Monica Castillo

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RogerEbert.com, The A.V. Club, The New York Times, The Playlist, TheWrap, Village Voice
For 369 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Monica Castillo's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Hokum
Lowest review score: 0 The Departure
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 236 out of 369
  2. Mixed: 67 out of 369
  3. Negative: 66 out of 369
369 movie reviews
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    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Monica Castillo
    A Nice Girl Like You
    If A Nice Girl Like You would have stayed the course of the book it’s based on, Ayn Carrillo-Gailey’s 2007 memoir Pornology, it might have been an interesting enough premise. Instead, Andrea Marcellus’ screen adaptation whitewashes the main character and moves the narrative into a more conventional territory, one centered on love over lust, tame over the risque.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    Ad Vitam
    Ad Vitam, which in Latin means “for life,” is at times brisk but narratively unclear, delivers its share of action, but not the characters to keep you emotionally invested.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    Eat Wheaties!
    The unappealingly named comedy Eat Wheaties! is a tedious exercise in patience that, like a bowl of soggy cereal, I would not recommend to anyone.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 63 Monica Castillo
    Jexi
    Although the title is confounding and perhaps the movie’s worst misstep, it’s Byrne’s digitized and stilted delivery that earns the biggest laughs.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    The Kissing Booth 2
    You can soak in the movie’s basic premise and overacting just as long as you know this pool’s shallow.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Monica Castillo
    Three Christs
    The cast can’t cure all the movie’s problems, from its abrupt ending to a random acid-test scene, but it’s not without its curious appeal as a star-studded failed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” experiment.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 42 Monica Castillo
    Michael
    Michael is an attempt to remind audiences why so many fans fell in love with him in the first place, but it doubles as a pretty clear bit of hagiography.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    My Oxford Year
    The couple doesn’t quite light up the screen with their chemistry, and the writing feels much too basic, given these are meant to be characters in a literature degree program. Thankfully, there are moments of levity, a number of cross-cultural jokes, and supporting characters to lighten the mood.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    Men in Black: International
    Many fans wished to see these two actors trade witty barbs once again, but the pair’s new movie, Men in Black: International, strips away just about everything fun from the duo except their on-screen presence.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    Echo Boomers
    As with the many trend pieces complaining about millennials spending too much money on avocado toast over home mortgages, Echo Boomers gets a lot wrong about the generation it wants to discuss. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened more.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 Monica Castillo
    Poms
    Poms is strongest when basking in the infectious enthusiasm of its cast. Keaton and Weaver could have easily phoned in their performances, but they do look like they’re having fun together with their crew of Golden Girls.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Monica Castillo
    The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    The jokes are thin, the computer animation is wanting and the inane plot is a series of set pieces strung together.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    Lucy in the Sky
    What Hawley has delivered is a garden variety bad movie, proving the TV wunderkind of “Fargo” and “Legion” was not quite ready for the big screen.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    The Kissing Booth 3
    To Marcello and and co-writer Jay S. Arnold’s credit, there are a handful of surprises that defy some of the more expected youthful rom com tropes. But the rest is a lot of the same teenage romantic tribulations we’ve seen before.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Monica Castillo
    Awake
    Awake has just enough scares and strangeness, plus a sense of dread and paranoia, to make its horror creepy and enjoyable. It’s not a flawless thriller, but enough different elements click into place, like Rodriguez and Greenblatt’s performances.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    Stardust
    The lack of a solid narrative means Stardust cannot compensate for the production’s modest budget, which lacks a noticeable amount of Bowie songs and includes many scenes filmed on the cheap.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    The Blazing World
    The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    Regretting You
    Josh Boone’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “Regretting You” is a romantic drama with big emotions and plenty of both romance and drama. But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and in the case of “Regretting You,” the narrative buckles under the number of overblown emotional scenes and the commercial interruptions for product placements.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    The Host
    For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Monica Castillo
    The Kindness of Strangers
    Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    Corporate Animals
    Imagine “Office Space” with forgettable characters and nothing to say about this next bleak phase of the business world.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Monica Castillo
    Half Brothers
    Because of the movie’s uneven story and characters, it’s a bumpy ride no matter which route you take.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is rife with melodramatic moments and insufferable characters.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 12 Monica Castillo
    Fool's Paradise
    Overblown caricatures and stale jokes about “don’t you know who I am?!” and going to see his wife’s shaman feel about as empty as a finished cup of coffee, and unfortunately, this movie has nothing else to offer for a refill.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    Dear David
    Dear David is branded content—uninspired and hollow to a fault—and perhaps that’s even more disturbing than a five-year-old internet ghost story.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 38 Monica Castillo
    Life Itself
    Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself packs in enough narrative twists and turns to leave viewers with a sense of emotional whiplash. One tragedy bleeds into another so often that the events begin to blur.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Monica Castillo
    On a Wing and a Prayer
    The best preachers always know how to tell a story and tie it back to a Biblical lesson, but director Sean McNamara has less than a youth pastor’s grasp on his main character’s crisis of faith.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 0 Monica Castillo
    City of Dreams
    It is another advocacy film without answers, pretending that the mere act of bringing awareness to a problem solves it.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Monica Castillo
    Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango
    The musical interludes of rarely heard recordings are an impressive find, but the movie's messy approach to telling tango's hidden history seems at odds with itself.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Monica Castillo
    Breaking Through
    For a movie all about passion and the need to express yourself artistically, it is the most halfhearted "you got served" to hit theaters this year.
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