Michael O'Sullivan

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Washington Post
For 1,854 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael O'Sullivan's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Flipside
Lowest review score: 0 Tomcats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,051 out of 1854
  2. Mixed: 394 out of 1854
  3. Negative: 409 out of 1854
1854 movie reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Michael O'Sullivan
    Tokyo Godfathers
    Part of the spell cast by this magical film is its ability to make an unvarnished political statement about economic reality and social alienation while, at the same time, seducing its audience into believing in the transformative power of love and the almost supernatural beauty of the everyday.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    Muscle Shoals
    A mesmerizing documentary.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    Honey
    Trinca delivers a marvelously unfussy performance, rendering her complex character gradually, along with the effects of the opposing forces that tear at her.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Thor: The Dark World
    Hiddleston steals the show here, making wickedness and treachery look a heck of a lot more fun than virtue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    What happened to almost an entire generation of musicians in Cambodia isn’t a scandal. As “Forgotten” makes powerfully, passionately clear, it’s a tragedy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Cider House Rules
    More honest than any conventional morality tale. Here there are no heroes and no real villains; the good guys are all flawed and even bad guys are sometimes capable of the noblest of acts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    Time to Choose
    The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    Chasing Ice
    Chasing Ice aims to accomplish, with pictures, what all the hot air that has been generated on the subject of global warming hasn't been able to do: make a difference.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 37 Michael O'Sullivan
    Profile
    Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    Tully
    Things are never exactly what they seem here — but there’s a deeper, more authentic story Reitman and Cody are interested in telling, even when — maybe especially when — the film veers toward fantasy. If Tully is a movie that cheats, even lies to us a little bit, it’s to get at a more real and recognizable truth.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Michael O'Sullivan
    Elizabeth
    Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Muppets
    The Muppets is both a delightful family film about the Muppets and a winking, self-referential satire about how lame the Muppets are.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Clay Bird
    Strikes several beautiful and lingering chords about the human condition, but the notes of the music ultimately never come together to form a coherent song.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Shrek 2
    Sure, the animation work is great, but it's the actors and their subtle, complex vocal performances that make us care about these fairy-tale characters. Shrek 2 is all about fantasy, but its characters are rousingly, affectingly real -- not to mention real, real funny.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Night Moves
    It’s a richly engrossing drama, so long as you understand that it’s aiming for the head, not the gut.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    John Wick: Chapter 2
    It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Michael O'Sullivan
    Bulworth
    It's daring, deliberately offensive and, for a comedy, it has far more ideas in it than actual laughs.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Michael O'Sullivan
    Ju-on: The Grudge
    It's creepy, all right. It's just that HOW it goes about creeping you out is sometimes just plain cheesy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Wolfpack
    More than a testament to the power of cinematic storytelling as food for the human spirit, The Wolfpack also is a portrait of a family that has had to rely on each other to survive.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Michael O'Sullivan
    Lake Placid
    It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Rich Hill
    Rich Hill doesn’t just make you feel like you know these boys; it makes you care about them.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 37 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Rhythm Section
    The Rhythm Section was directed by Reed Morano, who did a nice job with the first few episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but who seems a bit self-indulgent here.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Baltimorons
    The story manages to put a smile on your face from time to time, despite the gloom of its humor. It avoids happily-ever-after almost as strenuously as it works to remind us: You’re not in Hollywood, hon, but Hampden.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Middle of Nowhere
    They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Michael O'Sullivan
    Startup.com
    It also has heart and soul, two commodities all too often in short supply in the field of garden-variety cinema verite.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Michael O'Sullivan
    Harry Is Here to Help
    Very, very funny, in that morbid sort of way that makes you laugh even as you shudder with horror.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Michael O'Sullivan
    Kitchen Stories
    May, at times, be deadpan to the point of stiffness, but it's far from dead.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Days of Future Past is, in itself, as intoxicating as a shot of adrenaline. It’s what summer movies are meant to be.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    Polite Society
    Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.
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