Rick Groen

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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 1,531 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Rick Groen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Kafka
Lowest review score: 0 The Amityville Horror
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 851 out of 1531
  2. Mixed: 449 out of 1531
  3. Negative: 231 out of 1531
1531 movie reviews
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    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Chaplin
    Chaplin is a mediocre movie that you can't take your eyes off. Your wandering mind is telling you one thing: This is a standard check-list biography, the kind of glossy whitewash that treats a man's accomplishments like so many vegetables from the produce aisle - toss 'em in, tick 'em off, and move on. But those riveted eyes are saying something else entirely - they're watching Robert Downey, Jr. with rapt attention, marvelling at his every move, pondering his every gesture.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Jun 30, 2017
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    Patriot Games
    TERRIFIC cast, imaginative direction - Patriot Games is such an enjoyable film that you keep hoping it will go the extra mile, that it will transcend the action-genre and progress from an intelligently made picture to an intelligently themed picture, That it doesn't - not quite, anyway - is mildly disappointing but easily forgiven; there's a lot to be grateful for here. [9 June 1992]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Jun 30, 2017
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Eddie Murphy: Raw
    Murphy's brand of crude is studied and sleek, all high-polish and sheer calculation. As a performer, he's stylishly smooth; as a comic, that very smoothness is both his greatest strength and his abiding weakness. [22 Dec 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Soapdish
    This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Jun 28, 2017
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    I Declare War
    The narrative meanders on occasion, the conceit can seem repetitious, the editing is loose. Nevertheless, buoyed by the naturalism of its exclusively young cast, the picture effectively gets into your head and under your skin.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Unfinished Song
    In the end, then, just Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp and those voices – their solos contain this picture like carved book-ends, vintage and lovely and still so profoundly of use.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Bling Ring
    How do you make a movie about shallow people in a shallow culture and not end up with a shallow movie? For writer-director Sofia Coppola, the answer is to dramatize a story “based on actual events,” then to step back and present it as a case study in pure anthropology.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    Dirty Wars
    A remarkable documentary as important as it is compelling.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    Before Midnight
    It plays like documented fact, a kind of "7 Up" primer on life’s romantic vicissitudes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Something in the Air
    An overdose of sympathy makes for a wispy picture, likeable certainly but lacking in crispness and clarity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Love Is All You Need
    As the title more than hints, Love Is All You Need is no stranger to formulaic clichés, but it’s still a Bier film. There’s a sprinkling of vinegar in the treacle, a bit of ballast in fancy’s lightweight flight, and, of course, the triumph of optimism that can seem unearned in her dramas is made to measure in a comedy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The We and the I
    Still, credit Gondry, like Tocqueville before him, with at least re-examining tired clichés and scraping the rust off stereotypes.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Director Dan Algrant’s conceit here is to take an actual event – a tribute concert for Tim held at a Brooklyn church in 1991, the concert that sparked Jeff’s own career – and wrap a fictionalized drama around it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Hannah Arendt
    En route, despite some clumsy exposition and the reduction of heavyweights like Mary McCarthy and William Shawn to fifth-business caricatures, the film does manage one impressive intellectual achievement of its own: rescuing that “banality of evil” phrase from the banal cliché it’s become and, by providing the full and daring context, giving it real meaning again.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Room 237
    Are these enlightened critics or dark nutcases themselves?
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    The Great Gatsby
    It’s a terrific adaptation that succeeds not only as a work of cinema but also, wonderfully, as proof of the novel’s greatness. In short, the picture rebukes the revisionists even while entertaining them.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    The Company You Keep
    In The Company You Keep, old radicals never die – they just turn into old actors.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    It's a Disaster
    The humour may not be wickedly black, but once in a while it’s amusingly beige.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Oblivion
    Oblivion is an okay blockbuster, a multimillion-dollar exercise in competence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Trance
    Individually, Dawson and Cassel each generate plenty of screen heat, but, together in that one bedroom scene, their chemistry is downright explosive, so much so that it seems we have strayed into a whole different movie, and dearly want to stay there.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    42
    In the hallowed frames of 42, the legend is front and centre and still inspiring. Too bad the more interesting man is nowhere to be seen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    A Place at the Table
    Says the actor Jeff Bridges, a long-time and articulate soldier in the campaign against hunger: “It’s a problem that our government is ashamed of acknowledging. We’re in denial.”
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Love, Marilyn
    Remove the comma from the title and Love, Marilyn plays like the command it is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Beyond the Hills
    If you long for the bleak intelligence of an Ingmar Bergman film, where humankind is deeply flawed and God is indifferently silent and the landscape is cloaked in perpetual winter, then Beyond the Hills promises to be your cup of despair.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Spring Breakers
    Whether the film is uniquely brilliant or dismissively dumb is not the issue here. Either choice can (and will) be offered – it’s the choosing that counts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Yossi
    Yossi is an early spring breeze of a film – too delicate to be substantial but definitely holding the promise of warmth.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Admission
    The result is a picture curiously yet intriguingly at odds with itself: One moment is edgy, the next is not; the cast is terrific, the direction is not; here it’s satirically sharp, there it’s sloppily sentimental; now we’re happily engaged, then we’re cruelly dumped. Some films are electric – Admission settles for alternating current.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Caesar Must Die
    Not surprisingly, prison must be the perfect incubator of sadness and anger, because every one of the “performances” is astonishingly vivid. At the extremes of the emotional spectrum, at least, these guys are brilliant.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    I Killed My Mother
    Love sometimes hurts, but love/hate is always pure anguish. That's the two-stroke engine powering I Killed My Mother ( J'ai tué ma mère), a coming-of-age tale as ferociously raw as its teller - the very young Xavier Dolan.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Dead Man Down
    Lumpy title, lively movie. Dead Man Down proves to be a frisky gangster flick cum elaborate thriller cum off-beat romance. Yep, there’s a whole lot going on here, but this is one of those plot-heavy scripts that carries its weight with confidence – the intricate twists don’t cheat.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Gatekeepers
    As a political testament, the result is revealing and important. Yet as a documentary, it wanders here, there and everywhere – long on intensity but short on focus.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Snitch
    Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Middle of Nowhere
    Sometimes, the quiet lyricism of DuVernay’s direction seems at odds with the grittiness of the subject matter, like poetry force-fed into prose.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Identity Thief
    McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Last Stand
    Dig just a shade beneath the surface, trade in the text for the subtext, and a more interesting picture emerges – a little richer, sadder, almost poignant. Arnie is back again, yet now, as a storied immigrant nearing the end of his tale, he's become an odd sight to behold.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Rick Groen
    Amour
    More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Barbara
    Barbara is intriguing because the script subtly plays off that expectation, not denying it so much as expanding it, showing us that the grey world can contain, and even embrace, contradictory colours.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Not Fade Away
    Ultimately a disappointment – this is a movie easy to watch and even easier to forget.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Rust and Bone
    By turns brutal and tender, Rust and Bone is a bullet train of heightened melodrama that refuses to derail.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    This Is 40
    Apatow rescued big-screen comedy from its lengthy wallow in the trough of dumb-and-dumber – we have good reason to thank the guy. Until now. In This Is 40, his fingerprints are still identifiable, but not nearly as crisp. They're starting to look smudged.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Meet the Fokkens
    Despite the occasional stumble, the doc never falls, thanks to the sheer strength of its subjects' undaunted and indomitable character.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Hyde Park on Hudson
    As for Daisy, her inflated role is problematic. Although at the periphery of the action, the woman stands at the centre of the film, doubling as the compromised love interest and our voice-over narrator. But even Linney can't bring her to life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Hitchcock
    Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Rick Groen
    Life of Pi
    Every once in a long while, the right director comes across the right project at just the right moment, and things so often discordant fall into perfect harmony.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    Holy Motors
    You may be of the opinion that taking in an art film, especially the haute brand that disdains conventional narrative, is like watching paint dry. If so, happy surprise, Holy Motors is definitely the art film for you – it's like watching paint blister.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    Lincoln
    Lincoln is directed by Steven Spielberg but, to his great credit, few will mistake this for a Steven Spielberg film. Rather, it's a Tony Kushner film, the playwright who conjured up the wordy but intricately layered script; and it's a Daniel Day-Lewis film, the actor who so richly embodies the iconic title role.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Chasing Ice
    The impact should be visceral and gut-wrenching; instead, it's cool and cerebral – after all, we're being lectured in a lecture hall.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    How to Survive a Plague
    Society would do well to remember that, in large part, the most effective redress to the tragedy of AIDS came directly from the people with AIDS. Lest we forget, director David France is intent on reminding us.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Flight
    This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting – Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Café de Flore
    The film commands our attention again as more connections emerge -- not enough to fully solve the mystery, but sufficient to convince us that Café de Flore amounts to more than the triumph of style over substance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Imposter
    The utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Seven Psychopaths
    In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Looper
    Looper ups the ante like a poker player on speed. What a potpourri of genres we have here – noir again, but sci-fi too, and action and horror and psycho-drama with existential trimmings, the latter designed to invite the thinking viewer into the fray.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    End of Watch
    No doubt, these twin saviours are a likeable tandem, and they bear their cross lightly. Still, End of Watch suffers from no end of sanctimony. Sainthood is all well and fine but it ain't drama and, on screen at least, the question cries out: Where's a corrupt cop when you need him?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Anna Karenina
    The results are generally refreshing. Much of the film takes place inside a theatre, as if to suggest the shenanigans of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy were a form of public entertainment.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Impossible
    The Impossible looks back at a natural calamity with unflinching honesty. It sees fear and pain, it sees fortitude and bravery, but mainly it sees this: In that raging instant when the sea becomes its own monster, there's precious little to separate the devoured from the spared – nothing but the thin wedge of luck.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Hit and Run
    It's a rom-com, it's a road movie, it's "Cars" without the animation, it's "A History of Violence" played for yuks. It's all that and less because, really, Hit & Run is awfully hit & miss.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    ParaNorman
    Norman is the "freak" bullied and ostracized and otherwise degraded by the alive-and-well crowd. Such is the outcast fate of most heroes in the best children's tales. And ParaNorman, a ghoulishly delightful exercise in stop-motion animation, is a very good children's tale indeed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Hope Springs
    Yes, this is the fascinating stuff, a rare (in pop culture) look at the complex nature of the love-sex equation – when it's too direct, when it's too vague, when it breaks down completely.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    The Queen of Versailles
    Everything about The Queen of Versailles, a documentary both sharply observant and deliciously funny, is jumbo-sized – the riches, the rags, his ego, her breasts, their steroidal pursuit of happiness.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Total Recall (2012)
    Today's Total Recall does nothing to tarnish the image of yesterday's – 22 years from now, I expect it to be hailed as a classic.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the times may be hard but the apocalypse is soft. Welcome to the anti-"Melancholia."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Safety Not Guaranteed
    Call me biased, but I'm quick to put out the welcome mat for any movie – good, bad or indifferent – that resists easy categorizing. That's certainly the charm of Safety NotGuaranteed, which flirts with two very different genres yet never goes steady with either.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    The Woman in the Fifth
    The Woman in the Fifth is an interesting chameleon until it runs out of disguises, and all that was transitory just looks transparent.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Prometheus
    There's definite mastery here, but it's hardly a masterpiece.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Moonrise Kingdom
    Even by his stylistic standards, Anderson has cranked up the artifice.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Snow White and the Huntsman
    Yes, there are many splendid reasons to see Snow White and the Huntsman – enough, maybe, not to care that neither Snow White nor the Huntsman rank high among them.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Where Do We Go Now?
    So the interrogative title is left to hover over the ending, as it does over all those tension-filled places near and far. Speaking as a foolish man, I had high hopes for these wise women – given the historic alternative, I still do.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Men in Black III
    Delight, a modest yet palpable measure of the stuff, is restored.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Detachment
    Ultimately, Detachment invites us to feel precisely what it warns against – detached.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Payback
    Payback is nothing if not brave. It's a documentary attempt to give concrete shape to an abstract discussion, using the medium of film to transplant a nuanced thesis – on the concept of debt – from its natural home on the printed page.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Deep Blue Sea
    Happily, in his adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies has found a setting close to his heart and a subject more nearly suited to his style.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Bully
    Indeed, like all bureaucracies, the educational version is a bit of a bully itself. In Sioux City at least, the official response to bullying is to recognize its existence but to deny it's an "overwhelming issue," and retreat behind the comforting bromide that "kids will be kids."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Damsels in Distress
    This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    The Forgiveness of Blood
    There's much to observe – for example, the thoroughly credible performances of the cast, most of them non-professionals.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    The Hunger Games
    A film that transforms a popular work of teen fiction not just by faithfully exploring its themes but, more important, by proving those themes have a very grown-up resonance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Being Flynn
    In this tale of two lives, Being Flynn gets the emphasis wrong. The success that has many fathers is altogether predictable; it's the despicable orphan of failure who has us in his thrall.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Silent House
    Silent House is a bundle of horror-flick tropes yoked together like a package deal.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Attenberg
    What a strange, moving, puzzling, funny, frustrating and ultimately absorbing film this is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Not often does a film double as a literary critic, but this is the Northrop Frye of docs. Essentially, it revises and sharpens the blunted reputation of a great writer.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Tyrannosaur
    The principals are superb, with Mullan and Colman doing a masterful job of inhabiting their separate but equal prisons.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The bloody narrative has an oddly bloodless effect. But that's not surprising – not when a film is so eager to double as a lecture.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Rick Groen
    A Separation
    Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Pariah
    Occasionally, Rees's script seems to mimic Alike's poetry, and fall into its own slough of earnestness, as the stages of the girl's dawning enlightenment get dutifully ticked off like stations of the cross.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Yet these are precisely the sort of pictures that divide audiences over a central question: Are those strings being honestly played or just shamefully pulled? Of course, the answer determines whether you feel moved or merely manipulated.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    We Bought a Zoo
    Director Cameron Crowe who, not having made a dramatic feature since his 2005 stinker "Elizabethtown," seems bound and determined to crank out a crowd-pleaser here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Rick Groen
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    This superb remake has the inevitable look of a period piece, a smoke-filled rendering of things past. However, thanks to Tomas Alfredson's direction, a taut screenplay, and a uniformly brilliant cast, the film also retains its contemporary relevance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Into the Abyss
    By Herzog's lofty standards, the result is mildly disappointing. The film lacks the sociological depth of "The Executioner's Song" or the emotional wallop of "In Cold Blood." But it sure is a surpassingly, and compellingly, strange tale.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    London River
    Here, in orderly fiction, the reverberations bring about the alignment of cultures, the meeting of minds and the comforting assertion that "our lives aren't that different." Maybe so, and the film deserves full marks for trying, at times movingly, to convince us. In the end, the argument is a little too neat to accept, but far too poignant to ignore.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Shame
    This is an affecting picture that leaves the viewer as wrung out as the protagonist. No doubt you'll be seduced but, in the end, you may also feel abandoned.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    My Week with Marilyn
    The acting is superb, the settings are beautifully recreated, the dialogue crackles with occasional wit, but where's the juice? Although lovely to gaze upon, the whole thing feels a bit precious and porcelain, more teapot than sexpot.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Arthur Christmas
    For the kids, the action is always lively and, for the rest of us, the dialogue has a witty and even caustic edge.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    J. Edgar
    What a sprawling, befuddling, fascinating, frustrating mess of a movie. Usually the tautest of directors, Clint Eastwood has gone all slack here, allowing his subject to get completely away from him.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Rick Groen
    Melancholia
    All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Rick Groen
    Immortals
    Thrills are in short supply, but so are annoyances. This is a maintenance-free ride.
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