Phil Hoad

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The Guardian
For 167 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 13% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Phil Hoad's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Violation
Lowest review score: 20 Shark Bait
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 48 out of 167
  2. Mixed: 117 out of 167
  3. Negative: 2 out of 167
167 movie reviews
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    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Ladyworld
    Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Salvable
    Even if the skimpy detailing of Sal and Vince’s past leaves the finale verging on sentimentality, rather than fully exposing the self-inflicted wound it’s supposed to be, Salvable’s overall melancholic undertow is hard to resist.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Evil Eye
    With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Phil Hoad
    Project Wolf Hunting
    The slaughter does start to get monotonous, but the film rallies in its final third.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Balloon
    How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Bad Things
    Some of the storytelling gets clotted, leaning too much on the girls shrilly screaming at each other. Bad Things, though, is sharply filmed, with cinematographer Grant Greenberg feng-shuiing the hotel spaces into tone-setting tableaux (with a touch of Twin Peaks’ kitsch).
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Destroy All Neighbors
    At 85 minutes, Destroy All Neighbors gets a little indulgent, and the plot, as William finds his creative mojo in the company of his newly acquired ghoulish ensemble, is throwaway. But it’s a gleeful lo-fi rampage all the same.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    The Dead Thing
    Hunt, though, gives an excellent performance in the lead role, agilely running the gamut from deadened admin serf and hipster-bar dating veteran, to infatuated young lover, to abuse victim. She brings emotional suppleness and complexity to what is – despite some flaws – a bold and stylish take on the endless samsara of digital romance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    On a Magical Night
    Christophe Honoré, now edging into veteran status with his 12th film, once again steps up to the oche of desire and infidelity. But this peppy, flighty and self-involved film – a hybrid of marital drama, chamber piece, erotic farce and crypto-musical – hovers frustratingly outside the bullseye.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Black as Night
    Its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Phil Hoad
    Slingshot
    It labours for an hour to find its own thematic core, but as the psychological pieces accumulate, the film starts to exert an inexorable pull in its exploration of cognitive dissonance and mental illness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Ride On
    The 68-year-old Chan slips down off Red Hare like a limber teenager. But horse aside, he largely retreads old ground here, with a handful of shambolic dustups that, apart from the enterprising use of a wicker rocking chair, are pretty standard Jackie.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Elevation
    Prospective future instalments might want to aim higher than mere competency.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Fatima
    Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    The Unholy Trinity
    If following The Unholy Trinity’s various tracks is sometimes frustrating, it’s still rare enough: a red-blooded and essentially satisfying western.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Phil Hoad
    The Lie
    Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Dark Match
    The visually overworked Dark Match feels oddly underworked at the same time.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Quicksand
    It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 80 Phil Hoad
    Madres
    Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Scarlet Bond
    Compensating for there being nothing in the way of any Narnia or Harry Potter-style flitting between realities, this film has crunchily animated brawls every five minutes and a playful embrace of sword’n’sorcery hokum that gives it a little lift.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    The Exorcism of God
    Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    The Lady of Heaven
    For a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Please Don't Feed the Children
    Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there’s an edginess to Spielberg’s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    One True Loves
    There is little payoff, with Fickman running shy of the full-blooded commitment to make his film a proper weepie and instead constantly reverting to sassy, annoyingly self-aware comedy that makes light of everything.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Off the Rails
    The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 40 Phil Hoad
    Vanquish
    Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods
    This has cosmic charm aplenty.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    In Safe Hands
    This intelligently performed film is still a welcome look at a vital and underappreciated duty of state.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Phil Hoad
    Gorillaz: Reject False Icons
    With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.
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