Robert Abele

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L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, TheWrap
For 1,590 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Robert Abele's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Donbass
Lowest review score: 0 Detention of the Dead
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 824 out of 1590
  2. Mixed: 489 out of 1590
  3. Negative: 277 out of 1590
1590 movie reviews
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    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Robert Abele
    Death on the Nile
    Branagh’s indulgences can grate, but you also sense how much he loves it all, which helps. It also helps that production designer Jim Clay’s elaborate recreations (of an age-specific steamer and Aswan’s Cataract Hotel) and Paco Delgado’s stylish period clothing make for steadily appealing visuals, and that the story is one of Christie’s more tantalizing, hot-tempered mysteries.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    The Conductor
    While The Conductor isn’t redrawing the documentary form, it’s nevertheless pleasurably illuminating as admiration cinema about a feminist hero who bucked tradition and broke rules to make herself — and the significant music she’s curated — heard on her terms.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    Jackass Forever
    As always, what’s so joyously, infectiously funny about “Jackass” is rarely the prank itself, but how funny they all find it to reduce each other to writhing heaps.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    Sundown
    In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Robert Abele
    Call Jane
    At its richest and most riveting, when it’s seizing your breath or making you laugh or opening your eyes, Call Jane is about what it takes to come to that realization about true liberation, and what it means to see it through.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    The Pink Cloud
    If you’re game for an emerging filmmaking talent’s stingingly uncanny foretelling, The Pink Cloud is an arresting examination of what it can look like when existence is misshaped into a compromised destiny.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Robert Abele
    Munich: The Edge of War
    It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Delicious
    Should your New Year’s watching require the occasional break from grim awards fare and grimmer real-world news, you could do a lot worse than this well-intentioned tale of mirthful mouthfuls and other appetites.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Robert Abele
    Jockey
    It’s disappointing that the story machinations get in the way, because the lived-in heft of Collins’ turn is better suited to the atmospheric portrait inside “Jockey,” the one scored for tonal moodiness by Bryce and Aaron Dessner, than the story that shoehorns in a dubiously engineered motivation late in the film for added drama it didn’t need.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    Marx Can Wait
    Even at its most emotionally awkward or loose, it signals a filmmaking sensibility where Bellocchio — whose nearly 60-year career has been built on a provocative rendering of the social and political fractures around him — is refreshingly averse to viewing his own past through rose-colored glasses.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Robert Abele
    Revolution of Our Times
    With specificity, sweep and urgency, occasionally terrifying and bloody when capturing violent police tactics, Chow’s movie is a true epic of meaningful resistance.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Beijing Spring
    Though modestly assembled, Beijing Spring benefits from its historical richness as a portrait of artistic dissent.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Robert Abele
    The Velvet Queen
    Gorgeous, humbling, looking out-, up- and inward, the documentary The Velvet Queen is the rare nature film about not only beauty and beasts but also the very human urge to make sense of our place in it all.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 45 Robert Abele
    The Tender Bar
    It’s surprising that this effort from Clooney is as flavorless and unrooted as it is, because his better directorial turns are the ones grounded in character more than style.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Robert Abele
    President
    President is in-the-moment documentary storytelling of the highest order, and what it’s showing is what the threat to democracy everywhere looks like and will continue to look like.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    Torn
    Satisfyingly emotional without ever feeling sensationalized.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Robert Abele
    Being the Ricardos
    A Wikipedia entry fed into what can only be called The Sorkinator, but missing the wit module, Being the Ricardos is cultural-television-marital history flattened into a babbling stream of airless, horribly shot scenes that never come close to the glorious timing of a single comic exchange on “I Love Lucy.”
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Robert Abele
    Wolf
    A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Try Harder!
    As snapshots go of bright kids facing the next step, Try Harder! is winning enough, but considering how much more there is to follow up on, here’s hoping it’s only part one.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    The Hand of God
    The first hour’s parade of oddballs and exaggerated vignettes under the bright Neapolitan pop of Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography can be broad to a fault, but there’s an honest perspective at work about what lands in an awkward boy’s memory.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Robert Abele
    Procession
    Observational documentaries are by nature intrusive, but Procession, miraculously, never feels that way — you sense humane engagement, not imposition.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Robert Abele
    Boiling Point
    Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Robert Abele
    Compartment No. 6
    In stripping genre ornamentation away to get to what brings people together in stark, lonely, and in this case, mighty cold circumstances, Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki”) has achieved something genuinely unlikely, and quietly renewing about what a love story can be.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Prayers for the Stolen
    The result is a film made of loosely connected scenes, the best ones floating between observation and storytelling, not unlike a dream.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Robert Abele
    Peepal Tree
    Though its seriousness of purpose and visuals of trees whole and hewn keep Peepal Tree intermittently compelling, one wishes the more pointed audaciousness of Kanadé’s last film, the stylish acting-school melodrama “CRD,” were in effect here to rev the urgency of what is clearly a deeply personal crusade for the filmmaker.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Hive
    Hive is occasionally bumpy, but it’s the rough terrain of a raw narrative — the out-of-place music cue or awkward dream snippet doesn’t disrupt the social realist momentum, which is at its best when focused on the grit of how moving forward is also moving on.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Paper & Glue
    In its swirl of ingenuity, purity, and achievement, Paper & Glue can’t help but feel self-serving for its traveling, ever-creative dynamo, even when the tale JR has to tell is unquestionably riveting and inspiring.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Robert Abele
    Gaza Mon Amour
    Low-key and likable, the Nassers’ Gaza Mon Amour is a movie with no use for sentimentality but in which the timing of a simple kindness, a nervous smile or a cathartic laugh means everything. Which it often can.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Robert Abele
    Julia
    As breezy primers go in a life that’s as full as it gets, this collection of the archival and the anecdotal, with the occasional preparing of dishes as mouth-watering interludes, is decidedly more feast than fast food.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Robert Abele
    Finch
    A mishmash of star power, bleakness, CGI and the cutes, it will on the one hand remind you of how charmingly adaptive Hanks can be, while the same time proving just how problematic the end of the world is as a scenario for schematic heart-tugging.
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