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.
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