Scott Tobias

Select another critic »
NPR, The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Reveal, The Verge, UPROXX, Variety, Village Voice
For 1,915 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Scott Tobias' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Sansho the Bailiff
Lowest review score: 0 AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 975 out of 1915
  2. Mixed: 723 out of 1915
  3. Negative: 217 out of 1915
1915 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Scream Blacula Scream
    There’s so much distance between where Blacula started and where Scream Blacula Scream ends up that the sequel quickly exhausts its thin purpose.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Manny
    Though co-directed by Leon Gast, who made the exceptional “Rumble In The Jungle” documentary When We Were Kings, Manny stays entirely on the surface of Pacquiao’s life and of a sport that’s rife with dirty dealing and chicanery.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Cherry Orchard
    Cacoyannis errs on the side of genteel respectability, sacrificing emotion and verve at the altar of good taste.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty
    Save for the vague aura of danger surrounding Guzmán—which palpably engulfs the filmmakers as they get deeper into the cartel’s “Golden Triangle”—Drug Lord has trouble forming a coherent point of view.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    AKA
    Divided into a triptych of images sprawled across a Cinemascope frame, AKA rarely uses the extra screens for information that couldn't be conveyed well enough in one.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Eight Legged Freaks
    The few isolated funny moments, particularly a witty visual gag involving a pop-up tent with legs, provide only a short break from the screen-flooding onslaught of CGI creatures and screaming extras.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Life or Something Like It
    A banal message movie.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Park Bench
    Hayden and Perez do their best to generate sweetness and spark, but the obstacles separating these characters are as contrived as the cliches that animate them.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    13 Sins
    This ultimately isn’t a film about human fallibility, but about high-concept grotesquerie for its own sake.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Shelter
    To want Statham to appear like he cares about any of it is to ask too much.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Dracula
    Besson seems more at home making pop art than gothic tragedy, but the neither-here-nor-there quality of Dracula makes it chintzy and unsatisfying on both fronts. In a word, it sucks.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Nurse 3D
    Co-writer/director Douglas Aarniokoski has a nasty little neo-noir thriller tucked into Nurse 3D, but he buries it in his all-chocolate-all-the-time conceptual sloppiness.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Derailed
    Much of the second half is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, though you don't have to have 20/20 vision in order to see the big twist coming from miles away. Once it arrives, the film officially disembarks from reality with an over-the-top climax and denouement that play shamelessly to the bloodthirsty masses.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Home Fries
    Veering wildly from macabre Southern Gothic to quirky small-town romance, Home Fries is too busy cross-pollinating genres to bother with consistent behavior and tone.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Sex Tape
    Sex Tape is a case study in how little interest American movies—and especially American sex comedies—have in dealing with sex as anything other than a source of cheap giggles and nonstop humiliation.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Blackboards
    Episodic and minimalist to a fault, Blackboards makes its ironic point about education, then makes it again a few times over for good measure, rarely expanding beyond its narrow seriocomic agenda.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Unicorn Store
    The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Million Dollar Arm
    The only splash of cold water comes from Lake Bell as J.B.’s bohemian tenant, who pops his bubble of self-importance (and the film’s) whenever she gets the opportunity... her chemistry with Hamm, who gives his slickster all the dimension he can, offers a nice relief from the broad culture comedy and sentimental button-pushing.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Virginia
    Connelly, Harris and Amy Madigan, as Tipton's devastated wife, all do their best to bring a measure of soul to Black's creations, but there's something fundamentally synthetic about Virginia, which lays bare its influences without doing much to reanimate them.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Two Brothers
    The tiger footage in Two Brothers would make for a solid nature documentary, but because the animals are shoehorned into a narrative, they've been anthropomorphized to death.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Labor Day
    Reitman has placed a not-unreasonable bet that sensual creatures like Winslet and Brolin can convey the passion necessary for their relationship to make sense, but the film carries itself too stiffly, like it’s so afraid of making the wrong choices that it doesn’t make any good ones.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Mystic Masseur
    The Mystic Masseur shows more signs of life than "Cotton Mary," but it's still a producer's movie: attractively mounted, dramatically inert.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Loft
    Whatever fun there might be in the guesswork is wiped away by the realization that Van Looy has made a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake, to no discernible thematic end.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Transcendence
    Transcendence wants to use this future panic to comment meaningfully on our current interconnectedness and inorganic lifestyle, but it’s screaming too much to have that conversation.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Ouija
    The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Surviving Christmas
    Affleck's psychotic enthusiasm aside, no one seems to be having a good time, and the ill will becomes infectious.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    I Am David
    While it's not always necessary for filmmakers to relate that closely to their material, Feig's marked distance from the story of a sullen boy who parts the Iron Curtain may account for its generic artlessness.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Perfect Match
    An attractive and appealing cast helps this formulaic pablum go down easy, but the genial tone buffs the edge out of every element.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Kill Switch
    Had Smit developed his themes as scrupulously as his visual effects, Kill Switch might have been the next “Primer” or “District 9,” but instead it feels like a demo reel for a game that nobody can play.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Way Home
    It's telling that this slice of milquetoast is the first to get picked up by a major studio boutique. Put in the most euphemistic terms possible, the film's banal premise contains "universal themes," meaning that its sentimental clichés translate readily to all continents and cultures.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Better Luck Tomorrow
    Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Better Luck Tomorrow is that, on a slow night, it's easy to imagine these delinquents wanting to rent a film just like it.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Stalingrad
    Bondarchuk mingles the you-are-there grittiness of close-quarters combat and constant assaults from above and below with war-movie clichés that haven’t been updated since before the real Battle Of Stalingrad. It’s history written with airbrush.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Police Story: Lockdown
    Lockdown is mostly a humorless bore until the obligatory bloopers and outtakes in the end credits—and even those are drawing from a flat vein, since there’s so little play in the movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The 33
    In broad strokes, the events that unfold are undeniably riveting.... The trouble is, The 33 only knows broad strokes. Lacking any specific angle on the ordeal, the filmmakers give the once-over-lightly treatment to every aspect of it, which ensures that none of them will be properly served.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Lone Ranger
    Verbinski orchestrates complex action sequences, including two spectacular bits of derring-do on a moving train, with a precision few in Hollywood are capable of pulling off. Yet The Lone Ranger, like his last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Jessabelle
    Director Kevin Greutert, who cut his teeth on the Saw series (editing the first five and directing Saw VI and Saw 3D), whips up some generic Louisiana atmosphere, but his PG-13 shock effects are ineffectual, and he’s eventually given over entirely to a story that twists into melodramatic knots. The takeaway from all this: Sometimes less is more.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Notebook
    Opening shots tend to say a lot about a movie, but they say everything about The Notebook, a glossy adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' four-hanky sudser.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Equalizer
    Say this for The Equalizer: It gets the job done, and that job, to quote A Clockwork Orange, is delivering a little of the old ultra-violence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Fruitvale Station
    Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Emperor's Club
    The film is an old-fashioned morality play writ extra-large, applying a heavy, austere tone to a sequence of events that can't bear the load. The burden falls mostly on Kevin Kline, who trades in his lithe, expressive comedic gifts for a dramatic role that fits him like a straitjacket and a pair of lead shoes.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Family Stone
    Most of it falls on Bezucha, not just for devising these monstrously cruel characters, but for putting them in situations that are far too serious to be resolved by Christmas morning. When the melodrama gets too intense, the film collapses in slapstick.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Duller than a rain delay on the Golf Channel.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Protector 2
    The bigger The Protector 2 gets, the further it gets away from Jaa’s basic appeals.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Black Phone 2
    Derrickson’s instinct to lean on a low-res, Super 8-style camerawork in the film’s frequent dream sequences is fitfully effective, rendering nightmares like spools of home movies that have been decaying in the attic. But here, he’s having to reanimate a dead property.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Connie and Carla
    Seems as much an imposter in the drag-queen world as its heroines; it fronts the sort of safely asexual gay characters found on network TV.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Way, Way Back
    There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Stretch
    It’s a backhanded sort of praise to say Stretch is a movie that goes nowhere fast.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Calling
    It could generously be referred to as a character study about a detective haunted by her past, and a case that forces her to confront that past in Biblical terms. It could less generously be referred to as a pseudo-spiritual thriller that tries to literalize scriptural mythos in the same bloody terms David Fincher’s Seven used to literalize the Seven Deadly Sins, only far less artfully.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Ward
    The Ward feels less indebted to cinema's past than a desperate attempt to keep up with the present. Carpenter has made his approximation of a cheap, twisty, shock-filled modern horror movie, and he has lost all but faint sighs of his minimalist swagger in the process.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Where Hands Touch
    Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Watch
    The Watch perks up when Ayoade's spacey line readings give it something unique and unexpected - otherwise, per Costco, audiences are buying their generic sci-fi comedy in bulk.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    1:54
    1:54 intends to be a straight-shooting social drama about the multifaceted problem of bullying in the digital age, but it’s out of touch with how real teenagers think and act and communicate. It’s a modern film that feels like a relic.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Chlorine
    it’s hard to not see the puppet strings above everyone’s heads as Alaimo tugs them into big statements about suburban emptiness, economic flim-flammery, family dysfunction, and other hallmarks of America’s foundational rot.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    You, Me & Tuscany
    It’s a piece of escapism that can’t escape from itself.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Head in the Clouds
    The film feels more at home with sex than war, like a romance novel where the swinging lovers find their passions stirred by bombs exploding in the distance. Their three-way dalliances are so frivolous and silly that once the action turns dark, Duigan and his cast leave audiences unprepared for the emotional fallout.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Middle Man
    Crowley’s thinly conceived debut feature only has one big joke, and everything around it is either long-winded setup or deflating letdown.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Storytelling
    It would be tempting to call Storytelling a narrow and simplistic examination of the creative process, if only Solondz weren't so quick to agree.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The November Man
    The November Man doesn’t pause for a moment’s breath, which tightens up the action at the expense of clarity, character development, wit, politics, themes, subtext, and all the other things that can go into a thriller besides bang-bang and crash-crash.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    Without the mythical power or giddy adventurousness of the first two Star Wars movies, the impact is strangely numbing, like watching a two-and-a-half-hour ILM show reel in search of moneyed investors.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Short Game
    The Short Game is like a tape-delayed Olympics: old footage, slick bios, no substance.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Stolen Summer
    Beyond fulfilling the dreams of a seemingly nice fellow, the whole venture is a victory of hype over substance, loudly accomplishing nothing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Lay the Favorite
    Adapted from a comic thriller by Carl Hiaasen, South Florida's day-glo answer to Elmore Leonard, the film missed the fizzy, beach-friendly fun of Hiaasen's work, and wound up playing the comedy and the suspense at half-speed. It couldn't keep up with its own protagonist.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    IO
    The dynamic between Sam and Micah shifts the film into romantic melodrama, as lifeless and as chaste as the windswept apocalypse that surrounds them.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Deliver Us From Evil
    Derrickson gives it everything he’s got, but when a film offers “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” as a spiritual pathway, it’s hard to take seriously.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Ejecta
    In the end, the film isn’t scary and it isn’t all that brainy, either. It’s just a juicy metaphor in search of worthy action to support it.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Straight-Jacket
    Loses its sass too quickly.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Barely Lethal
    While Barely Lethal is conscious of the clichés of the genre, it’s also the type of film that won’t let that get in the way of regurgitating them.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    RoboCop
    There’s no harmony at all to the elements tossed into the new remake of RoboCop, but credit screenwriter Joshua Zetumer and director José Padilha for at least having some elements in play.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Merchants of Doubt
    Though Kenner’s slick graphics and attractively photographed talking heads call Errol Morris to mind, his methods are significantly less subtle.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Saving Face
    The umpteenth variation on second-generation American immigrants bucking the traditions of their first-generation elders.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Paparazzi
    Paparazzi follows the vigilante playbook in all its banality, without much in the way of moral reflection.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    The Longest Ride
    Sparks has to rely on exterior plot machinations because his characters lack any inner life.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Max
    There’s a touching story here about a boy getting over his grief and narcissism by nursing a dog through its own set of traumas, but Max is far too gung-ho about playing up the pup’s heroism and self-sacrifice to give it much time to develop.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Dreams
    Aside from a lively stretch toward the end of the film where Jennifer and Fernando wrestle on equal footing, literally as well as figuratively, Dreams is blunt in its intentions and programmatic in its plotting.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Waiting...
    There's real potential in the premise of young, unmotivated screw-ups logging time at a dead-end restaurant job--a hash-slinging "Office Space," basically--but first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick makes it look like a homemade sitcom laced with profanity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    ABCs of Death 2
    The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Agent Cody Banks
    The generic intrigue and chase scenes take over, leaving poor Muniz at the mercy of stunt doubles and chintzy special effects.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Ethan Mao
    Without contrivances, the movie would only run about five minutes.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Virgin
    Shot on shaky-cam digital video, filtered through what appears to be an old sweatsock, the film mimics Dogme-style realism in its vision of modern persecution, but in the end, it offers the sort of touchy-feely mysticism that belongs to the crystal-ball and tarot-reading set.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Curvature
    Part metaphysical thriller, part inquiry into scientific ethics and the morality of revenge, the sci-fi indie Curvature wants to get the heart racing and the mind bending simultaneously, but flatlines in both departments.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Freeze Frame
    Compelling as it sounds, the idea behind Freeze Frame doesn't make any sense, especially when realized in practical terms.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Open Windows
    Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Our Blood Is Wine
    Oenophiles may swoon over the delicious native varietals that tease Quinn’s palate, but Railsback’s thin and disorganized documentary doesn’t go down so smoothly.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Mean Machine
    While competently staged and punched up by Lock, Stock's changing camera speeds, it doesn't have the wit or intrigue to sustain its half-length.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration. But one salvageable piece emerges in the middle: a sharp and acerbically funny segment that seems written specifically for Parker Posey.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    House of Sand and Fog
    Folds like a house of cards, collapsing under its own flimsy foundation.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Secret Society
    A feeble and self-congratulatory heart-warmer.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Serena
    Serena is quite bad, as it happens, but until it goes absolutely haywire in the final act, the biggest problem is that it’s all bones and no flesh, so busy combining all the structural elements that go into an award-winner that it has no personality of its own.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Reminders of Him
    Reminders of Him is a disciplined mediocrity, sticking to picture postcard images and a happy ending that’s so much easier to achieve than the story allows. Next time, please have the courtesy to be crazier.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Duane Hopwood
    Duane Hopwood is suffused with hangdog dreariness, equivalent to a unsoled shoe treading rainwater.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Mambo italiano
    If Gaudreault's 90-minute pilot ever makes it to television, French-Canadians can look forward to their own Italian version of A.K.A. Pablo.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Saw II
    Stripped down to the barest genre essentials, Saw is a spring-loaded killing machine, packed with sadistic little deathtraps and ludicrous macabre twists, and its quickie sequel offers more of the same, which should again appease viewers who enjoy being jerked around.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Scott Tobias
    Against the Ropes
    Right up to the ludicrous finale and an even more improbable denouement, everything rings Hollywood-false. More galling still, the filmmakers' inventions take the zing out of the facts.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 35 Scott Tobias
    Life in a Day
    Produced in partnership with YouTube and distributed by National Geographic Films, the documentary Life in a Day is offspring with the worst genetic traits of both: narcissism on a global scale, speckled with pretty pictures. In a world without books or magazines, this is the movie people would watch in the waiting room at the dentist's office.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Life Happens
    The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Cop Out
    With Cop Out, Smith works from a script other than his own for the first time--this one penned by siblings Mark and Robb Cullen--but his slack direction siphons the energy out of this tongue-in-cheek throwback to ’80s mismatched-buddy comedies.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Garden Party
    Taken together, these stories are a symphony of inconsequentiality, drained of tension and purpose until all that remains is a vague sense of collective ennui.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Perfect Game
    Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Sleuth
    No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Nanny McPhee Returns
    On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Safe Haven
    The cutaways to this cop-on-the-edge plot are jarring and lacking in conviction, and when the whole tortured mess comes together in a twist-filled third act, Safe Haven becomes a full-blown calamity.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Last House on the Left
    It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Bella
    The emotions at play in Bella are no doubt heartfelt--and must have resonated with a few hundred people, anyway--but they're so cut-and-dried that the mawkish script virtually writes itself.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Lodger
    It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Mr. Woodcock
    Thornton is one of America's finest actors, but after this, "Bad News Bears," and "School For Scoundrels," his run of loveably irascible authority-figure roles should probably come to a close. He's kicked around one child too many.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Primeval
    If there were a shred of sincerity to its straight-faced exposé of African strife, the film would be easier to forgive, but since it's really just a cheap horror-thriller about an ancient predator, the austere tone does it no favors.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Red Dawn
    Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Awake
    Only the so-bad-it's-good crowd need apply.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Moth Diaries
    Writer-director Mary Harron, a supremely intelligent adaptor who did wonders with the screen version of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," simply doesn't have the chops to give this story the florid kick it needs.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Loverboy
    Though he labors endlessly to account for her behavior, which is explained away by flashbacks to her decadent parents and a glamorous mother-figure played under Vaseline lens by an uncredited Sandra Bullock, Bacon fails to make her seem human.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    TRON: Legacy
    Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Casino Jack
    Spacey has made a career out of projecting the smarmy elitism of the powerful, but Casino Jack is so painfully clunky that he gets dragged down along with it.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Green Lantern
    A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Death by China
    These are all legitimate concerns, which Navarro supports with testimony from economists, politicians, union leaders, and businesspeople, but they're undermined at every point by a sky-is-falling hysteria that registers as white noise. It's the documentary equivalent of a raving street-corner derelict.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    License to Wed
    Krasinski knows how to play off Williams--his pained looks are all too appropriate in the face of Williams' desperate shtick--but it's disillusioning to see him here, because he seems too smart for this film.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Battle: Los Angeles
    It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    True Wolf
    Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Another Gay Movie
    Arriving late to the scene, Another Gay Movie coughs up the same awkward gags about coming of age via false starts and sexual humiliation, only the genuine sweetness and camaraderie that made the first "Pie" movie bearable has been replaced by glib self-awareness.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Mirrors
    The film looks to do for reflective surfaces what "Amityville 4" did for killer lamps.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Burning Plain
    The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    My Best Friend's Girl
    Dane Cook plays a smug jerk in the dismal comedy My Best Friend's Girl. Strike that: He's only ACTING like a smug jerk.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Man on a Ledge
    As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    La mission
    Bratt’s character is stuck in old ways of thinking, and the movie, for all its well-meaning social intent, is right there with him.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Couples Retreat
    Features a running gag about a little boy in the midst of potty training who doesn’t always go where it’s appropriate. In a nutshell, that subplot explains everything that’s wrong about the film.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Night at the Museum
    Stiller's continued efforts to court the broadest possible audience has taken the edge off his comedy. Whenever he shares screen time with Williams, it looks like the grim future he's mapping out for himself.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Help
    The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Jennifer's Body
    Cody’s script fails in the fundamentals.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    BloodRayne
    With minimal flare and maximal gore, Boll simply delivers the turgid drama and incompetently staged action sequences that have made him the unstoppable Big Boss of the gaming community.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Shaggy Dog
    Okay, so when does the fun start?
    • 32 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    The Perfect Holiday
    It's a measure of the film's lack of imagination that Morris Chestnut, as an aspiring songwriter logging time as a mall Santa, can't even think of a good fake occupation.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 33 Scott Tobias
    Monte Carlo
    Monte Carlo finally resolves itself in a farcical climax that at least shows a little energy, but it isn't enough to overcome the discomfiting tensions and indifferent formula filmmaking that plagues nearly every scene.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Formula 51
    Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Darkness
    At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    London Has Fallen
    The action never stops once the first car bomb is triggered, but the second half of London Has Fallen takes place mostly in the dark, where nobody can see the budget.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Afternoon Delight
    Afternoon Delight is one of those bad films that seem to drift further and further away from a recognizable reality the more we get to know it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Harmontown
    The impression left by Harmontown is that the podcast and the tour are feeding the beast, worsening a pathology that casts him as the “mayor” of whatever stage he happens to be occupying at the moment.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Premature
    Premature isn’t nearly as inventive and witty as Groundhog Day or Edge Of Tomorrow about finding fresh angles on repeating events, and it overestimates how much the audience might care about the self-improvement of a bland, clueless douchebag.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Herbie Fully Loaded
    In reviving the beloved Disney property, Robinson attempts to resuscitate the fast-motion shots and sub-Three Stooges physical comedy of classic Herbie, but the new model seems distantly related to the innocent, peppy little car of old.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    All Roads Lead to Rome
    Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    A Walk to Remember
    Basically a prim, desexualized "Carrie," told from the prom date's perspective and featuring Peter Coyote in the Piper Laurie role.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Saw
    Though dumber than a box of rocks, Saw forges ahead with the kind of conviction and energy that will keep bad-cinema junkies sitting bolt upright.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Tears of the Sun
    Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Event
    A deadly earnest, relentlessly solemn affair.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Walk of Shame
    Brill’s point that there should be no such thing as a “walk of shame” is a good one, but he lacks the conviction to see it through honestly—or humorously.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    Gomez-Rejon has erected a gleaming shrine to adolescent narcissism.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Aloft
    There are reasons why everyone on screen looks as unhappy as they do, but Llosa puts viewers in a place where they can’t understand precisely why, so the only choice is to sit there marinating in misery and boredom.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Prince
    All would be forgiven if director Brian A. Miller were the next John Woo, but the shootouts and car chases call to mind adjectives like “requisite” and “obligatory,” and the ready-made New Orleans ambience is nonexistent, probably for budgetary reasons.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Black or White
    The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Showtime
    De Niro and Murphy are visibly uncomfortable with each other. Their improvisation seems chaotic and mismanaged, and the movie follows in kind.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Vampire Clay
    Nothing this absurd should be this boring.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Alexander
    Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Harvard Man
    Channels Toback in his purest form, which will probably be a treat for auteurists and a headache for just about everyone else.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Bad Boys II
    Bad Boys II is the rare case in which escapism involves leaving the theater.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Mojave
    Monahan isn’t required to satisfy bloodlust or to pay off conventional plot points, even if his screenplay for “The Departed” displayed an abundant talent for doing so. But he assumes too much in believing that the audience will connect in any way with a sour, prickly narcissist who’s trapped in the gilded cage of wealth and fame.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Who Is Cletis Tout?
    In the absence of sincerity, Cletis Tout creates a vacuum that flushes out the entire story, leaving nothing but its own hollow cleverness.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Hellions
    Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    When the Game Stands Tall
    While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Face of an Angel
    Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Dracula Untold
    Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Suicide Kings
    The only redeeming moments come from Walken, whose assured, effortless screen presence stands out from his faceless co-stars. Taped to a leather chair and bleeding profusely from a severed finger, he's still the most powerful person in the room.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Opens with its snazziest effects sequences and gets cheaper from there, as if studio executives were constantly scaling back the budget as the filmmakers went along.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Entourage
    The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    It reduces a large cast to an unwieldy collection of simpletons and caricatures.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Lake Placid
    At least White summons the camp energy that Lake Placid is fecklessly seeking.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Let's Get Frank
    Everly tries to patch together a profile out of borrowed news clips and shoddy videography. In the process, Frank's charisma and force never emerge.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Reflektor Tapes
    Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Playroom
    Between the loaded conversations and metaphors, and the phony overlay of a children's fairy tale, The Playroom can't stop telegraphing themes and interpreting itself. There's nothing left for the audience to do.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Fifty Shades of Black
    At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Death to Smoochy
    An aggressive black comedy that seeks to satisfy a bloodlust already quelled many times over.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    Nothing is more dangerous than a sequel to a wildly successful awful movie, because the artisans involved have to preserve the franchise, which means honoring the original formula as if it were a cure for cancer.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Free Birds
    Free Birds feels like Hollywood brining small children for the blockbusters they’ll pay to see when they’re older. It’s littered with quips, but the film puts a premium on loud, effects-driven action that mistakes nonstop intensity for cartoony entertainment.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Identical
    Even allowing The Identical its premise, the reframing of the Elvis myth as a wholesome example of following God’s plan is not as inspirational as the film seems to believe. Rock fantasies are rarely this milquetoast.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Water Diviner
    Sorting through the shards of the Ottoman Empire requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe. His on-screen persona could stand to be as modest as his filmmaking abilities.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Stalin's Wife
    Though serviceable as a primer on Soviet history under Stalin, the film's sloppy assemblage of dull interviews and stock footage never comes close to illuminating a life that the Russian people have long cherished as a precious enigma.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    White Rabbit
    Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Greendale
    There's no forgiving the home-movie slackness of Greendale for its numbing dearth of imagination.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    The Bank
    LaPaglia brings the hero into a world of greed and compromised values, but his fork-tongued monologues aren't remotely seductive, which makes the ending a foregone conclusion.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Arthur
    This Arthur cravenly turns Susan into a monstrous status-seeker, making her less of a human being and thus much easier for Arthur to trample over in securing a meaningful adult relationship.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    High Crimes
    A major disappointment that lacks the courage to follow through on its premise's themes.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Dead or Alive: Final
    In Dead Or Alive: Final, Miike trades his grimly comic, sex-and-blood insignia for a self-consciously wacky conflation of Hong Kong action cinema and Japanese anime, with a little cheap science fiction tossed in for good measure.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Girl Most Likely
    Wiig’s new comedy sulks limply along with her, unable to bring the kind of energy that might complement her tendency to underplay every scene.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    9 Songs
    Between the performances in the bedroom and on stage, 9 Songs gives off plenty of heat, but the whole project seems half-thought-out and hastily arranged, hampered by butt-ugly DV photography that turn skin tones grimy and make the Brixton scenes look as high-grain as a bowl of Mueslix.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    National Security
    Lawrence clamors for the spotlight. If he ever found a way to make desperation look like charisma, he'd be the funniest man in America.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Stand Up Guys
    Stevens wants to honor the living legends who have miraculously agreed to appear in his movie, but after spending a full hour treating their characters like cartoons, the about-face into heartfelt slop lacks the necessary gravitas.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Getaway
    It couldn’t be a simpler, more workable premise for a good B-movie, but the amount of effort put into making it fast and edgy is inversely proportional to the scant thrills it yields.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Bride & Prejudice
    Chadha doesn't seem at home with either Austen or Bollywood, and her ambitions far exceed her competence in the song-and-dance numbers, which are a clutter of stiff choreography and silly original lyrics.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Scott Tobias
    Search Party
    As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Revolver
    Ritchie has said that it takes several viewings to fully understand what's going on in Revolver, but once will be enough for most to agree to take his word for it.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Broken Bridges
    Country Music Television's answer to "Elizabethtown."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Zombie Strippers!
    Currently stopping by theaters briefly en route to DVD, the film tries to position Jameson as the next Linnea Quigley, the B-movie queen behind such enduring titles as "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" and "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama."
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Blind Side
    Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    ATM
    No, the indie horror movie ATM is not about a psychotic automated teller that charges the steepest of convenience fees - your life! - but it isn't much smarter than that premise, either.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Last Song
    Offers a taming-of-the-shrew scenario so relentlessly bland and old-fashioned it makes "Dear John," the Sparks adaptation from two months ago, look like "Last Tango In Paris."
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant's pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he's making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Howard the Duck
    The film resembles one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that has one joke and keeps going, and going, and going.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Inhale
    It's neither remotely convincing as true-to-life drama or lurid and propulsive enough to work as exploitation. It's just bad.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Captivity
    In a genre where killers love to play head games, it's a clever idea (Cohen's?) to have this one remain mute, but that leaves Cuthbert to carry much of the psychological load, and there's no substance to her character, apart from the suggestion that she's being punished for her vanity.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Finding Bliss
    It's a big-hearted, well-intentioned disaster.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Bounty Hunter
    Tennant and his actors have done the bare minimum to carry their lifeless movie past the finish line, and their apathy reads a lot like contempt.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Obsessed
    Doing his best to class up the joint, "The Wire's" Idris Elba stars as the perfect man.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Losers
    There isn’t a whiff of humility or self-deprecation to Clay, Roque, Jensen, Cougar, and Pooch, a collection of black-ops douchebags and our ostensible heroes.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Trash Humpers
    With every project, he pops open the same trunkload of shtick and leaves everyone to argue over whether it’s art. It’s a win-win situation for Korine, who’s either a genius or a provocateur who’s succeeded in gaming his stuffy critics.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Wild Hogs
    Abysmal.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    I Love You, Beth Cooper
    There’s hardly an authentic second in the film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Holiday
    Even with a wild card like Black desperately retooling his lines, there's nothing authentic or personal about The Holiday--it's as chilling as heart-warmers get.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Black Christmas
    Seems to go out of its way to obliterate all the elements that made the original so special.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Deal
    To think that a semi-major studio financed a production this low-rent and listless is amazing: Since when did MGM start making student films?
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Imagine That
    Though he commits to a lot of embarrassing silliness, Murphy projects so little genuine warmth that his transformation barely registers.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Yogi Bear
    The best that could be said of Yogi Bear is that it doesn't diminish its source material.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Smiley
    Gallagher briefly threatens to turn Smiley into something closer to the hallucinatory psychological horror of "Repulsion," but he retreats to the more conventional twists and jump-scares expected of bottom-of-the-barrel slasher films like this one. This film will not do for the Internet what "Psycho" did for showers - no more computers have to be smashed because of it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    It’s a busier and less coherent film, too, with a baffling master plot and a crowded pileup of special effects in search of something to do.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Ugly Truth
    The sort of rom-com apparatus that no relationship can overcome.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Devil
    Perhaps someday, in the greatest twist of all, Shyamalan will be remembered as the Hitchcock of the early 21st century. Until then, movies like Devil will be misunderstood as schlock.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    Cultists will be happy to discover that In The Name Of The King bears all the so-bad-it's-good hallmarks of a classic Boll production.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Killers
    Killers isn’t an entertainment, it’s a high-speed spat.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Good Luck Chuck
    There's an audience out there for this kind of thing--Cook is obviously a populist, and Norbit made bushels of money--but if this is what passes for funny, what in the world of comedy DOESN'T qualify?
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Olympus Has Fallen
    Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Filth and Wisdom
    Madonna presents the three leads as flawed but essentially decent and redeemable, but they're bound up in a story that's meant to affirm a vague set of values. If she needs to justify the "Sex" book by charting her own contrived path from filth to heavenly wisdom, that's fine. But she should do it on her own time.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    This Means War
    Given the creepiest rom-com premise this side of "Addicted To Love" - which at least had the wisdom to reflect on its camera-obscura voyeurism - director McG tries to turn This Means War into a cool pop confection along the lines of his Charlie's Angels movies. But pouring on the douchey hipness and charm only makes things worse.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Gigantic
    Any resemblance the film bears to real people and real situations is purely coincidental.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Bedtime Stories
    Sandler’s laziness, sloppiness, and cynical pandering are all over Bedtime Stories, and it turns what’s intended to be a graceful intersection of fairytale whimsy and real-world slapstick into an ugly, head-on collision.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    She's Out of My League
    Baruchel and Eve never shed that awkward first-date chemistry, which speaks less to their talents or the possibilities of mismatched romance than to a movie that forces them together like animals being mated in captivity.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Last Exorcism Part II
    An abysmal sequel that abandons the found-footage concept, along with the pockets of wit and originality that made its predecessor salvageable.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Just My Luck
    Just My Luck, a lazy spitballing session of karmic humor, hinged on the sort of generic rom-com contrivances that keep movies like these from ending at a reasonable time.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Cavite
    The only rational explanation for how an abysmal no-budget film like Cavite could get released theatrically is that its makers, co-writer/directors Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana, have come up with a from-the-headlines hook too big to deny.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Crossover
    Crossover doesn't have the competence to make it exciting or the desire to explore what's really at stake for these players.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    When a Stranger Calls
    The original should have been a short film; the new version shouldn't exist at all.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Roommate
    A deplorable unofficial reworking of "Single White Female."
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Law Abiding Citizen
    A flagrantly ridiculous thriller that tries to retrofit "Saw" to function as a mainstream, semi-respectable vigilante picture
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Barnyard
    It shouldn't be surprising that writer-director Steve Oedekerk, the man responsible for "Kung Pow! Enter The Fist" and the second "Ace Ventura" movie, considers single-celled organisms as he shoots for the lowest common denominator.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Evan Almighty
    It goes without saying that Evan Almighty, a kid-friendly follow-up to the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty," is more Ronald McDonald than Holy Bible, but it didn't have to be this epically trite.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Little Fockers
    When the conclusion leaves the door open for still another sequel, it feels like an invitation to a living wake.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Seven Days in Utopia
    Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    Assembles the most motley group of incompetents this side of a "Police Academy" movie, yet somehow misses the laughs. But humorlessness is probably the least of the film's problems, lagging behind amateur-night performances from the no-name cast, a homogenous visual palette (and from a music-video director, no less!), and lots of pointless sadism.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    Barry Munday
    A deeply off-putting independent comedy.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Scott Tobias
    I Spit on Your Grave
    Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Km. 0 - Kilometer Zero
    It's hard to fathom what they intended for this forgettable group of lonelyhearts, other than to choreograph a whopping 14 happy endings at once--all of them forced, none of them earned.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Mortdecai
    Mortdecai’s farcical mechanics are actually well worked out, which is a credit to Koepp, an ace Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, 2002’s Spider-Man) who directed the fun late-summer sleeper Premium Rush two years ago. It’s just the jokes that are astonishingly unfunny.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    The Life of David Gale
    Brazenly ridiculous.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    The King and I
    It's hard to imagine a more ill-advised choice of source material.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Pauline and Paulette
    Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Dreamcatcher
    Perhaps due to the talent of everyone involved, Dreamcatcher moves with an oddly exhilarating awfulness that sets it apart from more run-of-the-mill horror films, which lack the imagination and budget to be so thoroughly misconceived.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Good Boy!
    Includes a few half-hearted ironies about how people are really serving dogs, not the other way around, but even those gags are cribbed from a retired Seinfeld routine.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Inept.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Glamour
    Major characters drop in and out of sight, WWII begins and ends without much fanfare, and full decades pass in the space of a few cuts.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Dragonfly
    Awash in cheap shocks and corny sentiment, Dragonfly aspires to be an inspirational thriller about one man's spiritual journey, but it takes little time for him to reach his destination. All that's left for him and the audience to do is solve a riddle unfit for the back of a cereal box.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    My Sister Maria
    Deeply personal and deeply silly.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Raise Your Voice
    Dreadful.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Electric Slide
    With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Conan the Barbarian
    There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there's the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Swept Away
    Ritchie's frivolous comedy tries to have it both ways, thinning out the material for mass consumption while still sticking to the script -- an unstable alchemy that backfires horribly.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Latter Days
    Stranding an able supporting cast in mostly disposable roles--including Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Kay Place, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Amber Benson--Cox writes himself into several corners, then plots honking contrivances to get out of them.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Brewster's Millions
    Dim, compromised, and dead on arrival.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    The Devil's Hand
    There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Simon Birch
    There's hardly a character, plot twist, or musical theme in the whole enterprise that isn't primed to go straight for the tear ducts, as if Johnson assumes that his audience is incapable of mounting a defense.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Four Brothers
    Four Brothers regresses into gallows comedy, rampant misogyny, and one preposterous Hollywood action setpiece after another.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Scott Tobias
    Death Wish 3
    Everything abhorrent about Death Wish—its inner-city stereotyping and casual racism; its embrace of lawlessness and righteous bloodletting; Paul’s rancid transformation from naïve, bleeding-heart liberal into gun-toting angel of vengeance—gets blown up to such a grotesque degree that no sane person could mistake its world for the real one. It’s like a paranoid right-wing small-towner’s vision of what the big city is like: a gang-infested war zone, lorded over by the cast of Breakin’.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »