Stephanie Zacharek

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Film.com, Movieline, Salon, Time, Village Voice
For 2,390 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stephanie Zacharek's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Paper Tiger
Lowest review score: 0 The Hunt
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,330 out of 2390
  2. Mixed: 869 out of 2390
  3. Negative: 191 out of 2390
2390 movie reviews
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    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Stephanie Zacharek
    Two Brothers
    Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    California Typewriter
    People who love typewriters--you know who you are--shouldn't tap the space bar once, let alone twice, before rushing to see Doug Nichol's agile, deeply affectionate documentary California Typewriter. But anyone who loves machines, poetry or, better yet, the poetry of machines should see it too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Clouds of Sils Maria
    The movie's true center, the meteorological phenomenon that makes it so pleasurable to watch, is the half-prickly, half-affectionate interplay between Binoche and Stewart.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Coraline
    Coraline is essentially faithful to the spirit of its source material. But it's also so visually inventive, and so elaborately tactile, that it stands apart as its own creation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Little Miss Sunshine
    Carell's physical comedy is close to genius.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Frost/Nixon
    Howard has made a picture for grown-ups, a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Stage Beauty
    An entertainment as billowy as a Shakespearean nurse's sail-shaped hat.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Dear Mr. Watterson
    [A] heartfelt but largely inarticulate documentary.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Song Sung Blue
    A bittersweet feel-good movie is perhaps the best kind.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Mank
    For all its intelligence, Mank isn’t anything close to a masterpiece; it’s more a pleasurable feat of derring-do, a movie made with care and cunning and peopled by actors who know exactly what they’re doing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    March of the Penguins
    There's more drama, and more heartbreak, in March of the Penguins than in most movies that are actually scripted to tug at our feelings.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Pride
    Pride hits some bumpy patches when it switches gears between comedy and gentle pathos, which it does often. But its spirit is bold enough to power through the rough spots. It’s easy to find fault with Pride, but it’s not so easy to resist it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Babygirl
    No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Whose Streets?
    Whose Streets? is rough around the edges, like a torn photograph whose borders have also been raggedly burned. But that's more a strength than a liability.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    Rivers appears to have more energy than most 30-year-olds; she gets more done in a day that some of us could accomplish in a week.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    High Fidelity
    Every single actor here rises to the occasion.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 65 Stephanie Zacharek
    Coriolanus
    Fiennes works hard to keep the rhythm going: He stages hand-to-hand combat sequences and knife fights as if he were making a smart action movie, not adapting Shakespeare, which is precisely the point.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Bad Education
    Bad Education is a story of small-town villains who just can’t help themselves, and it’s fun to see how their own carelessness trips them up. These are people we can’t trust, played by actors we trust implicitly. Why not be flimflammed by the best?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Stephanie Zacharek
    A Most Violent Year
    Grand in its aims but tepid in its conclusions, A Most Violent Year burns slow and gives off very little heat. It's not really that violent. But it sure feels like a year.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Gone Girl
    The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Stephanie Zacharek
    Kinsey
    Condon's tone is gentle and lifeless and at times baffling: The picture is a weird cross between clinical and whimsical.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Dear White People
    The small miracle of the movie is that Simien finds so many laughs in what are genuinely bewildering issues.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Stephanie Zacharek
    Broken Flowers
    Well-meaning but remote picture.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Loving
    Nichols—director of Take Shelter, Mud and, most recently, Midnight Special—tells the Lovings’ story in a way that feels immediate and modern, and not just like a history lesson.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Christophers
    Simultaneously meticulous and casual, it’s the kind of movie only a master filmmaker could have made—though it's doubtful Soderbergh, perpetually moving away from one movie and toward the next, thinks of himself as a master filmmaker at all.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Silence
    Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Weight of Water
    It's an intelligently made (and beautifully edited) picture that at the very least has a spark of life to it -- more than you can say for plenty of movies that flow through the Hollywood pipeline without a hitch.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Hitchcock/Truffaut
    This is a jewel box of a movie for anyone who loves either Hitchcock or Truffaut–or better yet, both.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Flags of Our Fathers
    The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood's attempts to do too much. Still, even when he overreaches, he somehow hits the mark.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    This loose retelling of Carlo Collodi’s weird and often unsettling 1883 fantasy novel (the screenplay is by del Toro and Patrick McHale) is a little too long, and hammers away too eagerly at its central idea: that fathers who expect too much of their sons can do untold emotional damage. Even so, del Toro’s creation is clever and lively and just strange enough to keep you guessing what’s coming next.
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