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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Rainer
    Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    What's exciting about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is that, in Jason Scott Lee, the movies have created a new star out of an old star. The film is a tribute to Bruce Lee but it's also a tribute to the transforming powers of performance. Lee does justice to Bruce Lee while, at the same time, creating a character out of his own fierce resources. He is, quite literally, smashing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Rainer
    Mystic River
    Sean Penn is so frighteningly good in this movie that he outdoes even the best of his earlier work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Match Point
    Rhys-Meyers and Johansson work well together - they both know how to project glossiness and guile.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    A winning movie about losing. I didn’t always warm to its coy quirkiness, but it’s the rare American movie about contemporary teenagers that rings more true than false.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Shirkers
    It’s a charming, wistful movie, and I trust Tan will not have to wait another 20 years to direct her next film.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Atonement
    Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Graduation
    What also comes through is a quietly scathing portrait of a society in which every move, overtly or covertly, is monitored.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Brooklyn Castle
    As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    How to Train Your Dragon 2
    The dragons in this movie are expertly brought to life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Sessions
    Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Breach
    Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Shoplifters
    Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    District 9
    The ad campaign for the sci-fi thriller District 9, with mysterious billboards touting aliens among us, is highly creative and amusing. So, in patches, is the movie, which is a thinking man's, or man-boy's, "Transformers."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    District B13
    It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair’s uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    Plowright's performance as a genteel widow in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a small-scale gem, deeply felt without being in the least bit showy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    What Maisie Knew
    The film stands quite well on its own. The directors have made the right, essential decision to make the movie almost entirely from Maisie’s point of view.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an ersatz experience, a commingling of forced uplift and exotica, but it's moving anyway.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Congress
    The film has a transcendent spookiness.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Forgiven
    The most powerful scene in the movie, and the one that most fully encompasses its meaning, belongs to Mrs. Morobe (the marvelous Thandi Makhubele).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Christine
    It’s to Hall’s credit that, in the end, we see Chubbuck as a victim of no one so much as herself.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Rocker
    Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Still Walking
    The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Newtown
    This is a movie about people trying to make sense out of the senselessness of what happened.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Echo In the Canyon
    If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Far from the Tree
    The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Undefeated
    I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    In the Intense Now
    It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Cyrus
    There's an original comic temperament at work here, and that's rare.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Flat
    Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Cadillac Records
    The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Loneliest Planet
    The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    End of Watch
    I wish that the Mexican drug cartel subplot was not so overwrought and Oliver Stone-ish, and the decision to shoot much of the film "Cops"-style is also problematic. But the film puts you right inside an everyday inferno and, to its credit, doesn't turn down the heat.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    I am not a fan of food you need a microscope to see, but if your idea of fine dining is pumpkin meringue sandwiches, bone marrow tartare with oysters, tea shrimp with caviar anemones, and ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, then by all means make haste to El Bulli.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    28 Weeks Later
    The ending is a set-up for yet another sequel: Can "28 Months Later" be very far away?
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    I wish this movie wasn't so purposefully elegiac and attenuated – at times it's like a middling Terrence Malick fantasia – but it's well worth sitting through.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Operation Filmmaker
    The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Doubt
    Along with its disappointments and its narrowness of intellectual focus, Doubt offers up the crackling pleasures of performance and a narrative that snaps shut like a mousetrap. It's the movie equivalent of a rousing night at the theater.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Visual Acoustics
    Shulman was around so long that he even got to weigh in on Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. He was skeptical once but came to love it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Argo
    In some ways the movie might have been better if it had been about those two Hollywood guys with only occasional blips from the hostage crisis in Iran.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Soul Power
    Levy-Hinte has said that a great deal more concert footage exists. I can't wait for the expanded version DVD.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Waste Land
    Despite his street cred, Muniz comes across as way too effete for these laborerers, many of whom have harrowing life stories to tell. But his intention to have them re-create photographic images of themselves out of garbage, while it may not pass muster as high art, has the effect of raising their spirits.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Avatar
    If I never felt entirely transported by Avatar, it's probably because the story thudded just as often as the imagery soared. But Pandora is still a good place to park yourself for three hours.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Catch a Fire
    Philip Noyce's anti-apartheid drama is tense and thoughtful, if somewhat marred by Hollywood-style thrills.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Everything Must Go
    If there is a single image that we take away from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," it is of Willy Loman weighted down to his very soul by his suitcases. The image that holds in this modern-day salesman's serenade is Nick the salesman reduced to selling off his own life.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Lives of Others
    The director is fortunate to have cast actors who fully embody their roles. Muehe, who once played Josef Mengele in Costa-Gavras's "Amen," has the ability to let you see far beneath his masklike countenance. Koch, dashing and intense, is entirely believable as a man of the theater; Gedeck exudes a sensuousness that this covert society cannot abide.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Police, Adjective
    This intermittently terrific cerebral thriller does, indeed, hinge on the proper use of dictionary definitions, but the film is really about the oppressive blahness of small-town, postcommunist Romania. In such surroundings, parsing definitions can almost stand for high drama.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Hunger
    Although the film, for the most part, is told from the perspective of the IRA, it does not blithely take its side.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Lola Versus
    Lola is, in other words, a believable heroine for our times.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Flushed Away
    This computer-animated feature is consistently inventive, if a bit busy and overlong.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Mother
    Bong's style is comically tart even in the film's most noirish moments.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Star Trek Beyond
    I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Jungle Book
    Thankfully, the usual Disney cutesy factor is relatively low, and the script by Justin Marks is more literate than usual for this sort of thing. There are even some end credits that, for a change, are actually funny.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Project Nim
    The big news here is not simply that Nim was traumatized, it's that Nim was signing that he was traumatized.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The World's Fastest Indian
    This film would be better if it wasn't so slick. Still, parts of it are enjoyably shaggy, and Hopkins is very endearing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Dark Horse
    A slight but winning documentary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Nanny McPhee
    What actors! The great Miriam Margolyes has a wonderful cameo as a scullery maid, and Colin Firth manfully endures a face full of frosting. And then there's Angela Lansbury, playing her first movie role in 20 years as the villainous Aunt Adelaide.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Must Read After My Death
    Dews perhaps makes too much of the notion that Allis was a woman out of her time – a feminist precursor. This is too sociological a formulation for such a patently psychological crisis.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Dheepan
    For most of the movie, Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Marie Antoinette
    Destined to become this year's love-it-or-hate-it movie. Is it OK to say I merely liked it a lot?
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Kung Fu Panda
    The animation is consistently sporty and there are some choice comic riffs on martial arts movies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Frantz
    The sources of this happiness become far more complex when Adrien’s revelation is imparted (only to Anna). At this point the movie’s moral compass spins.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Félix And Meira
    It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Earth Days
    Devotees of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" may regard this film as a nostalgia trip, but it's much more comprehensive, more forward-looking than that.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Social Network
    The problem is, the geek in question, at least as Jesse Eisenberg plays him, doesn't have the emotional expansiveness to fill out a movie. Perhaps sensing this, the filmmakers play out the story line from multiple points of view and crowd the stage with a pageant of voluble supporting characters.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Grindhouse
    In all, it's a fun exercise in nostalgia but a three-hour homage to grade Z movies is a long sit. Grunge overload sets in early.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Birders: The Central Park Effect
    In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Pina
    You may not feel like dancing after watching Pina – unless you have a thing for earth in your shoes – but you'll certainly know you've seen something.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Trophy
    Trophy is a documentary that can make the stomach turn and the head spin. It’s about the big-stakes world of hunting and conservationism, and what’s surprising is how morally intertwined the two activities are.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Things to Come
    Huppert never loses sight of the fact that Nathalie’s wounded heart often overrules her steel-trap mind.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Wind Rises
    His movie is visually as beautiful as anything he’s ever done. Conceptually, it’s muddled. The collision between poetic fancifulness and grim reality, between peace and war, never falls into focus. Miyazaki has seized on a great theme only to soft-pedal it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    Many of the interviews in the film – conducted with everyone from family members to Christopher Hitchens and Tom Hayden – look to be 10, even 20, years old. Together they concoct a complex portrait of an ultimately unknowable man.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The End of the Tour
    Directed by James Ponsoldt from a script by Donald Margulies, the film gets at the wariness and competitiveness inside the journalist-interviewee dynamic and, in Segel’s performance, captures the quandary of an immensely gifted and immensely troubled writer who disdained the celebrity he also, without fully fessing up to it, sought.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Rothemund's use of the recorded testimony, while it gives his film a startling veracity, also limits his imagination. It prevents him from delving too deeply into the psychology of these activists.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Fury
    Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances as Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a tank commander with a passion for killing Nazis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The War Tapes
    This film is apolitical in the best sense - it bears witness to a time and a place.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Steve Jobs
    For most of its two hours it’s brainy, high-speed entertainment, but the filmmakers are not quite as smart as they think they are. For all its flash and hypertalk, Steve Jobs is an old-school movie in new-style camouflage.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Killing Them Softly
    The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Dead Girl
    The cast is something of an indie movie hall of fame that includes Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Steenburgen, Brittany Murphy, and Toni Collette. Marcia Gay Harden is particularly fine as the murdered girl's mother.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Children of Huang Shi
    It radiates intelligence. Of how many historical epics can that be said these days?
    • 58 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Shrek Forever After
    It has a sweetness all its own.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    My Perestroika
    The openness of these people is often astonishing – and a sign of hope.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Attack
    As this film demonstrates in so many ways, the intractability of the Arab-Israeli political situation is, to put it mildly, not easily resolved, least of all onscreen.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    This rousing documentary directed by Kevin Tancharoen and shot during two live concerts in New Jersey, is a nonstop campy celebration of youthful pizazz.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    Based on the 1938 novel by Winifred Watson, it's a deluxe romance that most of the time plays like farce.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Make no mistake: The Michelsons have a lot more going for them than their marital longevity. As the documentary makes clear, both Harold and Lillian made integral contributions to some of the most iconic movies in Hollywood history.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Bridge of Spies
    Solid and uplifting, but it doesn’t extend Spielberg’s range. Perhaps one day he will make a movie about a historical character whose complexities are not quite so untainted.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Last King of Scotland
    Whitaker is terrifying in a way that we recognize not from old movies but from life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Searching for Sugar Man
    This is a real-life fairy tale with a remarkably happy ending.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Burning
    It builds slowly, and, at almost 2-1/2 hours, it occasionally drags. But it’s worth the time. This is a very knowing movie about the ultimate unknowability of people.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Get Low
    Not only Duvall shines. Murray, in case anybody still doubted it, is one of the finest character actors in America.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Good Night, and Good Luck.
    A solid achievement, but those in the press who have been trumpeting its greatness may be going in for a bit of self-congratulation. The movie plays very well to the choir.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The title captures the man. He makes no apologies.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Salesman
    Farhadi’s new film, The Salesman, isn’t his best, or even second best, but it offers up glints of what, at times, makes him one of the best directors around.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    A Prairie Home Companion
    Streep and Tomlin are so attuned to each other that it's as if they had worked together all of their lives. In fact, it's their first time. Streep has become a wonderfully soulful comedian; Tomlin always was one.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    Up
    As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    We Own the Night
    It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Peter Rainer
    The Skin I Live In
    It all achieves a loony unity by the end, even though what is being unified is not altogether palatable.
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