Shirley Li

Select another critic »
Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic
For 76 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 86% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 13% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 11.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Shirley Li's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 77
Highest review score: 98 May December
Lowest review score: 38 My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 76
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 76
  3. Negative: 3 out of 76
76 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 68 Metascore
    • 82 Shirley Li
    Problemista
    Within Problemista is a heartfelt core conveying something profoundly human. It’s a marvelous mixture of surrealism and social satire that depicts the American dream as a nightmare of bureaucracy and phone calls to customer service. There’s nothing more absurd, the film argues, than the mundane.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 82 Shirley Li
    Conclave
    Conclave also adds a few too many contrived twists in its quest for narrative drama, but the movie moves nimbly enough to avoid a collapse into pure fantasy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 82 Shirley Li
    Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    The world was not built for the likes of Marcel, but he can help guide us through it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 82 Shirley Li
    Priscilla
    Priscilla is more than a story of a young woman in a gilded cage; it’s also an examination of how adolescent beliefs can be hard to shake.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Shirley Li
    The Good Nurse
    Few modern true-crime movies and shows remind viewers that they have as much responsibility over their own choices as the people onscreen do. That message may be uncomfortable to absorb, but it’s far more productive than luxuriating in disturbing acts.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Shirley Li
    She Said
    The film doesn’t just re-create the journalists’ day-to-day life; it also captures the book’s solemn and matter-of-fact tone.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Shirley Li
    Society of the Snow
    As a film that attempts to honor its victims while simultaneously offering graphic details, it both improves upon previous iterations of the material and exposes the limits of the story itself. The result is a movie that wrestles with its very existence—and, perhaps, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Shirley Li
    Zola
    With Zola, however, the director Janicza Bravo has made a film that contends with the uneasy interplay between characters’ online and offline selves. And it posits that we use the internet to fool ourselves as much as to fool others.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 79 Shirley Li
    Roofman
    Roofman deftly blends genres to create a low-key crowd-pleaser—one that avoids merely reveling in what made Manchester notorious in the first place.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 79 Shirley Li
    Friendship
    It fearlessly—and wackily—reckons with how confounding people can be in their bid for one another’s approval: at work, at home, at their new friend’s house while dressed in their finest Ocean View Dining clothing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 79 Shirley Li
    Eternals
    Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 78 Shirley Li
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The film is, as a result, a portrait of how Rasoulof perceives the systematic oppression within his home country, from which he is now exiled. The government’s rejection of its citizens’ efforts for change is personal to him—as devastating and painful, the film suggests, as having a father turn against his own flesh and blood.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 78 Shirley Li
    The Life of Chuck
    The appeal of Flanagan’s take on The Life of Chuck rests on his understanding of this resonant quality of King’s writing; on-screen, as on the page, the story hums because it highlights the ordinary foundation upon which the supernatural can be built. Within the strange events is a core that is bittersweet and familiar.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 78 Shirley Li
    Fingernails
    For all its whimsy, Fingernails is delicately profound. Its characters aren’t making bold romantic moves; they’re interrogating their assumptions of what is ultimately an unknowable phenomenon.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 78 Shirley Li
    Lady Chatterley's Lover
    De Clermont-Tonnerre understands that the lovers’ behavior and Lawrence’s social commentary no longer spur much pearl-clutching, so instead, she surprises viewers by adding uncanny elements to her most explicit scenes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Shirley Li
    Bugonia
    Bugonia’s provocative premise doesn’t yield a sci-fi thriller. The film instead offers an intimate, unhurried exploration of human cruelty.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 77 Shirley Li
    Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Mike and Max’s relationship—in which she whisks him off to London so he can direct an all-male revue at the theater she owns—is the stuff of romance novels, but that’s the point: Last Dance is all wish fulfillment, seductive and surreal.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 76 Shirley Li
    Gran Turismo
    The result is a mishmash of subgenres that, surprisingly, works.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    No Hard Feelings
    No Hard Feelings is not about to usher in a new era in mainstream sex comedies—it is, however, a delightful showcase for Lawrence’s movie-star verve.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    The Marvels
    It delivers many of the ingredients expected of a Marvel movie—cheer-worthy cameos; cute, fuzzy sidekicks courtesy of the catlike Flerkens, and a truly exciting mid-credits scene that’ll spawn countless speculative blog posts about the MCU’s future—while also keeping a keen focus on its characters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    Black Widow
    The messy third act, and its insistence on making Natasha infallible, doesn’t ruin the film. But it does make Black Widow a missed opportunity; Natasha never gets to make the choices that could help her complete her portrait.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    Blink Twice
    Blink Twice is not about eating the rich or satirizing the one percent. It’s instead a stylish, if tonally uneven, exploration of how being in the orbit of powerful people can produce an insidious sense of powerlessness that easily curdles into self-deception.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    Missing
    The result is a film that is slickly made but buggy in execution, like a premature software update.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Shirley Li
    The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    Nicolas Cage, even after all the memes and all the ridicule, still knows exactly what to do with the weight of his unique intensity, including when to dial it back.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 74 Shirley Li
    Eddington
    The film never interrogates why the early pandemic led to so many ideological conflicts, but it suggests that the prognosis is bleak for those who continue to venture too far into the internet’s noxious rabbit holes. Being too online, in other words, can be its own kind of sickness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 73 Shirley Li
    Hocus Pocus 2
    Like the trio of eccentric spell-casting divas at its center, this follow-up is bizarre, flashy, and chaotic. And yet, it’s also satisfying to take in.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 73 Shirley Li
    Fly Me to the Moon
    The film doesn’t offer much wisdom about how we should deal with our growing unreality, but it is a charming diversion. In a way, its very shallowness is the point: Sometimes, the film posits, what we want to see matters more than what we actually do.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 72 Shirley Li
    Strays
    The movie is, in the end, deeply unserious and completely mindless, but still strangely sweet.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 72 Shirley Li
    Gladiator II
    For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Shirley Li
    Materialists
    Materialists falters most when it tries to mesh its competing aims: to deliver a throwback love story while also deconstructing the reality of modern dating. Instead, in the end, the film resembles the very world it tries to critique, offering a litany of observations about finding The One without ever substantially arguing for any of them.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »