Nick Allen

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RogerEbert.com, The Playlist
For 347 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 45% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Nick Allen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Makala
Lowest review score: 0 DriverX
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 197 out of 347
  2. Mixed: 74 out of 347
  3. Negative: 76 out of 347
347 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Leo
    Leo can sometimes have a jolt of energy from its slapstick sequences or its bright color palette, in which Leo the lizard flies through the air, floats on a bubble, or meets other talking animals. But it's all defined by its assembly line animation, in which the spell of watching life-like characters and settings can be easily broken by looking at the backgrounds of shots for just a few seconds.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 12 Nick Allen
    After Death
    America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Elevator Game
    Not dunking on social media teens is a refreshing angle, enough to make you want to care about their inevitable deaths. But the movie's by-the-numbers horror will make you feel otherwise.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Vacation Friends 2
    You might find yourself forcing a laugh during one weak sequence to pretend this is all supposed to be fun.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Paint
    Ross always preached that there were no mistakes, just happy accidents. A mess like Paint—all broad strokes and no point—proves that he wasn’t always right.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
    As a horror and a comedy, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has no rhythm with either, and it's too dim to be worthy of a curious look.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    The Mean One
    A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Nick Allen
    The Man from Toronto
    The Man from Toronto could have been sharper with much more care all around, but a glaring problem comes from how Hughes isn’t a funny filmmaker. He might have the self-awareness to slap his name on a food processing plant that hosts the movie’s climactic kill, but his sense of making an action scene comedic is seriously lacking.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Takedown
    The Takedown works overtime to uphold the façade of heroic policing in the most generic way possible, for god knows what greater good.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Escape the Field
    It's ambitious, but with such hand-holding dramatic direction and a dreary visual palette that never creates terror out of random corn stalks, it couldn’t be more dull.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
    It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    I Want You Back
    Jenny Slate and Charlie Day deserve better than “I Want You Back,” a leaden rom-com that gives them a shot at being funny, charming, and sweet, only to squander it scene by scene.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Moonfall
    Co-written with Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, “Moonfall” is a lumbering, long locomotive of one cliche attached to another, making time pass slowly even though there is so much juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Don't Look Up
    A disastrous movie, Don’t Look Up shows McKay as the most out of touch he’s ever been with what is clever, or how to get his audience to care.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    8-Bit Christmas
    8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 33 Nick Allen
    Hypnotic
    The thrills here, whether you want to believe what Hypnotic is hawking, are far too mild to be satisfying for even a mindless viewing.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Madres
    Calling a movie like Madres by-the-numbers would be a compliment, and an overstatement, because that would indicate that the makers were even mildly successful.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Intrusion
    There are simply too many moments here in which the characters, who we are supposed to care about in some form, are conveniently dumb.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 12 Nick Allen
    Midnight in the Switchgrass
    Midnight in the Switchgrass is the type of crime thriller that’s so full of cliches that it becomes one big cliche itself.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Nick Allen
    The Forever Purge
    Gout’s entry should be a victory lap for this relatively often dumb and dirty treatise on all that’s wrong with America, especially one that has become so powerful with multiple box office hits. Instead, it displays all that makes these movies a failed experiment in blockbuster exploitation.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Awake
    Awake is not even smart enough to play a little dumb, and so even the silliest, most gratuitous parts involving very cranky humans turning into killing machines are anticlimatic and frankly boring. The apocalypse has rarely been this abysmal.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Boys from County Hell
    Vampire stories can be so rote that it’s noticeable when the rules are even slightly changed, and that's when Boys from County Hell shows a little spark. But this is more the clear case of a horror movie that forgets to have fun.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Shook
    Shook, about an influencer being tormented by a mysterious caller, takes the bait on making a movie about such social media vanity, but its touch-and-go terror hardly offers commentary or cleverness.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Brothers By Blood
    A superficial force eats at this movie from the inside, including the way that it’s a brawny script with nil visual grit, and a style that mostly announces itself with sporadic neo-noir lighting.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Lie
    Very little about this movie works, in spite of a certain ambition in telling a story based solely on unfathomable decisions.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    David Foster: Off the Record
    Yet while the doc might prove that his approach worked, it’s progressively tedious to revisit these hits through such a thick air of self-affirmation.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 12 Nick Allen
    Yummy
    Any degree of sleaze requires a little wit, and Yummy has none. As it struggles to be even mildly significant in the sprawling history of zombie stories, it eventually leaves viewers with a movie that's just plainly ugly.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Mighty Oak
    Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Survive the Night
    You’ve got to lower the bar for a cliche-at-best thriller like Survive the Night. If it keeps you awake, consider that a success.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Behind You
    The script's interest in the past becomes a dead weight, which leads to boring emotional monologues from the adults and later a typical referencing of every supernatural movie's guidebook about how to deal with the demon in one's house.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Main Event
    It's not about the hard work that's intrinsic with all of wrestling, so much as the WWE's open willingness to sacrifice its core values for lazy family-friendly amusement.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Coffee & Kareem
    Coffee & Kareem is stock R-rated buddy-cop comedy shenanigans by way of cuteness, and it ain't "Stuber."
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Last Thing He Wanted
    Dee Rees’ The Last Thing He Wanted is incomprehensible to an almost impressive degree — usually when a movie's narrative gets so out of control, it over-corrects itself at some point before the end. But not here.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    VHYes
    I didn't see what was funny about the shallow wackiness of VHYes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    I See You
    As loud and in-your-face as these developments are presented, they're amount to a shabby collection of Blumhouse-lite scenes that would be a parody if it weren’t so dull.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Let It Snow
    As a bland addition to the already low-stakes tradition of Xmas rom-coms, Let It Snow could use a whole lot more tinsel.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Can You Keep a Secret?
    Can You Keep a Secret? doesn’t elicit warm laughs so much as heavy sighs, even though the film has some zippiness — there’s a slapstick spirit to the movie that doesn’t shine because the jokes are plain, the couple is tough to root for, and the general tension behind this weird situation is on the lazier side of rom-com premises.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Sextuplets
    The laughless mess of Sextuplets proves that Marlon Wayans still has a big obstacle in the way of his comedic greatness — himself.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Phil
    A project clearly made by a first-time actor-turned-director, who is most concerned with their own scenes and casting.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Euphoria
    Euphoria struggles to be little more than a hum-drum meditation on kicking the bucket.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Papi Chulo
    Papi Chulo is a buddy comedy, but only by its ramshackle design — it’s a forced friendship, and it’s not cute, let alone funny.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Rim of the World
    Its greatest value is probably in how it could educate budding movie-lovers on cheesy and predictable storytelling, but even that seems like a lesson Rim of the World cynically teaches at an elementary level.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Professor and the Madman
    It’s the presence of Gibson and his co-star Sean Penn, who give the project a stuffy sanctimoniousness, as it so transparently yearns to be the definition of “powerhouse acting.”
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    William
    William simply devolves into a drab, moody morality tale for parents about not treating your kids like test subjects.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Mercy Black
    If having their own Momo is Netflix’s latest attempt to grab viewers, they’re gonna need a much more disturbing monster.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Mapplethorpe
    A stunningly drab take on the life and legacy of a photographer who merged pornography with grace, Mapplethorpe doesn’t have an artistic signature of its own, so much as a name it doesn’t live up to.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Rockaway
    With Rockaway, you don’t have to know all the details of Budion’s life—or have even seen “Stand By Me”—to get a strong feeling of what’s honest here, and what isn’t.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 0 Nick Allen
    DriverX
    DriverX is worse than just one of the year’s most vapid movies, it’s an out-and-out nightmare of late-stage capitalism.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Silencio
    It's one of the year's most convoluted original screenplays, but is probably best taken as a test in plot summarizing.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Hell Fest
    It’s the closest you can subject people to a horror potluck without being "The Cabin in the Woods." So why can’t the six writers of this story have more fun with this premise?
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    There’s plenty to explore about people who hide their true selves behind text and decoys, but Sierra Burgess is a Loser is dumber and more desperate than any episode of “Catfish,” even the one where a guy thought he was dating Katy Perry for five years.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Boarding School
    Boarding School has some edge by being told from a child’s perspective, even though it's not for kids. A lot of great directors have told this kind of story, and while Guillermo Del Toro might be the most popular living one to do it, it’s Louis Malle that comes to mind.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Extinction
    It’s a B-movie with a blockbuster attitude, and not in a fun way.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Tau
    A wannabe-thriller about artificial intelligence with little wit of its own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Sollers Point
    One can imagine that Sollers Point might be better if its focus expanded to the area's inhabitants, not just Keith.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Demon House
    It's telling that Demon House features a real-life exorcism, but it feels more superficial than supernatural.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Outsider
    As the story bloats to two hours by mistaking itself for an epic, The Outsider falls into a pit of boredom somewhere between the white savior complex of Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai” and the much slicker kills by Alain Delon in “Le Samourai.”
    • 22 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Father Figures
    Filled with insincere wackiness and sappiness, Father Figures never quite figures out whether it wants to be a raunchy, zippy road movie or a more dialogue-driven dramedy. Despite having no personality of its own, this movie just yearns to be recognized at all.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Psychopaths
    The director called this “mayhem porn,” a designation and ideology fitting for the latest from indie director Mickey Keating, Psychopaths. This is an active, obnoxious test of an audience’s appetite for blood and how long they can go without novel ideas like purpose or plot.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Realive
    The movie is inescapably lifelessness, unintentionally dumbing itself down while desperately hoping to be profound.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Tulip Fever
    Tulip Fever reveals itself to be so nutty because it explicitly believes it’s not crazy, rambling through its odd events and obsessions without an ounce of 17th century kitsch.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    I Do... Until I Don't
    It’s baffling, more than anything, as to how all of this talent could create something so uncharacteristic to their collective abilities to make us laugh, or feel something.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Queen of Spain
    The Queen of Spain can only offer scant entertainment for movie buffs and non-movie buffs alike.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    2:22
    With a movie like this, it’s hard to tell where the good idea ran out, as it seems to have been lost many drafts ago. 2:22 really just wants to be seen as clever, which often renders something not very clever at all.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 12 Nick Allen
    All Eyez on Me
    All Eyez on Me is one of the most useless music biopics ever made — it’ll be too confusing for newcomers and too underwhelming for those familiar with the work and the life of rap prophet Tupac Shakur.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Salt and Fire
    Salt and Fire is fundamentally bad, in its filmmaking and expressiveness, whether there is any meaning to a parrot quoting Nostradamus or not.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Mean Dreams
    As for Paxton, he enters the story with an edge, establishing the authority and revealing sensitivity of a single father with a powerful job. It’s not a career-topping role by any means but it is a reminder of how the late actor could take on a role with sincerity and breathe some type of life into it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Donald Cried
    In the true spirit of this profoundly uninteresting movie, Donald Cried can only shrug through its central notion that men will be sad boys.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Collide
    Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Railroad Tigers
    Though it boasts a large scope with its ensemble cast, huge sequences and the star power of the almighty Jackie Chan, Railroad Tigers lacks the vital focus to come together.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    Best and Most Beautiful Things
    With a documentary as flabby but well-meaning as Best and Most Beautiful Things, you have to savor the small stuff.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    The Unspoken
    That the story is never scary is the least of its problems.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    The Late Bloomer
    Kevin Pollak's raunchy comedy The Late Bloomer is merely cheesy and horny, but rarely amusing.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    When the Bough Breaks
    While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Nick Allen
    The Tenth Man
    Burman's film languishes on the chaos of the events, and it can never be accused of not having some ideas about fatherhood and legacy. But the humor of this rambling film runs dry to the point of unpalatable.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Nick Allen
    Outlaws and Angels
    A movie hopped up on the period piece sadism within Tarantino’s regurgitation cinema, Outlaws & Angels gravely mistakes Tarantino’s audaciousness for its own originality.

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