Peter Debruge

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Miami Herald, Premiere, Variety
For 1,770 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Peter Debruge's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Josephine
Lowest review score: 0 Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,028 out of 1770
  2. Mixed: 593 out of 1770
  3. Negative: 149 out of 1770
1770 movie reviews
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    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    A Magnificent Life
    Magnificent as Pagnol’s achievements may have been, it’s a pity that the decades-spanning account of one of France’s greatest storytellers didn’t make for a better story unto itself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Wicker
    The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    The Weight
    While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    The Gallerist
    The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    Anaconda
    The movie could have really used some of that anarchic, industry-skewering “Tropic Thunder” energy. The only risk taken here was asking Sony — plus any surviving members of the original cast — to poke fun at themselves, which only goes so far when the film has no fangs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    H Is for Hawk
    It’s a rare privilege to spend so much time with Helen and her charge, and the footage of Mabel (filmed by Mark Payne-Gill in the wild and DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen in dramatic scenes) hunting pheasants and so forth mesmerizes. But there’s arguably too much of it, dominating the film’s slightly excessive run time.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    TRON: Ares
    While it was exciting to see what “Tron” might look like in the 21st century, the brand gets in the way of Ares’ internal evolution. However fascinating it might be to watch him “level up,” what audiences expect — and what Rønning delivers — are cycle races and dynamic gladiator battles.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Infinity Castle
    The film’s humor doesn’t necessarily translate, and the animation style doesn’t come close to the medium’s most artistic work. Beyond the sheer inventiveness of the movie’s made-up martial arts, that leaves the tragic elements, which can be disarmingly effective in giving audiences reason to feel invested in the battles — battles that have only just begun.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Sacrifice
    There’s a virtuosity to Gavras’ filmmaking, which yields some surprising laughs and thrills along the way.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    Doin' It
    Doin’ It wants to preach sex positivity, but feels stuck in the immature, shock-comedy mode of “American Pie” and early Farrelly brothers movies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Hamlet
    With director Aneil Karia’s interpretation, we get the great Riz Ahmed in the role, which is reason enough for the film to exist — but it’s perhaps the only one in a remake that might better have chosen not to be.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Fuze
    The action is entertaining enough in the moment, but not especially memorable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Rental Family
    A movie like Rental Family lives or dies by its tone, and the one Hikari strikes is reflected in the concerned creases of Fraser’s forehead: It’s maudlin and unconvincing, means well but isn’t above manipulating us for the desired emotional outcome.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    The Lost Bus
    The Lost Bus resembles several other Greengrass films in that it’s also slim on character (only one of the kids has a name and personality), but succeeds in plunging audiences into the action — which, in this case, means trying to steer an unwieldy vehicle through hell itself.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player looks great, but lacks the fundamental human insight to make it a winner.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Frankenstein
    Technically, “Frankenstein” was made for Netflix, and though the streamer will give it whatever theatrical run it’s contractually obliged to honor, the visual effects weren’t rendered for big-screen consumption. Alexandre Desplat’s baroque score, on the other hand, makes up for it in grandeur.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The technical side isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, and there’s only limited interest in watching White navigate the icon’s first serious bout of depression. That is, unless one understands just how much that record represents to the next generations of musicians and why.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    The movie offers an updated version of the same basic ride Spielberg offered 32 years earlier, and yet, it hardly feels essential to the series’ overall mythology, nor does it signal where the franchise could be headed.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Animal Farm
    The message feels muddled amid all the pratfalls and fart jokes.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Fixed
    Sacrificing good taste in pursuit of the higher goal — which could be described as joining “Fritz the Cat” in animated infamy — Tartakovsky and co-writer Jon Vitti (a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons”) make no apologies for the project’s obscene sense of humor.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Hot Milk
    The film unfolds in a dreamy, liminal place in Sofia’s personal evolution, but lacks the tangible sense of vicariously experiencing it ourselves — a shame, since it’s a splendid location in which to be doing such intensive self-healing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Woman and Child
    The psychology simply doesn’t add up.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    Fuori
    Martone’s repetitive, tediously non-linear film attempts something more impressionistic and expansive, with emotionally muted and sometimes strangely exploitative results.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Lilo & Stitch
    Somehow, Lilo & Stitch has lost its unpredictable sense of anarchy in the retelling.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    Alpha
    It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Peter Debruge
    Shadow Force
    It takes a certain esprit to pull off this kind of bombastic yet larky star vehicle. Joe Carnahan’s film provides passable diversion for a couple hours, but the fun to be had is limited by uninspired action staging, less-than-sparkling dialogue and a maudlin streak of the “It’s about family!!” type.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    Thunderbolts*
    As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    Havoc
    The cheesy screenplay, shallow characters and wince-worthy acting (from all but A-listers Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant) suggest that Evans might be better suited to specializing in the second unit or action sequences on a major franchise, rather than writing and directing a quasi-dramatic feature.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Debruge
    G20
    Action does not come naturally to the “Under the Same Moon” director, though the script poses an even bigger problem in G20, a movie whose short title manages to reflect both its high concept and shockingly low intelligence level.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Debruge
    On Swift Horses
    There’s a current of tragedy running beneath all of the couples here, as the characters create obstacles to their own happiness. It can feel a bit diagrammatic, as if the novelist were setting up impossible loves and then watching them fail. But there’s hope too, and however contrived the last scene may feel, there’s poetry in watching someone betting their future on yet another horse.
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