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.
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