Stephanie Zacharek

Select another critic »
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
view
per page
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Paper Tiger
    In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    First Cow
    A picture that’s both tranquil and dazzling, two qualities that should be at odds with one another yet somehow bloom in tandem under Reichardt’s gentle touch.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Nouvelle Vague
    It’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    We Are the Best!
    Brash and sweet, We Are the Best! captures perfectly the aimlessness of adolescence, the waiting to become something that's so often intertwined with the desire to make something, to leave your mark on the world in some small way.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Wonderstruck
    Wonderstruck embraces so many shimmery, evanescent ideas, it’s a marvel that any one picture—let alone one you can take your kids to—can hold them.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Third Man
    Welles’s presence, so radiant, so enthralling, so unapologetically egotistical, is all the more wondrous when you consider that Harry Lime was nearly played by someone else.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    The sight of Hedwig and his band transforming a trashy trailer into a glitter-rock stage during "Wig in a Box" was so exhilarating I almost leapt out of my seat. The movie is pure theater, as it should be.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Fantastic Mr. Fox
    Anderson has pulled off the most elusive of goals: He's made a nonchalant masterpiece, a movie that feels dog-eared and loved before it's even reached our hands.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Somewhere
    Coppola is a filmmaker who fills up a big canvas with small moments: That's the opposite of working in miniature, even though she's attuned to the tiniest details.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Lady Bird
    Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s semiautobiographical Lady Bird is both generous and joyous, but when it stings, it stings deep.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Queen of Earth
    Queen of Earth is also a semi-comedy, often funny in an intentionally bleak way. And that, besides Moss, is what makes it work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Selma
    With Selma, DuVernay has pulled off a tricky feat, a movie based on historical events that never feels dull, worthy, or lifeless; it hangs together as a story and not just part of a lesson plan. The movie is at once intimate and grand in scope.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Magnificent and heartfelt.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    A Hard Day's Night
    It's 85 minutes of screen time that represents one crystallized moment not in the Beatles' career per se but in the parallel career they forged inside all of us, the one that will last beyond any breakup, retirement or death.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Ratatouille
    Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Something in the Air
    In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Drive
    Drive not only met my hopes; it charged way over the speed limit, partly because it's an unapologetically commercial picture that defies all the current trends in mainstream action filmmaking.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Social Network
    Fincher and his screenwriter, TV writer-god Aaron Sorkin, have made a seemingly modest picture that achieves something close to greatness the old-fashioned, slow-burning way: By telling a story with faces, dialogue and body language of all types, from awkward to swaggering.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Despicable Me
    To hell with that childlike sense-of-wonder crap: Despicable Me, instead of trying to return adults to a false state of innocence, reminds us that we all started out as ill-mannered little savages.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    The King's Speech
    A direct and heartfelt piece of work. It's conventional, maybe, in its sense of filmmaking decorum, but extraordinary in the way it cuts to the core of human frustration and feelings of inadequacy, reminding us how universal those feelings are.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Bill Cunningham New York
    What Press comes up with in the end isn't just a portrait of individual eccentricity. Its larger subject is the way one man, just by being alive to what's around him, has created a vast, detailed anthropological record of how New Yorkers present, and feel, about themselves.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Melancholia
    The actresses' performances intertwine beautifully, like twin climbing vines vying for the attention of the sun.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    My Dog Tulip
    An adaptation that wholly and faithfully captures the spirit and mood of the book it's based on, and an example of computer animation - the 2-D sort - that shows the human touch in every frame.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Kids Are All Right
    More universal than it is alternative, except in one sense: There's nothing else on the contemporary movie landscape like it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 95 Stephanie Zacharek
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    The movie's intricacy, and the way it finds its way into the emotional lives of its characters via (and not in spite of) that intricacy, is what makes it extraordinary. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy challenges audiences to believe in craftsmanship again.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Baby Driver
    Wright has orchestrated every swerve and near smashup—and one glorious foot chase—with precision, a rarity in action filmmaking these days.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Funny Girl
    It's a cross between confidence and vulnerability that's hard for an actress to pull off, but Streisand hits the note perfectly. And her greatest moment of acting, I think, is also the picture's strongest musical number.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Drive My Car
    The movie is tender like a rainstorm: only in the aftermath, after you’ve allowed time for its ideas to settle, does its full picture become clear. It’s the kind of movie that makes everything feel washed clean, a gentle nudge of encouragement suggesting that no matter how tired you feel, you can move on in the world.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »