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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Moonlight
    A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Children of Paradise (1945)
    What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time?
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    45 Years
    With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    We Were Here
    A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Elevator to the Gallows
    It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Toni Erdmann
    Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature from writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    35 Shots of Rum
    35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    The Artist
    The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Melissa Anderson
    The Tree
    In her second film, writer-director Julie Bertuccelli, adapting Judy Pascoe's 2002 novel, "Our Father Who Art in the Tree," is sometimes partial to clumsy dialogue and scattershot pacing.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Cemetery of Splendor
    As is his custom, Weerasethakul addresses his nation's martial history with the lightest of touches.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Poetry
    A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Happy Hour
    Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story goes deeper, exposing a system of arrogance and duplicity that no WikiLeak could ever fully capture.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    How to Survive a Plague
    Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    The Interrupters
    The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    Take Shelter
    Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder - a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    The Ornithologist
    Though full of mysteries, and, like all of Rodrigues’s work, consistently unpredictable from scene to scene, The Ornithologist may be the director’s most conventional narrative.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Melissa Anderson
    Holy Motors
    Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Oslo, August 31st
    Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Melissa Anderson
    A Ghost Story
    “Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Melissa Anderson
    Iraq in Fragments
    Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The film too often relies on rote sermonizing when tackling the city's scourge of shootings, a grave topic that The Next Cut is simply too feeble to examine with any real depth or meaning.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Melissa Anderson
    In the Loop
    Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 Melissa Anderson
    20th Century Women
    Despite the movie's title and Bening's central role, women are oddly peripheral.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Pina
    Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    El Velador
    El Velador still sharply conveys what life is like in a traumatized nation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Melissa Anderson
    Sugar
    Without a trace of didacticism, Boden and Fleck portray the insidious details of exploitation and hollow American maxims.
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