Stephanie Zacharek

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Film.com, Movieline, Salon, Time, Village Voice
For 2,389 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: 1,329 out of 2389
  2. Mixed: 869 out of 2389
  3. Negative: 191 out of 2389
2389 movie reviews
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Hereditary
    There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Listen to Me Marlon
    There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Brokeback Mountain
    Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Kid with a Bike
    The real strength of The Kid with a Bike is the cautious but generous warmth of its storytelling. Not much happens in The Kid with a Bike, but it leaves you grateful that the worst doesn't happen - with these characters, you might not be able to bear it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Tragedy of Macbeth
    To see this movie in the theater is a special, shuddering pleasure, a tilting-at-windmills affirmation of what movies, seen big, can mean. This is movie as black magic. To give yourself over to it feels a little dangerous. It also feels great.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Life Itself
    James — the director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters — gives us a sense of Ebert as a man who kept reinventing life as he went along — out of necessity, sure, though he also took some pleasure in adapting. It couldn't always have been easy, but that, too, is part of the story.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Shape of Water
    There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Color Purple
    The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    All About My Mother
    So intrinsically rich that it doesn't need any metaphors.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Moneyball
    Now that Pitt no longer has brash youth on his side, he's digging deeper and doing more with less. It's the kind of acting - understated but woven with golden threads of movie-star style - that gives us more to look at rather than less.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Duke of Burgundy
    Strickland builds the film, artfully, into a complex and ultimately moving essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    My Golden Days
    Roy-Lecollinet’s face, both haughty and welcoming, both anchors the movie and sets it free in the wind. No wonder Paul can’t shake the memory of it. It’s the thing that will age him before his time—and also keep him young forever.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Good One
    Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Tangerine
    In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Rock Star
    But even here, in a role that doesn't ask much of Wahlberg, I find plenty of evidence that he's among the finest actors of his generation.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 85 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR - and not human lives - were the most important consideration during wartime.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Anatomy of a Fall
    Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Fallen Leaves
    Sometimes a movie reaches the unreachable in us, not because it’s a grand masterpiece but because it’s as quiet and intimate as air.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Krisha
    What really registers is how frustrating Krisha’s erratic, furtive behavior would be if she were part of your family — and how deeply sympathetic she is because, thankfully, she is not. Fairchild’s performance is key to the movie: Krisha is witty and chatty one moment, and shut down like a deserted fairground the next.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams is compelling, sometimes in a hypnotic, sleepy-bye way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Showing Up
    The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape—a shape you could almost trace with your thumb, as if it were made of clay and not images, air, and feeling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    Luhrmann has sourced some rare Super 8 footage from the Graceland archives. This newfound footage, painstakingly restored, forms the fabric of EPiC, which, despite Luhrmann’s penchant for hurtling over the top—or maybe even because of it—manages to feel profoundly intimate.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    May December
    May December could have more fire; it could be even more twisted. But it’s seductive enough to keep us following along, one betrayal after another.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Stephanie Zacharek
    Sex and the City
    Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Happening
    It’s an unyielding picture in some ways; you might long for a sliver of optimism tucked amid its layers of grim truth. But then, all its hope lies in Anne’s face, as uncompromising as an early crocus. This is the face of a woman who deserves much more respect—for her body, for her very life—than her society affords her.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Lost Daughter
    To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.
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