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 8.3 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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    The Creation of Meaning
    Rapisarda Casanova's film shows just how much natural splendor dominates the region, here caught at the height of estival glory.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    From Afar
    Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    4 Days in France
    Reybaud’s film similarly serves as a tonic lesson in physical specifics, each location populated with richly idiosyncratic conversation partners.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Kiki
    Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    The Illinois Parables
    Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Melissa Anderson
    Frantz
    The savage derangements of grief so guttingly explored by Ozon in Under the Sand (2000), a career-revitalizing project for Charlotte Rampling, are decorously treated in Frantz.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    You Don't Like the Truth focuses on the pathetic manipulations of Canadian intelligence officers as they interrogate Toronto-born Omar Khadr, the youngest prisoner held in Guantánamo Bay.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    The King of Comedy
    The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Karl Marx City
    As too often happens in nonfiction movies, their exploration of these concepts is undermined by ill-considered execution.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    Despite the clumsy script and a shaky acting partner, Cattani, at least, is fascinating to watch, never demanding audience sympathy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Planet of Snail
    An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary Planet of Snail celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Sing Your Song
    Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    Cogitore's movie is at once otherworldly and firmly tethered to stark reality.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    Though hewing to a too-conventional structure, Bowser's film is densely researched enough to yield insights not just into its overlooked subject, but also into his overly analyzed era.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Joy of Man's Desiring
    Undeniably, the rhythms — of clanging machines, of humans at work and repose — seen and heard here are the tempo of the quotidian and the repetitive. Yet even in their mundanity, these factory routines are not without their exalted moments.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Melissa Anderson
    The Island President
    The Island President also shows how the most high-minded idealists inevitably become deal-makers: The toothless agreement eventually ratified in Copenhagen - which calls for but doesn't require CO2 reductions - is lauded by Nasheed as "a very good, planet-saving document."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Prick Up Your Ears
    As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Melissa Anderson
    Burden
    [A] densely packed but occasionally facile documentary.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Good Hair
    Breezy, superficial documentary.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    The Mouth of the Wolf
    A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Let It Rain
    Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners.
    • 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."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Hail, Caesar!
    The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Christine
    By the end of Christine — and of Christine — the reporter is at once burdened with too many signifiers (is Chubbuck a tragic heroine of second-wave feminism? of our current macabre newsscape? of untreated depression?) and a cipher. As with most biopics that resort to maximalism, more is less.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    Easy A
    As far as teen comedies informed by 10th-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by "The Scarlet Letter," is remedial ed compared with "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution
    "Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."
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