Peter Rainer

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Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Observer, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine (Vulture)
For 2,765 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Peter Rainer's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Lowest review score: 0 Mixed Nuts
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,744 out of 2765
  2. Mixed: 866 out of 2765
  3. Negative: 155 out of 2765
2765 movie reviews
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    • 92 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    The Act of Killing
    The effect is intended to be ghastly – which it certainly is – but I was equally repelled by this film’s conceit. Oppenheimer allows murderous thugs free rein to preen their atrocities, and then fobs it all off as some kind of exalted art thing. This is more than an aesthetic crime; it’s a moral crime.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    Rock Star
    Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Hunting Party
    The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Sum of All Fears
    Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 16 Peter Rainer
    The Proposal
    Monumentally unromantic.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 16 Peter Rainer
    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 0 Peter Rainer
    Mixed Nuts
    Mixed Nuts is a farcical whirligig that doesn't whirl. It's energetically unfunny, like "Radioland Murders," and, like that film, it boasts top-flight talent. Maybe the idea of making a comedy about a suicide prevention center just got to everyone-it's a bummed-out comedy about being bummed out. [21 Dec 1994, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 16 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    Beverly Hills Cop III
    There's a fundamental lack of human feeling in Beverly Hills Cop III that makes you want to avert your eyes from the people around you when the lights come up. Attending this movie makes you feel like an accomplice to the corruption. [25 May 1994, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 50 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    All Dogs Go to Heaven
    The animation is of variable quality; the story is a garbled pastiche of "Oliver Twist" and "Little Miss Marker;" the songs, including four by Charles ("Annie") Strouse, are eminently unhummable. [17 Nov 1989]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Funny Games (2008)
    In the end, the difference between "Funny Games" and Hollywood schlock horror may only be a matter of breeding. Funny Games is "Saw IV" with a PhD.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Another Happy Day
    Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    15 Minutes
    John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Evita
    As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    What Happens in Vegas
    What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    21 Grams
    It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    The Strangers
    Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Rookie
    Even as an Eastwood vehicle -- an appropriate term for a movie about a cutthroat car-theft ring -- the film is a warmed-over compost. [07 Dec 1990, p.F10]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 67 Metascore
    • 16 Peter Rainer
    Moon
    It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Kick-Ass
    Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Elf
    I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Oleanna
    David Mamet's Oleanna, adapted from his two-character play, is about sexual harassment, but it's the audience for this movie that gets harassed. Mamet must mean for this movie to be as enjoyable as fingernails scraping a blackboard. For both men and women, watching it is intended as an act of penance for all our sexist, elitist, feminist, patriarchal ills.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Boynton Beach Club
    Its wasted cast includes Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou, and Brenda Vaccaro, who miraculously manages to give a fine performance in this malarkey.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Lethal Weapon 3
    The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Ghostbusters
    All I can say is, I certainly hope this dreary, bleary comedy doesn’t end up serving as a referendum on anything. That would be a disservice to women, not to mention movies.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Together
    Since this is a coming-of-age movie about a poor rural kid who grapples with the big city, it would be nice if its protagonist weren’t such a lummox.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Horrible Bosses
    The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Brotherhood of the Wolf
    An exuberantly garish French movie.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Date Night
    Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?
    • 56 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Brave One
    The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    The Anniversary Party
    A heavy dose of movie-colony narcissism posing as warts-and-all honesty.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    Billy Madison
    Director Tamra Davis and screenwriters Sandler and Tim Herlihy scatter the bad jokes like fertilizer. Nothing sprouts.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Series 7: The Contenders
    There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."
    • 55 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    Seven Years in Tibet
    Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive--not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Starsky & Hutch
    Ends with a bunch of goofy outtakes--which are as dismal as the rest of the movie. How do you decide what to leave out when there's nothing worth keeping in?
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    The Astronaut Farmer
    Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 16 Peter Rainer
    Harry Brown
    Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    All the Pretty Horses
    Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    From Hell
    The only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Johnny Suede
    The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Enemy at the Gates
    It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Zookeeper
    Numbingly inane comedy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    O
    It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    The Wood
    The people who made this movie have either seen too much mayhem -- or they haven't seen any.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Black Snake Moan
    Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Birthday Girl
    The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Land of the Lost
    It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Fountain
    Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Romeo Is Bleeding
    The disjointed, self-conscious, over-the-top stylistics are supposed to make it seem avant-garde but mostly it's just annoying. The artsy clutter gets in the way of the crime story, which is pretty flimsy to begin with.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    City by the Sea
    The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Edtv
    I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Casper
    Director Brad Silberling and screenwriters Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver can't figure out how to play a lot of this material. They pour on the sentiment and then they pour on the dopiness. The ghosts in this movie aren't the only ones who lack resolution. So do the filmmakers.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Big Bad Love
    The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Antichrist
    Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    K-PAX
    Spacey is turning into another Robin Williams: Between this film and "Pay It Forward" he cops the prize for the Sappiest Performances by an Actor Previously Known to Have Great Talent.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Price of Milk
    Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    Scotland, Pa.
    Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Banger Sisters
    The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    Swept Away
    If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Memoirs of an Invisible Man
    The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Failure to Launch
    Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    Heartbreakers
    What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Day After Tomorrow
    The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 16 Peter Rainer
    The Time Traveler's Wife
    They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Dilemma
    The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    Ravenous
    Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Break-Up
    If, as the ads would lead you to believe, you go to see The Break-Up expecting a romantic comedy, you will be severely disappointed. If you go to it expecting a good movie, you will also be severely disappointed.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Heartbreak Kid
    Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    American Dreamz
    Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Blindness
    After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Loverboy
    Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Vanilla Sky
    Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Snatched
    It may not matter to audiences that this film...is junk. But shouldn’t it matter at least to Hawn and Schumer?
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Stella
    This 20-year saga of an uneducated, working-class single mother who sacrifices everything to give her daughter the chance she never had is so recklessly shameless it verges on camp parody.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Walking Tall
    The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Angels in the Outfield
    The sap in this movie rises almost as high as the Angels. It's a special kind of kiddie sentimentality: fantastical and self-congratulatory.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    It Runs in the Family
    Fred Schepisi, the great Australian director, had the thankless task of trying to turn Jesse Wigutow’s screenplay into something with a pulse, but his finesse is wasted on this steaming heap of dysfunctionalism.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Center of the World
    The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Hangover Part II
    It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Mexican
    He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Anything Else
    Being a cultural icon is a time-limited occupation; after a while, the culture moves on, and if you don't move with it, you end up with a movie like Anything Else.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    The Last Castle
    Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 0 Peter Rainer
    Final Destination 3
    There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Peacemaker
    It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
    Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Bucket List
    The Bucket List is a movie for oldsters that, paradoxically, looks as if it was made for 15-year-olds. If this is what is meant in Hollywood as "thinking outside the box," then it's time to get a new box.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Fred Claus
    Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    The Perfect Game
    Notable only for being a catalog of just about every kid-pic cliché ever committed to film.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Big Daddy
    Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 10 Peter Rainer
    The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Mad Money
    The best thing you can say about Mad Money is that it has a good cast. The worst thing you can say about it is that the cast is extremely ill-used.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 33 Peter Rainer
    Battleship
    The script is replete with howlers. My favorite, from Kitsch, after the aliens strike: "I've got a bad feeling about this." Indeed.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Running Scared
    When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Peter Rainer
    Evolution
    Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    The Boss
    I persist in believing that Melissa McCarthy is capable of starring in a movie that not only makes a scads of money but is – you know – good.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    A Kiss Before Dying
    For those of us who don’t fancy ourselves connoisseurs of badness, A Kiss Before Dying is less than delectable. It’s a real botch-a-thon, and it gets worse as it goes along.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    Wild Wild West
    From the look of this film, its prime appreciators will be heavy-metal futurist dweebs.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Peter Rainer
    Peaceful Warrior
    This woozily uplifting saga is big on homilies and deficient in just about everything else.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 0 Peter Rainer
    The Green Hornet
    Such a feeble excuse for an action comedy that it's already taken pride of place in my upcoming worst-movies-of-2011 list.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Peter Rainer
    The Bodyguard
    The Bodyguard isn't a good movie, but it's often enjoyably bad, and that's no small achievement. So many talented people had a hand in it, starting with director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, that you stare at the screen in a state of rapt bewilderment. Just about everything that can go wrong with this film does, and yet it's compulsively watchable. (So is a train wreck.) [25 Nov 1992, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
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