Michelle Orange

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Movieline, Village Voice
For 222 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 74% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 24% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Michelle Orange's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 90 Goodbye to Language 3D
Lowest review score: 20 Silver Circle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 139 out of 222
  2. Mixed: 72 out of 222
  3. Negative: 11 out of 222
222 movie reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Michelle Orange
    Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Zootopia
    Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Michelle Orange
    Two Days, One Night
    What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Michelle Orange
    The Immortalists
    Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    21 Years: Richard Linklater
    The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Michelle Orange
    Goodbye to Language 3D
    To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Michelle Orange
    Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    Generation War
    Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Last of the Unjust
    There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    "Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    The Square
    [A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Michelle Orange
    The Source Family
    With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Happy Poet
    Off-handed and yet quite artfully observed, The Happy Poet's winsome deadpan offsets its skewering of class and sustainability issues, right through to a tricky ending that, like Bill himself, may not be what it seems.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Michelle Orange
    Silver Circle
    The charms of what might charitably be called Silver Circle's homemade look and feel are limited.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    The Revolutionary Optimists
    Change may be elusive, Optimists confirms, but the will to make it blazes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The We and the I
    At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Night Across the Street
    Proof that Ruiz was still teeming with ideas himself, Night is a characteristic work of surreal wit and circuitousness—and the filmmaker's winking but mournful goodbye.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Michelle Orange
    Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Oblique and thickly layered with rhetoric, this account does little to illuminate Mumia the man, but it sets Mumia the statue aglow.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Michelle Orange
    The Gatekeepers
    The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Michelle Orange
    Unmasked Judeophobia
    Greenfield works against her own interests with absurdly selective arguments and sloppy filmmaking.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Brooklyn Castle
    We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    Former "Frontline" producer Brian Knappenberger's fascinating, incisive social history of the online network known as Anonymous.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Searching for Sugar Man
    Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Killer Joe
    In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    The Watch
    It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    The Dark Knight Rises
    The Dark Knight aspires to the epic and reaches it on a number of impressive and less impressive levels. That it is a frequently, unnervingly glorious triumph of brawn over brains is not despite but in spite of Nolan's admirably stubborn - if persistently, risibly serious - insistence that the modern superhero can have it all.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Alps
    The climax errs on the side of the overwrought and overdetermined, like an earnest adolescent's first attempt at a short story. And yet Papoulia's extraordinary performance lingers, as does the film's provocative existential fog.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Union Square
    With its small cast and focus on performance, Union Square promises to be a welcome showcase for Sorvino, and the early rhymes with Miss Linda are intriguingly open-ended.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Collaborator
    The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Despite this careful (and successful) depiction of a warm and decent person, Perry the pop star remains stubbornly two-dimensional.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    The latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    The success of this exuberant, affecting debut feature from director Benh Zeitlin depends on his ability to universalize the particular, in this case by drawing us into the perspective of a six-year-old girl living in squalor and feeling and uncertainty in the Louisiana bayou, then telling our own story from behind it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Neil Young Journeys
    The audience is never seen and only faintly heard. This puts a lot of visual pressure on a very inward performer. Young is a beast onstage, to be sure - he seems to re-grow an appendix for each song.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Your Sister's Sister
    It's a mark of Shelton's ability to create living characters from seemingly minor shared moments -- the ones that wind up meaning everything.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    An elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Bel Ami
    On the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    For Greater Glory
    There's enough froth along the way to keep the memory of Will Ferrell's recent "Casa Di Me Padre" close at hand.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Girl in Progress
    Girl in Progress feels a little trapped by its own conceits: It plays with the idea that all rebellion is in some sense performed and makes a caricature out of the immature, attention-hungry mother, but it never liberates its characters from their molds.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Perfect Family
    It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    It's all rather casual - not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Chimpanzee
    Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Hunter
    Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    Wrath of the Titans
    It would be a real shame, with this much money and this many effects artists, if there were not a few purely visual wows. Wrath manages exactly two, and not where you might expect.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Intruders
    A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Brake
    It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    Casa de mi Padre
    For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Michelle Orange
    Project X
    A party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the "Hangover" franchise too sophisticated.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 35 Michelle Orange
    Act of Valor
    The plot might be summed up this way: America's having a war, and everybody's invited!
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    The Secret World of Arrietty
    It's a matinee treat for the very little ones, after all.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Chronicle
    By the time he's putting the entire metro area on notice -- having thrashed his father and all the local bullies -- Andrew has no camera and the metaphor has run away with the story entirely. The crazy thing is it almost works.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    In Darkness
    Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews' plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it's boring as shit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Innkeepers
    Without a strong story to dance with, all of those fabulous tracking shots, lovingly uncanny art direction details and flickering shafts of light can make The Innkeepers feel more like an exercise in craft than a scary movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Front Line
    What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Don't Go in the Woods
    Unfortunately, outside of the proxy satisfaction it will give those who are dying to see the grim reaper let loose on the set of a very special episode of "Glee," the pleasures of Don't Go in the Woods can't quite compensate for its straggly bits.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    Tectonic pacing builds to a series of imperceptible and yet earth-moving moments in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a habeas corpus procedural stretched across two and a half discursive hours.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Albert Nobbs
    As Mr. Albert Nobbs, Close wears a discreetly waved cap of cropped ginger hair and the bright, blank expression of a small animal caught mid-nibble.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Michelle Orange
    Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    Number of chipmunks who speak fluent chola when necessary: three. Number of Spider-Man/Pepe Le Pew mash-ups I can't really get into: one.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 35 Michelle Orange
    I Melt with You
    In another light the group's - and the film's - portentous resolution looks a lot like quitting, in true slacker style.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    The Lady
    There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director - Luc Besson - manning the syringe.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    Arthur Christmas
    Arthur Christmas is a Grinch-style story of rekindled Christmas spirit told from inside Santa's compound at the North Pole.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Lie
    Embedded in The Lie is a sharp look at the moral limbo of a complacent life, the self-defeat of committing by halves, the self-interest of false equivalencies - but only the shallowest attempts are made to chip its themes out.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    A few shots of full frontal and an actual devil to point to are poor substitutes for exposure and depth of character.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Higher Ground
    Farmiga closes in on moments that express mood and character so lightly and perceptively that you don't notice them gently - sometimes too gently - moving the story forward.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Colombiana
    In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Michelle Orange
    Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The film is being released in both 2- and 3-D, and from what I could tell the 3-D version is still almost 50-50. What use is made of the technology is hardly worth the effort, unless you've always wanted to experience a cascade of cheesies in 3-D.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    Amigo
    The result is the double shrift of a thinly sketched background and a story that has trouble standing up on its own.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Fright Night
    Fright Night glides into its first climax with some funny touches but without building much structure or suspense.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Final Destination 5
    Aside from the showy, overwrought credits sequence, it's silly and self-conscious and still scary as hell.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    Magic Trip
    I'd say you had to be there, but over the course of Magic Trip we learn that the majority of the people who were there didn't want to be there.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Michelle Orange
    The Change-Up
    Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    The Future
    July is more of a presence than an actress, or even a believable persona.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 55 Michelle Orange
    The Guard
    Like the recent "Perrier's Bounty," The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    The Devil's Double
    As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Cowboys & Aliens
    Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    The Myth of the American Sleepover
    It looks more like your teenage world than such films generally allow, and it's not pretty. It's beautiful.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Sarah's Key
    Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Life, Above All
    The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    Winnie the Pooh
    The effect recalls the beguiling lightness of the good old Disney, where clever visual and thematic feats are deftly interwoven and yet tossed off with an insouciance that favors playfulness above all.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Ward
    The story's obvious and various potential is left to stand on its own, and the scares are largely uninspired.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Michelle Orange
    Zookeeper
    The talking animals, though less tough to look at than those in "Marmaduke," are murder on the ears: Maya Rudolph as a neurotic giraffe and Sandler voicing a monkey could take the paint off of a Buick.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 85 Michelle Orange
    Project Nim
    "A chimp could not have a better mother," Terrace declares of his decision. The people in this film say stuff like that a lot.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Monte Carlo
    As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    The film is so busy rifling through genres that it fails to develop a coherent flavor of its own.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Perfect Host
    You'll have to hang on to something to get through the hairpins in The Perfect Host, a chamber piece hostage thriller black comedy undone less by its twists than by the stretches of bad road between them.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 65 Michelle Orange
    The Best and the Brightest
    The goof on New York's awful elite only gets grimmer and less viable as the film goes on.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    A Better Life
    Bichir - who played Fidel Castro in "Che" - resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Buck
    Soft-spoken and stoical, Brannaman is a firm but sensitive presence in front of the camera and facing down a spooked horse.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 45 Michelle Orange
    The Art of Getting By
    I found myself forgetting The Art of Getting By as it unfolded, as though the Looney Tunes art department were two steps behind the characters, rolling up the scenery like so much carpeting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Road to Nowhere
    Despite its tai chi pace and genre-friendly characters, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening in the intriguing, intractable Road to Nowhere.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Trollhunter
    The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Michelle Orange
    Beautiful Boy
    Ultimately, the effort, however rough in patches, is to be admired. We need our best minds on this subject, in all arenas, and Beautiful Boy is another jagged, early piece in a puzzle whose borders haven't formed yet.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Michelle Orange
    Submarine
    Divided into three chapters in a largely unsuccessful attempt at structure, the voice and the style don't combine as explosively as they should to pick up the material's slack.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Michelle Orange
    Kung Fu Panda 2
    Scenic, inventively playful, and successfully serious when it wants to be.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Michelle Orange
    Hesher
    Portman is also a producer of Hesher; it is the first of her new company's films. It's not too tough to see what might have drawn a producer to the project: The story's mix of the mythical and the mundane has become an indie staple, and Hesher's edge might have proved artful instead of shredding everything in its path. For any actress, however, the part of Nicole is embarrassingly thin.
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