Nick Pinkerton

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L.A. Weekly, Village Voice
For 304 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Nick Pinkerton's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 54
Highest review score: 100 Little Fugitive (re-release)
Lowest review score: 0 30 Beats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 106 out of 304
  2. Mixed: 152 out of 304
  3. Negative: 46 out of 304
304 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Nick Pinkerton
    The Wackness
    All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.
    • Village Voice
    • 95 Metascore
    • 50 Nick Pinkerton
    Amour
    Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Nick Pinkerton
    Ikiru
    Were it the only film Kurosawa ever made, his name would be rightfully engraved on film history.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Nick Pinkerton
    Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Nick Pinkerton
    Towelhead
    Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    My Perestroika
    The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
    • 6 Metascore
    • 20 Nick Pinkerton
    Prince of Swine
    A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    45365
    The result is a poetic documentary of quiet American surfaces and intimately eavesdropped people.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Nick Pinkerton
    Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    Playboy "gave us some of the best literature of our time," opines noted literary critic Tony Bennett, among a cast of mostly ridiculous and redundant talking heads.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    Nothing But a Man (1964)
    The title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Nick Pinkerton
    Elena
    All of this builds into the film's last image, Elena's family finally welcomed into Vladimir's apartment, as the cautious, controlling, abstemious bourgeoisie are overtaken by the heedlessly fertile lower orders, the temporary inheritors of a terribly weary earth.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Nick Pinkerton
    Five Easy Pieces
    It’s a great work of the Discover America Seventies.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Nick Pinkerton
    The Tree of Life
    Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Nick Pinkerton
    Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Nick Pinkerton
    13 Assassins
    Perhaps something important was spirited away with the 20 minutes of footage shorn for this U.S. release, but the combatants are scarcely distinguishable here even before disappearing under layers of mud and guts.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    Hadewijch
    With Hadewijch, he (Dumont) endorses something like the Dardenne brothers' rugged, squalid secular humanism, offering the barrier-breaking embrace as vague alternative to Despair, Church, or Capital.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    The Day He Arrives
    Like Rohmer, Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    The Miracle Worker
    A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    The Deep Blue Sea
    Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Nick Pinkerton
    Killer Joe
    A hideously funny tabloid noir.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Nick Pinkerton
    The Man Who Fell to Earth
    Undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Nick Pinkerton
    No
    No uses the actual commercial material the opposition created for its anti-Pinochet campaign and—re-creating the behind-the-scenes filming—deftly appropriates mediated history for fiction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    Kati with an I
    Greene may intend Kati's story as a quiet tragedy, but the native feeling of that's-just-the-way-it-is lethargy ("Only in Alabama can you be a home-school drop-out") is rather convincing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    You, the Living
    You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Nick Pinkerton
    The Awakening
    Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Nick Pinkerton
    Tuesday, After Christmas
    Unrelentingly mundane, as if made with the sole purpose of draining the topic of adultery of any prurient interest.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Nick Pinkerton
    Madea's Witness Protection
    An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    Flight
    It is not surprising that Zemeckis's handling of spectacle would be undiminished, but he hasn't lost his touch with actors, either, coaching Washington into one of his rare performances that suggests much more than it shows.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Nick Pinkerton
    The Turin Horse
    An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.
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