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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per page
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    A White, White Day
    In light of my own experience with the film, I recommend the following. See it twice: a virgin viewing, simply to take in the strange counterintuitive way the story unfolds, and then again, with a bit of distance, knowing where the journey is headed, so that you might fully appreciate the genius of its construction. I’m convinced that A White, White Day is the work of one of the most important voices of this emerging generation, arriving at a stage where we have yet to learn his language.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Still Alice
    Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Searching
    Cutting to the emotional core of what social media says about us, the result is as much a time capsule of our relationship to (and reliance upon) modern technology as it is a cutting-edge digital thriller.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Martian
    An enthralling and rigorously realistic outer-space survival story.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Dark Horse
    The Dark Horse is as good a title as any for a film that takes an overplayed genre — the inspirational mentor story — and still manages to surprise, sneaking up to deliver a powerful emotional experience within a formula we all know by heart
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Sweet Virginia
    It’s this strange alchemy — the way that a terse script can leave so much unsaid, combined with such a talented ensemble’s ability to suggest all the details left either in silence or in darkness — that makes “Sweet Virginia” such a haunting character study.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Borat has lost none of his bite, treading that same fine line between sophomoric humor and pointed political satire.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Black Phone 2
    The movie strives to apply logic, inviting laughs (which are not unwelcome in the tense genre), but ultimately succeeds by devising a formula where two threats — ghosts and serial killers — come calling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Bruiser
    From the squarish Academy ratio and unconventional framing to composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s tense, bracing-for-conflict score, Warren’s choices frequently surprise, building to an ending that does exactly the right thing with the showdown we could feel coming all along.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Lady Bird
    The real surprise is just how honest and personal this film proves to be — again, par for the course with Gerwig, and yet, fairly rare among first-time directors, who haven’t had nearly so much practice simply being real.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Custody
    Legrand’s achievement — his integrity, one might say — is that he’s managed to cut to the marrow of the situation while remaining keenly sensitive to how such things play out in the real world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Kingmaker
    Marcos’ print-the-legend philosophy has particular resonance in a post-truth world, although such sinister undertones sneak up on audiences in a movie that begins, innocently enough, as the latest of Greenfield’s astonishing portraits of wealth run amok.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Sketch
    With his stellar indie family adventure Sketch, commercials director Seth Worley has come up with a creative — and highly teachable — concept for his feature debut, using imaginative visual effects to impart a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and other strong feelings.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Petite Maman
    In their children, parents often see reflections of the kids they once were. But daughters can’t access those same memories without a little magic. And that’s just what Petite Maman delivers: the spell that makes such a reunion possible, if only in our imaginations.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Wolf Children
    Embracing the patient, poetic style of such Japanese masters as Ozu and Mizoguchi, Hosoda sees no need for the manic energy and manufactured conflict of other recent toons.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Zero Days
    Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Minari
    Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Stolen Seas
    Assembled from three years’ worth of visits to one of the world’s most volatile hot zones, the format of Stolen Seas is as every bit as exciting as its content, raising beguiling questions about how the team managed to acquire the footage so stunningly interwoven by editor Garret Price.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    While We're Young
    Though While We’re Young is primarily a comedy — and a very funny one at that, managing to be both blisteringly of-the-moment and classically zany in the same breath — Baumbach has bitten off several serious topics, for which laughter serves as the most agreeable way to engage.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Bright
    This ambitious, yet astonishingly well-executed Netflix tentpole directly benefits from the way Ayer’s gritty, streetwise sensibility grounds Landis’ gift for creating an elaborate comic-book mythology.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Challengers
    Another filmmaker might have subtracted himself in order to foreground the story, whereas Guadagnino goes big, leading with style (and a trendy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Bikeriders
    It goes a long way to humanize figures who’ve been long misrepresented on film, while giving audiences privileged access to this inner world.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Two Popes
    While its subject may be religious, The Two Popes doesn’t want to convert the viewer. Rather, as an extraordinary piece of writing — and an even more impressive showcase for its actors — it eloquently communicates the importance of giving people something to believe in.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Brad's Status
    It’s a film with the courage to be unlikable and the confidence to be complex, trusting audiences to navigate Brad’s whirling, restless mental state as it swings from jealousy to pride to what Ananya (correctly) identifies as “white privilege, male privilege, first-class problems” — otherwise known as entitlement.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Memoir of a Snail
    Elements that might feel frivolous on first mention invariably pay off later, as Elliot brings things around in thoughtful and emotional ways, to the point you forget you’re watching people made of Plasticine.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Nine Days
    Nine Days is that rare work of art that invites you to re-consider your entire worldview.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Boyhood
    With Boyhood, Linklater has created an uncanny time capsule, inviting auds to relive their own upbringing through a series of artificial memories pressed like flowers between the pages of a family photo album.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Delivery Man
    The circumstances may be contrived, but the characters feel refreshingly genuine.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Restless
    It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Small Axe: Mangrove
    This may be “television” (in the sense that Amazon will release the films via streaming), but McQueen approaches it with all the seriousness of cinema.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Train Dreams
    Just because Malick’s influence can be felt does not mean that Bentley hasn’t found his own vocabulary to tell Grainier’s story. At times, Train Dreams feels almost quilt-like in the way its pieces fit together, with certain sounds and images flickering briefly, almost subliminally, across our consciousness, often to echo further on.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    La Belle Époque
    In the end, the story’s custom reenactment gimmick may not even have been necessary, so well-written and executed is the personal journey that underlies it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Life and Nothing More
    Whereas a Hollywood director might use subjective framing or emotional soundtrack cues to nudge audiences’ reactions in a certain way, Esparza strips away nearly all those techniques to a pure, neorealist approach: life and nothing more.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Kung Fu Panda 2
    Once again, the DreamWorks team demonstrates that humor is the primary weapon in its arsenal.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Land
    Bless Wright for paring Land down to a beautiful haiku, and for delivering a performance that’s ambiguous and understated in all the right ways.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Highest 2 Lowest
    In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Presenting Princess Shaw
    That rare Princess whose wishes do come true, Montgomery’s what is known as a “genuine discovery.”
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Night of the Kings
    With this project, in which magical realism lends everything a mystical dimension, Lacôte confidently delivers on the promise of his 2014 Cannes-selected “Run.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Emergency Declaration
    Believe it or not, Emergency Declaration was conceived before the pandemic, but it’s just about the most thrilling way a film can capitalize on our fears — of the virus, of flying, of governments making a problem worse — without directly exploiting the international nightmare we’ve all been living lately.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Tótem
    Rich with detail while also being intensely specific to the large middle-class family it observes, Avilés’ lifelike and lived-in second feature alternates among roughly half a dozen characters, inviting audiences to pick their own points of identification in the ensemble.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    It can take a TV series an entire season to establish a political intrigue as elaborate as the one Cedar devises here — and even longer to flesh out such a fascinating protagonist, when all Cedar had to do was give this archetype a name.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Moana
    As princess movies go, this one broadens the studio’s horizons, and as Moana herself sings in the film, “no one knows, how far it goes.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Color Purple
    Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Jeune Femme (Montparnasse Bienvenüe)
    Serraille studied literature before switching to cinema, and her sharp attention to the detail distinguishes Jeune femme from so many first-time indie features.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Force Majeure
    Visually stunning even in its most banal moments and emotionally perceptive almost to a fault.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Lost in Paris
    Who wouldn’t want a picturesque trip to the French capital that delivers more laughs than a nitrous oxide leak near the hyena compound? In fact, I’d go as far as to promise that Lost in Paris offers the three most delightful sight gags you’ll see on screen all year.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Saturday Night
    Now, just one year shy of the pop phenom’s 50th anniversary, director Jason Reitman gives back, turning an oral history of the very first episode into a rowdy, delectably profane backstage homage.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Ghostlight
    Any critic sitting through their show probably wouldn’t have much patience for all the characters’ personal catharses, but seen from the right distance, as beautifully told as this, the experience amounts to something special.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Amazon Adventure
    Slee’s film boasts such a high level of writing, acting, and overall production polish that youngsters may be fooled into thinking they’re watching a mindless blockbuster, when in fact, they’ve actually been fooled into thinking.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Old Man & the Gun
    People don’t forget a performer like Redford, whose movie-star charisma idles low and sexy like a Harley Davidson motor even when he’s not doing anything, and that means a movie like David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun — a dapper, low-key riff on the bank-robber genre — can play things soft, counting on Redford’s charm to fuel the show.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Hottest August
    Story’s an original, and the film is a revelation — a movie that’s as deep as we’re willing to read into it, and an invaluable time capsule for summers far in our future, assuming we ever get there.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Get Duked!
    That kind of all-around ineptitude puts the Get Duked! ensemble in the company of such classic Zucker and Abrahams movies as “Airplane” and “The Naked Gun,” and should appeal to lovers of old-fashioned lowbrow farce, provided they’re willing to accept a few lame hip-hop references.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Luce
    The film is sleek and shadowy, benefiting from the fact Onah chose to shoot on celluloid and driven by stellar performances across the board.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Loveling
    Brazilian director Gustavo Pizzi crafts a warm and wonderfully universal love story that comes across surprisingly unconventional for something so familiar.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Young Mothers
    Deeply moving but never manipulative, Young Mothers amounts to the brothers’ best film in more than a decade.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Short Term 12
    This compelling human drama finds fresh energy in the inspirational-teacher genre, constantly revealing new layers to its characters.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Pete's Dragon
    One of the year’s most delightful moviegoing surprises, a quality family film that rewards young people’s imaginations and reminds us of a time when the term “Disney movie” meant something: namely, wholesome entertainment that inspired confidence in parents and reinforced solid American values.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Origin
    The film will get people thinking and talking. The way DuVernay directs it, Origin is a swirling tornado of ideas.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Malcolm & Marie
    Levinson gives his stars roughly equal time, carefully modulating the sense of balance throughout. His direction seldom seems showy, and yet, we sense the intention behind each cut as power and control shifts throughout the movie.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Flamin' Hot
    Inspiration and entertainment can make corny bedfellows, but Longoria pulls it off, to the extent that a moment of faith when Richard and Judy pray doesn’t feel preachy, but a reflection of their priorities.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Black Bag
    Black Bag is a reminder of just how enjoyable Soderbergh can be when he’s riffing on well-worn genre material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Hateful Eight
    The movie absolutely delivers on the sheer moment-to-moment pleasures fans have come to expect, from dynamite dialogue to powder-keg confrontations.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Antebellum
    While Antebellum is no zombie movie, it treats systemic racism as a kind of contagion that refuses to die, eating the brains of successive generations. There’s only one way to stop it, and that’s by blowing the minds of all those infected — which is precisely the impact Antebellum achieves.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Dreams
    At times, the dramatic tension is so strong, “Dreams” could almost be a thriller.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Our Children
    At this finely tooled tragedy’s core towers Emilie Dequenne, no longer the feral young thing seen in 1999′s “Rosetta,” but a trapped animal pushed to devastating extremes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    The film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    A Cop Movie
    At times, A Cop Movie seems unnecessarily convoluted in its structure, but by the end, the brilliance of its design becomes clear: This is nothing short of an existential inquiry into what it takes to be a cop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Annihilation
    For those willing to put in the effort, Annihilation achieves that rare feat of great genre cinema, where we are not merely thrilled (the film is both intensely scary and unexpectedly beautiful in parts) but also feel as if our minds have been expanded along the way.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Kubo and the Two Strings
    With such awe-inspiring artistry, designed so as to never distract from the material it serves, Kubo and the Two Strings stands as the sort of film that feels richer with each successive viewing, from the paper-folded Laika logo at the beginning (an early taste of the stunning origami sequences to follow) to the emotional resonance of its final shot.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Painter and the Thief
    To get the desired emotional reaction, The Painter and the Thief proves able to deceive in ways that are best discovered for yourself. It works: In a genius final stroke, Ree pulls back to reveal the entire canvas, putting key aspects of this unconventional portrait into startling new perspective.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Dune: Part Two
    Villeneuve treats each shot as if it could be a painting. Every design choice seems handed down through millennia of alternative human history, from arcane hieroglyphics to a slew of creative masks and veils meant to conceal the faces of those manipulating the levers of power, nearly all of them women.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The situation Rasoulof depicts is hardly limited to Iran. There are echoes of Nazi Germany and modern-day China in the way average citizens submit, while the pressures to inform on one’s neighbors recall pre-perestroika Soviet policies. Rasoulof’s genius comes in focusing on how this dynamic plays out within a family, which makes it personal.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Most Precious of Cargoes
    Director Michel Hazanavicius finds a poignant way to address not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but the kindness that combated it, crafting an indelible parable destined to be watched and shared by generations to come.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    In Fabric
    There’s no reason a movie about a devil dress should work, and yet Strickland strikes the right tone, inviting laughter by taking it all so seriously.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Utama
    [A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Chasing Summer
    There’s real wisdom to Chasing Summer, which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Marguerite
    This splendid satire benefits...from “The Singer” director Giannoli’s gift for striking just the right tone with such tricky material.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Anora
    Baker’s subversively romantic, free-wheeling sex farce makes "Pretty Woman" look like a Disney movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Come Sunday
    Marston, working from Marcus Hinchey’s sensitive and remarkably nuanced script, invites measured introspection from both his characters and the audience.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Idea of You
    This is Hathaway’s movie, and she owns it: independent, desirable and never, ever desperate.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Minding the Gap
    It exists because it’s the movie Liu was born to make, the one he had to get off his chest before he could move on in his filmmaking career.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Gemini
    For a director who emerged from indie film’s so-called “mumblecore” movement, Gemini feels like a grown-up achievement, and the sign of a director with so much more to give in the future.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Birds of Passage
    Few films have captured quite so powerfully the tension between the old and new worlds — a feat Birds of Passage accomplishes while simultaneously allowing audiences to channel the Wayuu’s surrealistic view of their surroundings, where spirits walk the earth, and wise women interpret their dreams.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Islands
    A lean but revealing film of unexpected existential heft.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Memory
    Memory invites debate, rather than imposing a specific interpretation. It’s also a film that lingers, shifting and expanding in significance, even as the details start to blur.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Barbarian
    To Cregger’s credit, the sense of dread he creates is the stuff that the very best horror movies are made of.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Sidney
    The film isn’t groundbreaking, but its subject most certainly was, and Hudlin has the good sense to get out of the way and give Poitier the spotlight, which shines all the brighter through the eyes of the talents who followed in his footsteps.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    Unlike other filmmakers, who make it feel like we’re sitting back and watching someone else get to play, Gunn keeps the surprises coming, so audiences are actively engaged throughout, trying to manage multiple storylines and the ever-changing loyalties between characters.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Mommy
    It’s uncanny how much Dolan’s style and overall solipsism have evolved in five years’ time, resulting in a funny, heartbreaking and, above all, original work — right down to its unusual 1:1 aspect ratio — that feels derivative of no one, not even himself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Apples
    What might have been the latest oddity of the Greek Weird Wave — or else a surreal collection of live-action “The Far Side” cartoons — instead feels soulfully relevant as reality aligns with the speculative world Nikou imagined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Shadow in the Cloud
    Hardly a minute of the movie registers as “realistic,” but that hardly matters, since Liang so fully commits to its over-the-top sensibility that you’ll be clutching the armrest and grinning with glee for most of the ride.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Watermark
    Despite the staggering range of material Watermark manages to present — Burtynsky’s five-year undertaking is certainly the most encompassing survey any one artist has ever dedicated to the subject — it’s still just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Holy Hell
    Like watching a takedown of Hitler by a disillusioned Leni Reifenstahl, what emerges is one of the decade’s strangest and most unsettling documentaries, especially given its as-yet-unwritten ending.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Art of Self-Defense
    This singular black comedy balances off-kilter humor with an unexpectedly thriller-esque undercurrent, to the extent that audiences will find it tough to anticipate either the jokes or the dark, “Fight Club”-like turn things eventually take — all to strikingly original effect.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Love Is Strange
    Love Is Strange never feels anything less than authentic, like a true story shared by close friends.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Children of the Sea
    This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Penguin Highway
    To simplify matters: If you see just one anime feature this year, it ought to be Penguin Highway. It’s not that the style or story is mind-blowingly original, the way the best Miyazaki movies are; rather, this well-written cartoon playfully complements the kind of storytelling that Westerners are already enjoying via American-made, live-action series, while incorporating lots of delightfully Japan-specific details along the way.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    The Beasts
    The film’s big scene is upsetting and unforgettable, one of those movie moments you can’t unsee and which seems destined to haunt you for years to come.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Debruge
    Wicked
    Instead of feeling bloated, Wicked has found its ideal form, where every frame comes crammed with the kind of detail that could easily have been distracting, had a lesser talent than Cynthia Erivo been asked to carry it.
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