Nicolas Rapold

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The New York Times, Time Out, Village Voice
For 540 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 31% higher than the average critic
  • 7% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Nicolas Rapold's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 Mustang
Lowest review score: 0 Neander-Jin: The Return of the Neanderthal Man
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 204 out of 540
  2. Mixed: 285 out of 540
  3. Negative: 51 out of 540
540 movie reviews
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    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    Warsaw Uprising
    Warsaw Uprising is marred by a fictional audio drama among three characters (two cameraman brothers and an American airman) who provide an unnecessary, distracting and at times amateurish frame to this resourcefully, even wittily, edited tour. But the flaws don’t detract from the film’s casual and calamitous sights.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Nicolas Rapold
    Expelled
    The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Nicolas Rapold
    Barbecue
    Mr. Wilson’s Antoine is too much of a pill to root for, and the voice-over and wispy songs dribbling over scenes only underline the forgettable filmmaking.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Nicolas Rapold
    20 Once Again
    Mining deeper emotions from the fanciful premise doesn’t work out for the film, which gets tied down to a generic musical-contest subplot. It’s a workable comedy that’s sunk by its attempts to impersonate something else too.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nicolas Rapold
    Coast of Death
    The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Nicolas Rapold
    Evaporating Borders
    Despite the urgent subject matter and lyrical touches, it’s a film that needs further layers of complication and texture.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nicolas Rapold
    God Bless the Child
    Shot with available light, the suburban rambles are portrayed so naturally that it’s hard to believe they are scripted.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Nicolas Rapold
    Sleepless in New York
    There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nicolas Rapold
    Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis
    Roddy Bogawa’s Taken by Storm taps that intimate, thrilling ritual of another era: picking a record in a music store, beguiled by a mysterious album cover before the needle has even dropped.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Nicolas Rapold
    Havana Motor Club
    [A] serviceable but slightly drawn-out documentary.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Nicolas Rapold
    Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    The Weasel's Tale
    The Grand Guignol conclusion does fulfill the flair promised by the film’s tuned-up colors and by Mara’s vintage posters for her movies, which have glorious titles like “The Other Woman Forever.”
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Nicolas Rapold
    Long Story Short
    Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    The Big Scary 'S' Word
    Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Nicolas Rapold
    My Name Is Bulger
    The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Nicolas Rapold
    The Boys in Red Hats
    Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
    The movie reflects upon how people organize experience through our memories and our actions, but the filmmakers also have a self-awareness about their steadfast methods.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nicolas Rapold
    No Responders Left Behind
    While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    Los Últimos Frikis
    The film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Nicolas Rapold
    North by Current
    Out of the fractured family documentary, what emerges finally is a drama of self-realization.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    Burning
    The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Nicolas Rapold
    My Best Friend Anne Frank
    Clinging to Hannah’s naïve viewpoint and the cherished ideal of her friendship with Anne results in some hard truths being hidden away or oddly sanitized.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Nicolas Rapold
    Icahn: The Restless Billionaire
    The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Nicolas Rapold
    Family Camp
    Dad humor abounds in Family Camp, a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Nicolas Rapold
    Granada Nights
    a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Nicolas Rapold
    Hansan: Rising Dragon
    The film’s dramas are ornately costumed but often stilted and lacking the verve of the battle staging. Even the glories of war can turn stultifying when you’re shown one too many thousand-yard-stare reaction shots by military leaders.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Nicolas Rapold
    Seoul Vibe
    The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Nicolas Rapold
    Shalom Taiwan
    It’s hard to argue with that message, but one doesn’t have to accept the ho-hum experience of watching this movie.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Nicolas Rapold
    El Tiempo Perdido
    You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Nicolas Rapold
    Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2
    “Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.
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