Michael Sragow

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Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker
For 1,070 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michael Sragow's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Sea Inside
Lowest review score: 0 CJ7
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 623 out of 1070
  2. Mixed: 259 out of 1070
  3. Negative: 188 out of 1070
1070 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    L'Auberge Espagnole
    L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    Sugar
    Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    Step Into Liquid
    The movie has dual strengths that silence most objections. Even more than "X-2" or "American Splendor," it is, in a good way, the most comic-booky movie of the year. It's also the human Winged Migration.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    The Company
    Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Michael Sragow
    The Closet
    The movie's steady good humor and respect for character is pleasing - even energizing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Stardust
    If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Disturbia
    The Breakfast Club meets Rear Window. The result should satisfy dating crowds from high school to night school.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Chop Shop
    It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Breach
    In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    The whole film is about innocence and experience, and if it isn't a Blakean song, it is a sturdy and vibrant piece of prose.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Who Killed the Electric Car?
    Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you feel that no good idea, let alone good deed, goes unpunished. Only the exuberance of the moviemaking keeps your spirits high.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    What Would Jesus Buy?
    The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Down in the Valley
    Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    The Painted Veil
    No one has caught the pride, remorse and pain of an unloved and possibly unlovable husband better than Edward Norton in The Painted Veil.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    The World's Fastest Indian
    Both handmade and souped-up, it beautifully renders two types of camaraderie: the bonds among eccentrics and the fellowship of speed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Oliver Twist
    Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Mrs Henderson Presents
    A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    Will Ferrell does chicken-fried comedy right: with crackpot discipline and stripped-to-the-beer-belly courage.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    It's an unusual and engaging romantic comedy because it's mostly about how these women ready each other for real love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Live-In Maid
    Live-In Maid is a lived-in movie. Its cataclysms may be small in scale, but the movie brings us so far into these women's lives that a shattered cup creates an earthquake.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Wanted
    What's bleakly hilarious about the whole movie is that Bekmambetov directs the nonaction scenes just as hyperbolically.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Transamerica
    Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Charlie Wilson's War
    Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Volver
    Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    King Kong
    When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Clean
    Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Michael Sragow
    Gone Baby Gone
    In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.
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