Rainey make a well-matched duo, their chemistry is frequently squandered by a script that boxes them into impossible roles in one clichéd scene after another.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Mama
    Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    The Impossible
    These horrors, and the absorbing performances of Watts and McGregor, will soon be undermined by a surfeit of sentiment.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    The film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Barbara
    A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era "woman's picture," the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Quartet
    Sentimental and pandering.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Any Day Now
    Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Save the Date
    Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date, yet another unfocused movie about generic relationship quandaries.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Melissa Anderson
    Playing for Keeps
    Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Melissa Anderson
    Lay the Favorite
    Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Melissa Anderson
    Love, Marilyn
    Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Melissa Anderson
    Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    It's about as exciting as watching David Blaine play Stratego and makes you miss the power of the first four films all the more: the uncontainable yearning of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Starlet
    Director Sean Baker, co-writing his fourth feature with Chris Bergoch, does some deft balancing of his own: His genuine admiration for these two women extends to their idiosyncrasies, yet they never become fools, whores, saints, or coots.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Vamps
    Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Chicks
    A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    The Sessions
    Hawkes and Hunt nobly tackle the physical demands their roles require.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Bestiaire
    Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Holy Motors
    Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Gayby
    Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    The House I Live In
    What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Won't Back Down
    In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Melissa Anderson
    Radio Unnameable
    Now 79, the man with the snow-white ponytail in the radio booth hasn't flagged; as one of Fass's contemporaries says, "He can let someone go on and on and on."
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