Scott Foundas

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L.A. Weekly, Variety, Village Voice
For 852 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Scott Foundas' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Inside Llewyn Davis
Lowest review score: 0 Grind
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 447 out of 852
  2. Mixed: 278 out of 852
  3. Negative: 127 out of 852
852 movie reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Three words of advice to those who haven't yet seen it: Run, don't walk. Composed of excerpts from hundreds of locally shot movies past and present -- from grade-A prestige pictures to unrepentant grade-Z schlock -- Los Angeles Plays Itself serves as Andersen's exhaustive but never exhausting attempt to reconcile the myriad identities of the world's moviemaking capital.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    This Is England
    The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Springtime in a Small Town
    Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Foundas
    An Education
    Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    The Treasure
    Porumboiu’s particular brand of farce is always shot through with the pulse of everyday life and its Sisyphean struggles. He is, simply put, one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Tales of the Grim Sleeper
    What emerges, finally, is an urgent distress call from one of America’s many, predominately black inner cities cast adrift by decades of municipal neglect and institutional racism.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Foundas
    The Departed
    DiCaprio harnesses a terrific, buggy intensity reminiscent of "GoodFellas'" hopped-up Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Half Nelson
    At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Street Fight
    This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Foundas
    The Intruder
    For Denis’ film - which may be her most intricately constructed and intensely beautiful to date - is one that transcends words and stories, a movie to be felt rather than rationalized.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Foundas
    The Dark Knight
    The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Foundas
    The Pursuit of Happyness
    For a movie conceived and executed in the mainstream Hollywood idiom, it has uncommon depth and honesty.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 10 Scott Foundas
    Evidence
    The movie itself is conclusive proof that the found-footage horror cycle sparked by “The Blair Witch Project” and mined successfully by the “Paranormal Activity” series has finally reached its low ebb.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Slumdog Millionaire
    An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Children of Men
    One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Foundas
    Horse Money
    Working about as far as possible from the commercial mainstream of the movie business, Costa has again made a singular docu-fiction hybrid that defies classification as readily as it reimagines the possibilities of cinema for the post-spectacle, post-theatrical era.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    For Scientologists, going clear refers to a coveted status awarded to those who have completed a certain level of auditing. But for the men and women on screen here, it means something else: reclaiming their own voices and demanding to be heard.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Foundas
    Old Joy
    A beautifully nuanced study in friendship and the irretrievability of the past.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Foundas
    Momma's Man
    Wryly comic, sometimes heartbreaking and altogether original film about a thirtysomething Angeleno who pays a visit to his aging New York parents and finds himself unwilling or unable to leave.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Scott Foundas
    Volver
    The movie is enjoyable, but not passionately engaging in the way we've come to expect from Almodóvar, and it leaves you somewhat cold in spite of the warmth of Cruz's galvanic performance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Snowpiercer
    Snowpiercer has been brought to the screen with the kind of solid narrative craftsmanship, carefully drawn characters and — above all — respect for the audience’s intelligence rarely encountered in high-concept genre cinema.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Foundas
    Mutual Appreciation
    As before, Bujalski's preference for nonprofessional actors, his ear for the rhythms of conversation among bright young 20-somethings and his adept use of a roving, hand-held camera (this time shooting in fuzzy black and white) lend the film an invigorating energy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Foundas
    Willard
    Strictly for the birds.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Scott Foundas
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting...But the disparate pieces never quite jell; the movie is all trees and no forest.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Scott Foundas
    The Wind Rises
    Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Scott Foundas
    Osama
    At the center...lies the stunning Golbahari, a nonprofessional who recalls some of Bresson's most haunting model-actors in her intense, anguished grace.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Ixcanul
    What emerges, finally, is a film that gives an urgent, original voice to a people too frequently marginalized in both movies and society at large.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Scott Foundas
    Triad Election
    Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.
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