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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Outfit
    Set in 1956, it’s a cleverly twisty crime story constructed of many invisible folds and threads, yet it fits Rylance like custom-made clothing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    I Am Here
    I Am Here is, at its core, something much less complicated: a bearing of witness to horror. It’s inspirational, yes, but sadly far from unique. In its oft-heard contours, then, lies both its power and its tragic familiarity.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Adam Project
    The Adam Project isn’t especially smart, but it does leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. Its science grade is only passing, but its emotional IQ is above average.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Turning Red
    To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a red panda is just a red panda. And sometimes it’s a metaphor for that inner spark of creativity, the flame of originality that is to be cherished, not extinguished. With “Turning Red,” Shi demonstrates that she’s got it, in spades.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    Cyrano
    Cyrano, like the best art its implacable hero celebrates, is full of poetry, romance, terror and truth.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 37 Michael O'Sullivan
    Studio 666
    Studio 666 is either a delightful lark or a mystifying waste of time: Your pleasure will probably depend entirely on how you feel about Grohl.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    Uncharted
    What transpires is part heist flick, part Mission: Impossible-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s existential darkness.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Cursed
    The Cursed is stylish and scary enough for what it is. That’s an old-fashioned creature feature, effective enough to give you a mild case of the heebie-jeebies but nothing chronic.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Blacklight
    For fans of Neeson as action hero, “Blacklight” may be something of a disappointment, at least measuring it against the yardstick of previous thrillers in this particular branch of the actor’s body of work.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    Death on the Nile
    The crime’s solution is fine and dandy, but it’s Poirot himself who most fascinates. This isn’t your grandmother’s Agatha Christie, in other words. It belongs to Branagh, heart and soul.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
    The combined impact of these scenes, augmented with Robinson’s lecture — which, while deeply informed and informative, is anything but dull or academic — makes for a powerful one-two punch.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    Sundown
    Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    GameStop: Rise of the Players
    It’s a yarn that’s made for a great storyteller, with thrills and chills to burn. But the way Tulis spins the thread is wonkier and clunkier than it could, or should, be.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    France
    Dumont is clearly critiquing the way we mediate life via screens, large and small. There are times in this rambling story when the filmmaker’s point isn’t quite as obvious, but that’s only because he has a habit of trying to jab several moving targets with a sharp stick all at the same time.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Rifkin's Festival
    Like a dream you’ve half forgotten by the time you get to the breakfast table, it’s neither good enough to make much of an impression or bad enough to completely forget.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Redeeming Love
    Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Pink Cloud
    It feels sharply, even painfully true, while also hazy and nonspecific. Its head is in the clouds, while its feet are grounded in the very real catastrophe we are all currently suffering through.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Michael O'Sullivan
    Scream
    There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Michael O'Sullivan
    Munich: The Edge of War
    A mixture of well-researched historical fact and pure fiction, “Munich: The Edge of War” is a smart and entertaining thriller that suffers from just one thing: We all know how it ends.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Velvet Queen
    There’s plenty to look at while we’re waiting for the titular Queen, and it’s often quite pretty: Shots of rabbits, sheep, deer, yaks, foxes, pikas, bears, other big cats and a miscellaneous assortment of birds abound. But this is not your typical Animal Planet or National Geographic film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    A Hero
    The movie takes place in Iran, yet it’s really situated in the crack of daylight that separates truth from a lie. It’s a tight squeeze, Farhadi seems to say, and one whose pinch this tragedy of the everyday makes us feel, acutely.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    Parallel Mothers
    The geometry of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s masterful, moving Parallel Mothers, which follows the stories of two women who give birth almost simultaneously in a Madrid hospital, is really a crisscrossing set of two fascinatingly entangled lines.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 37 Michael O'Sullivan
    Red Rocket
    The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    The Tender Bar
    Tender also is an apt description for the gently heartwarming tone of this appealingly low-key, faded Kodachrome coming-of-age story, capably directed by Clooney from a screenplay by William Monahan (“The Departed”).
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    The King's Man
    If the story is fun — and it is fitfully, only after a protracted, sloggy set up — it’s a lot less so than either of the first two films.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Michael O'Sullivan
    Spider-Man: No Way Home
    For more casual consumers of the costumed comic-book superhero’s exploits, mileage may vary. But there’s a whole lot to like here.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Michael O'Sullivan
    Nightmare Alley
    It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature. The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Michael O'Sullivan
    Swan Song
    As a fairly soggy, two-hankie melodrama, “Swan Song” is effective. But I wouldn’t recommend thinking about it for too long.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Michael O'Sullivan
    Drive My Car
    There is so much going on here, yet the director handles the film’s constellation of themes and sweeping emotion with impeccable assurance and an at-times breathtaking sense of the poetic.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 37 Michael O'Sullivan
    Being the Ricardos
    Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” — a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons. Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz — a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup — wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.
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